Yeah, that’s right. You heard it hear. I’ve got the golden ticket. The golden ticket came back yesterday. What’s the golden ticket you ask? A pretty sweet golden Chrysler town and country, that’s what.

3 weeks ago, the transmission went out on the van. We had it towed to one shop, and then towed to another shop. Finally after 3 weeks of frustration, (and many thanks to the Millers, and the Atkins for loaning us their cars) we got the golden ticket back.

So here is the most frustrating part. 2 years ago, we replaced the transmission in this car. So, just about 730 days later we were in need of another transmission. Unbelievable. Anyhow, yesterday when I went to pick up the van, I recieved a very detailed report of what happened, what went wrong, and all this other technical jargon. Here’s the synopsis. The computer that controls the transmission went bad, and told the car to shift into some other gear it wasn’t supposed to shift into and it threw the trans into the wrong gear. This is what it did. It took a part that is supposed to look like this:

And made it look like this now:

It sheared off this whole hunk of metal due to the fact that it was going in the wrong direction or it was the wrong downshift, or who knows exactly what the scenario was. Either way, we ended up with a bum transmission. This is the close up.

So, here’s the problem. Two years ago, when I had the transmission replaced with a rebuilt one, why didn’t they replace the transmission controller at the same time? The part is seriously only $150. That’s a lot of money to me. However, I would gladly have paid $150 bucks initially to protect against ruining another transmission! I mean, that was basically $2,500 dollars down the drain because someone didn’t really fix the whole problem the first time.  Yes, they got the van running again; but fixed?  I’m not sure…

So, here’s where this hits me in real life. Have you ever had some sort of sin that you just couldn’t kick? The kind of thing that you don’t want to do, but end up doing anyway? It isn’t fun. The way I see it, it’s kind of like that transmission. If we don’t ever get to the root of the sin/problem in our life, we may find ourselves going through the same pain, the same sin issues time and time again. When we see that something is going on in our life, or when God shows us something that needs to be removed/fixed/changed, we better do something before our transmissions blows up, and shears something off of our life. I was recently hanging with a friend of ours who was expressing a time in their life when they were living with serious depression. They said that they stand here today completely healed and changed because they prayed and prayed, and asked for God’s wisdom, and sought counsel, and got to the very root of the issue. They went to the core and corrected it. They didn’t just mask it or wait for it to kind of go away for a while only to see it come back stronger and more intense. There is wisdom in that.

What do you think?

~Peter

P.S. My man Jesse has just started blogging over here, why not stop by and give him some love. Jesse is one of our Youth Leaders and is a great guy who really has a heart for the Lord.