I just bought a car today. The sway bar broke on the old one and instead of get­ting it fixed I decided to drive on it while look­ing for a new car. I spent sev­eral weeks plan­ning, research­ing, weigh­ing pri­or­i­ties, fret­ting over trade-offs and just all around pulling out my hair all the while wait­ing in anx­ious antic­i­pa­tion for my cur­rent model fall apart while I’m driving down the high­way and 65 miles an hour. I wanted a car that was small, fuel effi­cient, reli­able, and sporty. Even­tu­al­ly, I decided that money was pri­or­ity one and sporty had to go, ulti­mately pick­ing a used Honda Civic. How bor­ing… and yet very prac­ti­cal. It’s just the kind of thing I would get. Any­way, you may be won­der­ing what this has to do with God and His proof thereof… That’s com­ing.

When I finally decided to actu­ally buy the car, and drive down to the dealer to sign the paper­work, give them a check ¹ and drive the vehi­cle home, I real­ized that I would need some­one to drive my old car home as well. It was last minute so I called my folks who only live a short dis­tance away and my father decided it would be bet­ter if he picked me up in his car because he had errands to run in the area while I was there.

We drove to the deal­er, I departed the vehi­cle, sought out a sales­man and pro­ceeded to attempt to com­mu­ni­cate which vehi­cle it was I wanted to purchase; I had already made my deci­sion. My name was already in their sys­tem because both myself and my fam­ily used the dealer to repair our cur­rent vehi­cles, both of which were GMs. So I signed some papers, filled out some address­es, signed some more papers, waited for the sales­man to get some things togeth­er, signed some more papers, gave some more info, waited a bit more on the sales­man, etc, etc for at least a cou­ple hours as per the usual car buy­ing rou­tine but even­tu­ally started to get through it when I got a call.

My father had driven of to do an errand and when he left the store found his car smok­ing, the wind­shield wipers going, the emer­gency lights flash­ing, for what turned out to be a bit of an elec­tri­cal fire. Bad news, right? Right. But it could not have hap­pened at a more oppor­tune moment. Not only was he in the park­ing lot of a store with just the equip­ment to put out the fire, but because he had dropped my off at the deal­er, which also hap­pened to be our repair shop, he was in almost the right place to drop the car off for repairs. Con­sid­er­ing that elec­tri­cal are kind of inevitable when they hap­pen unless you hap­pen to know when they are com­ing, it was rather for­tu­itous that he hap­pened to be drop­ping me off when he was. Coin­ci­dence? Yes. But I’m not quite done.

You see, just when my father hap­pened to sud­denly find him­self short a car, I being in the act of buy­ing a new one, found myself with one extra. In addi­tion, I fin­ished my paper­work and he fin­ished drop­ping his vehi­cle off at exactly the same time, and we were in the same lot. Per­fect tim­ing.

It’s amus­ing how these things can some­times just come together and these mun­dane nui­sances be dealt with so con­ve­nient­ly. I’m forced to con­clude that,

1. God exists.
   and,
2. He has the strangest sense of humor.

Have a good day.

1. I will not take out a loan if I can at all help it. All that does is make one pay more and create an extra bill that one has to meet each month. It’s much simpler to pay it all upfront if one can. ↩