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You Don’t Know the Half of It
By Scott Harrup | January 30, 2009
“You should blog about that,” a friend at work said to me today as we commiserated about life’s auto repair woes.
She had just dropped off her family’s car and was waiting to hear what the cost would be. So I told her about last summer’s incident with our van.
Jodie was at the grocery store when she had a flat tire. A Good Samaritan very kindly came to her aid. He bought a can of tire sealant, sprayed and inflated the wounded rubber “limb” and refused to accept any kind of reimbursement from Jodie. I took the van to an auto shop when I came home from work.
And that’s when the trail of misfortunes began.
We had acquired our van used, and I had known for some time that the brakes and tires from the original owner were nearing the end of their useful life spans. With the flat, I decided to buy four tires and go ahead and have the brakes serviced.
Those items alone were going to be a financial burden. But when the van was on the lift with the wheels removed, I discovered I didn’t know the half of it. Turns out, if a vehicle is equipped with a tire pressure sensor system, you must absolutely never use a leak-fixing spray of any kind. The chemicals gum up and erode the pressure sensor in the tire.
The Good Samaritan had sprayed the front right tire. At the shop, the mechanic showed me where the first owner of our van had sprayed a rear tire. Two sensors shot, at about $130 each.
I still had another surprise to endure. The front right bearing assembly had to be replaced if the van was to be roadworthy.
The final tab for tires, brakes, tire pressure sensors and the bearing assembly nudged past $1,400.
Maybe your life has felt like my visit to that auto shop. Your dentist picked at a tiny spot of decay and discovered a sinkhole of a cavity underneath. Your dermatologist made that disturbing “ahem” sound when pondering that suspicious mole. Your accountant raised an eyebrow over the list of deductions and the ungainly pile of receipts you submitted, and you can mentally see your refund check shrinking or even disappearing. You can fill in the blank about how Person A kindly or not so kindly made you aware of Problem B.
At the front end of just about any challenge in life, we almost certainly don’t know the half of it.
But God does. And here’s another reassuring truth — our human understanding doesn’t know the half of what He can do to get us through every challenge.
A host of Bible stories bears this out. I have to remind myself during my own devotions that biblical characters’ struggles and pain didn’t just evaporate instantly. Those people went through a process where their faith felt hammered. I get to read about everything in the past tense, with God’s resolution already printed in the record in black and white. But a lot of their “todays” looked a lot like yours and mine. At their crisis points, they didn’t know the half of it either.
So, today and each day, I’m hanging on until God’s “other half” is revealed.
And here’s one final bit of encouraging data — God’s “other half” is infinitely more than half. As the apostle Paul reminds us, all of life’s pain taken together cannot be compared to the joy God has planned for anyone who has the faith to just hang in there.
“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18, NKJV).
We really don’t know the half of it.
Topics: Family Life, Bible |
