Transportation Optional
Friday, November 26th, 2010It seems you should be very careful what you say when you hang out with God. I took my car in for scheduled maintenance last week. Since where I work is neither near a dealership nor near where I live, my plan was simply to drop the car off in the morning and then pick it up after work. I did this a couple of months ago and it worked out quite well. The dealer gave me a ride to the BART station in the morning, then in the evening I caught a bus from the station back to within a quarter mile of the dealer.
Here’s where I made my mistake. Even though I thought that if a few things went well I could get back to the dealer a fair amount earlier, I told my service representative that I wouldn’t be able to pick up the car before six. And of course God heard me say that. And of course God likes lies even less than I do and I really, really don’t like lies.
So what’s a deity to do?
I have a weekly meeting at work that often runs until close to five o’clock, but this week it finished up by twenty minutes after four, so I was able to get out of work early. On my way out I was waylaid by a coworker with a couple of questions, but even with that I got to the BART station with a minute to spare before my train arrived. There were no delays, the train wasn’t too crowded and by a quarter past five I was leaving the station and heading to the bus stand. Now the last time I did this the bus was sitting there when I arrived and so I climbed straight on board. This time no bus was in sight so I had time to read the posted schedule. There was a bus at 5:05. The next one was to be at 7:05. What kind of municipality runs busses on a two hour interval? So now I had three choices, I could phone the dealer and see if they still had a shuttle driver who could pick me up, I could walk the three-hundred feet or so to the taxi stand and pay someone to drive me to the dealer, or I could walk the nearly two miles.
I decided to walk. I got to the dealership at 5:59, but it was six o’clock by the time I got to the cashier’s desk. I learned that it’s best to not make statements with too much specificity when God is listening.