A Weird Week of Provision and Panic

James called Sunday morning to say he'd be late for church. He'd blown a tire about a mile away. He was fine, which was all I cared about. The rest, we can handle. (We're all vaguely surprised those tires haven't all imploded before now. I knew they were bad, but I'll admit that I haven't paid attention to the vehicle maintenance. This is the first time I've even looked at our tires outside of the one crazy tire on the Highlander that we had to replace earlier in the month.) Blessedly, we've been budgeting, and I've been able to work, so it wasn't a problem to say we could get a new tire. I had an inkling there was no spare (there wasn't - oy!) so I slipped out of church to pick him up and just go get a new tire. When I arrived it was obvious the rim was also shot. Okay, we've got this, right?

So, this week, I learned that you can't just go to Walmart, or even National Tire & Battery, and buy a wheel on the spot. I could have sworn that I'd seen rims for sale in stores before ... But the world has moved on. This is going to be one of my Old Lady Stories. "When I was a child ..." (*waves cane*) Also, it's a '92, so that meant we had to find a junk yard that was open on Sundays and would have a car we could cannibalize. We found one that's open, but they didn't have a single Volvo on the lot. So, we went back, gathered his things, and he left a note (which I didn't see until Tuesday, when we were able to get back to it). Since it's a crappy car parked in a swanky greenbelt parking lot, this was probably a wise course of action:

We spent Sunday evening looking online for wheels at junk yards. The boys thought it would be kind of awesome to buy one really swanky gold colored alloy wheel, preferably with a spinning component. They thought it would be a delightful bit of absurdity against the stock Volvo caps, the missing trim piece on one door, and the mismatched door handle on another. While I appreciate their sense of aesthetics (and humor), I wasn't going to steal grocery money for lolz. I found one in Birmingham (just a plain Jane, stock steel wheel), and confirmed that they still had it.

(As a side note, if you're looking for a market that needs either data entry skills or could use some kind of useful software, junk yard inventories are notoriously out of sync with what's in the yard. So, if you have a superpower and are looking for a place to use it, give that some thought. You could make millions.)

We kicked Jacob off early at ballet, then realized we still wouldn't make it before they closed, so I called to let them know that I wouldn't be able to make it before they closed for the day and I'd just come in the morning. The guy very graciously said to come on down. He said he'd be there whenever I got there, that it wasn't a problem, wasn't an imposition, just come on down. No, really, he'd wait for us. Okay, then. The Littles and I drove down.

87 miles.

He wasn't there. Nobody was there. Nobody answered the phone. I even tried the lock on the gate. And I laid on the horn.

We took a deep breath, then turned around and drove back. It was an awesome (if somewhat forced) exercise in living out every stupid thing I tell the children -- about extending grace, about looking for the positive, about trusting in God's provision, about how we can choose to make a situation better or worse by how we respond to it. But we did it, and we had a really lovely ride down and back.

The next morning, we did this whole Cirque du Soleil level choreography that involved me leaving at 6:30 in the morning to drive 174 miles round trip, get tires mounted and balanced, and get to the Volvo, while the boys spent the morning switching cars and making a dozen relays with John's car so that everyone could get where they needed to be. I went ahead and got two wheels while I was down there so that he'll have a spare in the future, and we hopefully don't have to make that drive again soon. The kids grabbed clothes for me (we had tickets to see a play that day at noon), James picked up everyone from their respective activities, and we all converged on the parking lot where the Volvo sat, looking sketchy and abandoned.

The boys put the two new tires on. The back end is now raised visibly, and it looks like a custom lift job on a crappy car. It's kind of hilarious, if you can get past the mortification aspect. James saw the new tires in the back of the Highlander and was convinced I'd bought the wrong size. "These will never fit on the Volvo!"

No, Love, it's the same size tire, this is just what it looks like with tread. Jacob asked how that happens (which is a completely sane question). "Well, this is 130K miles on 60K-mile tires. Don't do this. Do better than your father and I do, okay? That's the goal."

Of course, that's kind of the goal of everything. Do better than we do. Be more diligent than we were. Be more engaged that we were. Extend grace more readily than we did. Walk more closely with God than we did. And maintain your cars better than we do. Of course, we don't just stick that out there and leave them to their own devices. They have support, resources, and encouragement. And they're doing it.

I told them all that because of who they are -- their willingness to step into the gap and help out, the fact that they can be trusted to look out for each other, the way they are willing to learn and to engage, they took what could have been a total nightmare situation and turned it into nothing more than a mild inconvenience that was easily surmountable. That's alchemy, right there. They wouldn't high five me in the parking lot, but that totally would have been appropriate.

And so, tomorrow, two more new tires (I'm terrified the front two are going to blow just from the added pressure of having the bigger ones on the back.) Thankfully, the weather is nice, James can bike to work and to school. We can give him a lift if he needs one. So, all is well, and we are slowly attending to all the things that clearly need it, one harrowing (yet encouraging) thing on the list at a time.

Sometimes, when things are overwhelming, they can also be encouraging. And that's a good thing.

Be encouraged! (And check your tires!)

~ Dy