Availability

March 13, 2019

On one of our mission trips, we spent an entire morning looking all over the city for two small screws to fasten an electric box to a wall. Back home, we could have bought a bucket of them at Home Depot, but in this country they were nowhere to be found. This was but one introduction to the glories of Socialism where everything is in short supply and everyone is equally poor. 

This afternoon was a perfect day to change the oil in my truck. It was overdue, but the cold combined with the slop adhering to the undercarriage of my vehicle had discouraged me from attempting it earlier. A couple days of warmer weather and dry roads meant that the time had come, so I crawled underneath (the clearance of 4wd is a godsend!), drained the oil, removed the old filter, and tried to screw the new one on. It wouldn’t go. I checked the threaded hole against the old filter; it was smaller! No wonder it wouldn’t fit! A search for the receipt was in vain, so I figured I’d just have to swallow the price of a new filter. What really irked me was having to waste an hour driving to Fredonia for a new filter.

Half an hour later, I stood in Auto Zone reading the oil filter chart, which informed me I had the correct filter after all. I even took the offending one into the store for comparison. They were the same; what could possibly be going on? Oh well—my hour was wasted, but there was no sense in fretting about it, so I headed home and checked the numbers on the old filter. They were identical to the one I had originally purchased. Crawling back underneath the truck, I tried again. No luck. Finally, I managed to get both hands up where the filter mounted to the engine block only to discover that I had been trying to screw the filter onto some protrusion on the block. Once I got it in the right place...voila! It screwed in as nicely as you please.

There was a time when this entire episode would have had me fuming, but I cannot forget our mission trip. I made a foolish mistake and wasted an afternoon, but if I had really picked up the wrong filter, I could have remedied my error with a shopping cart of the correct ones. In other countries, it wouldn’t have mattered; the right filters would just not have been available at any price. I am thankful tonight that we live in a country where Capitalism and enterprise has made available nearly everything I need to function well materially. 

God has made available everything we need for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3) if we will only take advantage of it. It would be a sin to make use of our abundant material resources while failing to tap into our unlimited spiritual resources. I am thankful for both, and hope to be as faithful in the latter as in the former.