Travelin' Mercies

Tomorrow and the next day, I have 16 hours of chaplain training with the Federation of Fire Chaplains just outside of Indianapolis.

(I keep wondering when I will get over the feeling of "wow, this time last year, I didn't even know this existed.)

So I drove down to Indy on Friday, where I am staying with my wife's sister and her husband.

(Since I started with the parenthetical commentary, might as well continue. I married the sister of a college friend. This friend had herself married another good friend from college. So my in-laws are a class reunion of sorts. As Ms. Stewart would say, it's a good thing.)

On my way down here, I stopped in Ft. Wayne to get gas and a refill on the caffeine. After pumping the gas, I turned the key, and the starter did its thing, but the engine did not follow suit. Crank, crank, crank, nothing. So I called the Mrs., who is still up in Michigan, she gets me some pertinent numbers, and I called for help.

In the meantime, I am busy praying for some help, because I am stuck halfway between home and where I am headed, and this training isn't happening in a reasonable driving range again anytime soon.

The short version of the story is that the crankshaft sensor on the car was bad. Which means the timing on the valves and the pistons was off a bit, so that is why the mileage was down and the car was a little rough lately. When it gets bad enough and the engine is hot, the car shuts off so as not to damage the engine. It could have happened while driving, apparently. So being in a gas station was not a bad place to be. After it cooled off, I could start the car and get to the local dealership.

The cool thing about this story is trying to jump start the car before I knew what was wrong. I looked around for someone who might have a set of jumper cables. Lots of commuter types were pulling in and out of the station. But one gentleman caught my eye. He was a bit older than me, driving a pick-up truck, wearing a well-weathered "First Armored Division" shirt, and pumping gas into a plastic gas can. I went up and asked if he had jumper cables. He did, and pulled around to my car and we tried those.

As the cables were not working (because that wasn't the problem), another guy, younger, African American, and with an accent I couldn't place (it might have been Caribbean, might have been African), drove up with a jumpstart pack and offered it for my use.

I had two good Samaritans who helped me out. Unfortunately, I didn't know what the real problem was, so I was asking for help with stuff that had little to no effect. I still had to get to the dealership and still had to write a check much bigger than I had wanted to. But in the midst of economic downturns and all sorts of other troubles, two people were more than willing to help a stranger who was stuck halfway to where he was headed.

God is good. As are lots of people.