thought exercise on Cars

Cars have allowed us to spread out our living patterns significantly. Historically, cities have had a natural limit set by how far people could comfortably walk from place to place. Then, with the dev...

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been very good at paying attention to my car’s fuel tank. I remember in high school I drove an old Jeep Grand Cherokee that had a digital fuel gauge. In 1998 tha...

So he took the paint brush and went out back. She forgot about it until sometime later when there was another knock at the door. It was him. He obviously had been painting because there was paint spla...

There was a woman who was baking her Christmas cookies and she heard a knock at the door. She opened the door to find a man who was dressed in pretty tattered clothes, and he was obviously poor. And h...

You decide to buy a certain kind of car, and suddenly you see it everywhere. A friend recommends an obscure movie to you, and by the end of the week, three more people have mentioned it. You find out ...

One of my small joys in life is grocery shopping. Ever since our kids were old enough to sit up, they fawned over the grocery carts that looked like little cars. Those carts are to grocery shopping wh...

One winter break in college, I was spending some time at a friend's house. This friend's father had recently purchased a Ford Model T and he was excited to take me for a spin. Now, If you’ve n...

During much of the twentieth century, the aspiration of most middle-class Americans was to own a home and a car. Now more than two out of three Americans own the homes in which they live. (In fact, so...

Restlessness keeps the pedal to the metal. To offer a suggestive analogy in this vein: several years ago there was a recall on some Toyota vehicles. Evidently the cars would be given to sudden and unc...

I knew a man who was the head of a set of car dealerships in the South. The way in which things were done was you could come in and negotiate, and the salesman had a pretty big window of what they cou...

A man is being tailgated by a woman who is in a hurry. He comes to an intersection, and when the light turns yellow, he hits the brakes. The woman behind him goes ballistic. She honks her horn at him;...

We argue with our alarm clock, which insists we wake up. We argue with our clothes that wear out or stop fitting. We argue with our bodies, we argue with our pets, we argue with bumps in the sidewalk ...

In her book, Invitations from God, Adele Ahlberg Calhoun shares a great analogy of the difficulty of faithful discipleship: it’s not always easy to follow: Recently I had to follow another car to a ...

One could imagine a comparison between a car’s oil drain plug and its electronic ignition system. One is as low-tech (and unimpressive) as could be, while the other is highly sophisticated. But a car ...

Take the cul-de-sac, for example, which is my metaphor for the world of suburban monotony and triviality that so many Western Christians find themselves trapped in. The literal cul-de-sac (i.e., a dea...

Not long ago I came upon a wreck on a road that leads from our national office to our local church. It appeared that the wreck had happened only minutes before I arrived. A car was completely overturn...

In most of the United States there is a policy of checking on any stalled vehicle on the highway when temperatures drop to single digits or below. About 3 AM one very cold morning, Montana State Troop...

In America, we consume twice as many material goods as we did fifty years ago. Over the same period, the size of the average American home has nearly tripled, and today that average home contains abou...

One of the most dangerous driving situations is when it is raining at night. Not only are the streets slippery and visibility obscured by water on the windshield, but wet streets can reflect light fro...

Members of the Natomo family sit on the flat roof of their mud house in Mali, Africa, posing for their early morning photograph. Their earthly belongings are arrayed in front of them. Two kettles, pla...

In this poignant social commentary, the comedian Louis C.K. points out why it is that people are constantly staring at their cell-phones: because they don’t want to acknowledge the loneliness that is ...

The author and pastor Louie Giglio isn't the type of runner who enjoys the scenery—he's just trying to survive his workouts. And when he's running in freezing rain? He's barely thinkin...

In the midst of an experiment to become more attuned to darkness, author and pastor Barbara Brown Taylor decided to spend time outside as dark sets in: According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, eve...

We all love a good comeback story. In such tales, the young upstart rises like a meteor, fails big, then fights back against the odds to win the victory. Tech whiz Steve Jobs was like that. After prod...

In the middle of nowhere, two Christians were driving in the mountains of Iran in a car that was full of Bibles. Without warning, the steering wheel jammed and they were forced to the side of the road...

The thrust of the parables is to subvert the distorted myths in which people live their lives. To understand what we mean by “living in a myth” just think of a couple of our own contemporary myths. Ta...

One of the many technological transformations of the twentieth century took place right on our dinner plates. Because of its cheapness and convenience, most Americans quickly accepted new ways of eati...

Psychologists and mental health professionals are now talking about an epidemic of the modern world: “hurry sickness.” As in, they label it a disease. Here’s one definition: A behavior pattern chara...

Regardless of how real the stress may or may not be, when our brain perceives a situation as being threatening, the process it engages is the same. Just like airport security, our brain has to take ev...

My counselor gave me the strangest advice a few months ago. Almost out of the blue, she said, “You should start waiting in the longest lines you can find.” She meant everywhere—at the grocery store, g...