Auto Angels Is About More Than Cars by Norm O'Banyon
At our recent car show, I was part of a conversation. We were standing under a protection from the gray drizzle, each with a steaming cup of coffee, admiring the blue Chevie coupe. “Is that a ’42,” the visitor asked. “Yup,” came the response. “That’s a favorite each year.” We sipped, and quietly admired the shiny show entry.
The visitor asked, “So you guys restore and repair old relics? The church just lets you use the place for your hobby?”
The man with the “Auto Angel” patch on his shirt smiled and said, “For most of us it is lot more than a hobby. Yeah, we get to work on our own cars, but over the last year we helped folks and serviced over 215 cars. Most folks couldn’t afford to have the work done at a garage. And, during the same time period, we had 31 cars donated to our program. Twenty of those we could fix up and we made them available to folks who needed transportation for work. We see this as a calling as well as a hobby. We like to believe it is in keeping with the work the church does for us all, you know restoring and repairing, or improving people.”
The visitor thought for a moment as though he was collecting his courage to ask, “I’ve got a ’64 Thunderbird that I have wanted to restore for a long time. Do you think I could….”
Before he could finish his question the positive answer came, “Just bring it in next Saturday morning, if it runs. We’ll give it a look and see if we could help you.”
“But I don’t belong to this church,” he said with a shrug. “Not any, actually,” he added.
“Come on by next Saturday morning and meet some of the other Auto Angels. If you like, we can help you with that belonging stuff as well.
The conversation took less than a couple minutes, but surprisingly the drizzle seemed less gray, and the morning seemed much more than a car show.
In a recent sermon, pastor Scott Mann told us that the challenge is to bring the spiritual into our everyday lives. Auto Angels is a classic example of how that can work like a well-tuned machine.
May God’s Peace and Joy make this an outstanding day!
Norm O’