Dad Can FIx It
Just as my daughter was arriving home from work this past week, her passenger side headlight assembly fell out of her car. The unit dangled from the “eye socket” of her right fender, being held by the minimal optic nerve of the wire harness. The lens bounced and rattled on the outside of the fender until it finally fell off and was crushed under her front tire…and then pulverized beneath the rear tire. All the while, her mother was calling to her to “stop, stop,” while I was in the house watching and yelling, “Why aren’t you stopping?”
I immediately pulled out my laptop and ordered a new lens from Amazon.
This seems to be a crazy pattern in our lives, so much so that it feels that we are living within the spin cycle of washing machine of destruction. Recently, as I was performing a simple oil change on my son’s truck, the oil filter collapsed while I was wrenching it off. Even after completely destroying the filter and hammering endlessly with my air chisel, I failed to find success. After 2 hours of hammering and frustration, I towed the vehicle to the local mechanic who removed it in about 25 seconds for $25. That translates to about a dollar a second…I am a cheap man…but that was worth every penny,
The air conditioner broke this past Tuesday (hot week for that, let me tell you). Fortunately, after paying three times the fair market value for a new capacitor at a local establishment, the AC was up and running again in a matter of hours.
It seems that I am constantly fixing everything around me. I am currently needing to fix a clock, a boat motor, boat hull, boat transom, house shingles, roller shades, brakes, idler pulley, lawn mower deck and a list of other things that I can’t even remember.
As a dad who is too cheap to hire most things out and tends to be a lifetime learner…I end up being the one…mostly by choice…who inherits the role of Mr. Fixit. I know that I am not alone in this.
Because I take this self-appointed role of fixing the family's dilemmas seriously, it becomes particularly difficult to find your children off to college, hours from home with broken vehicles. It has happened to both our oldest daughter and our son.
A couple of years ago our daughter found herself with a flat tire and could not find a place that was willing to fix it for less than $300. “Great Scott! Hannah! You can’t pay that much!”
“I know Dad! But what am I supposed to do?”
“If I was there, I could deal with it for you!”
“I know, but you are not here.”
I called my sister and brother-in-law who lived relatively close to our daughter. “Matt, would you be willing to take a look at Hannah’s tire and see if it can at least be plugged, so that she might be able to get home I can deal with a more extensive repair?”
In a matter of hours, my brother-in-law, had the tire plugged and holding air.
Matt’s willingness to help out his niece was an act of service directly to me.
I think that it is times like this that reveal perhaps what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 25:31-46. Here Jesus affirms those who serve him by serving one another. Jesus tells us, that it is this kind of service that is as if people are serving him directly.
May we come to have the same heart of Jesus…a heart that loves him and loves others well.
