Fresh Start Devotionals

Finding Gold I never liked Susan’s blue Dodge. Susan says I didn’t like it because she made me trade in a perfectly good pickup to buy it. Susan was pregnant with our second son at the time and refused to ride in the back when he was born. So what else could we do? The two of us and two car seats wouldn’t fit in the pickup, so without any research, we traded in the pickup and got the car. For ten years I didn’t like that car. (Even though Susan let me buy another pickup a couple of years later.) It wasn’t very reliable and didn’t handle very well. It was a bad choice that we had to live with for a decade. Two years ago, we traded in the old blue eye sore (We only got $200.00 for it, but I was so glad to get rid of it I didn’t argue with the salesman) and bought Susan her gold Chevy. Before we settled on what car to buy, we went down to the book store and bought a half dozen books or magazines about the 98 cars. Price and safety were our major concerns. We scattered the books all over the dining room table and stayed up late into the night gathering information to help us make a good decision. After all, I didn’t want another car like the last one. Armed with hours of research we went from one car dealership to another asking if they had a car with the options we wanted and if they did, we asked them to give us their best price. I explained that we wouldn’t make a counter offer, and I wasn’t interested in speaking to their sales manager—I wanted their bottom-line-best-offer. By the end of the day, we’d gathered several offers when I turned to Susan and said, which one do you want. “I want the gold one,” she said, “it’s cute.” We signed the papers and drove the new car off the lot. It strikes me that most people will spend hours making a decision about what car to buy and never give their eternal soul a second thought. Why would they dismiss the claims of Christ without investigating them? It just doesn’t make any sense. By the way, I like the gold car. If you ask Susan, she will tell you it is because I didn’t have to trade in my silver pickup to buy it, but I’ll say it was a smart choice. Jim L. Wilson, Fresh Start Devotionals (Fresno, CA: Willow City Press, 2009).