Time will tell whether we’ve made a shrewd move.
There’s a new car sitting in our driveway, you see. But it’s not truly “ours,” at least not in the sense that we owned (for the past 13 years) the car it replaced. Or that we still own the other car in the driveway. Both were bought and paid for, long ago. As were the cars that went before them, stretching back some several decades.
Indeed, we’ve taken it as a point of pride (and perhaps, in our better moments, as a point of gratitude) that we haven’t typically had monthly car payments weighing us down. We know we are blessed, and we tend to live within our means.
In essence, none of those bedrock truths have changed with acquisition of this latest vehicle – except for the “monthly payments” part. This time around, I talked my Sweetie into leasing our new wheels. So that means it’s “ours” for the next three years or so, but after that, maybe not.
Probably not, in fact. And that’s where my financial calculus comes into play. The potentially shrewd move.
What I’ve noticed in recent years is how dramatically technology has changed in late-model vehicles. “Driver assist” technology in particular – the sensors and software designed to keep you safe. This is no small matter for my Sweetie and me. At our age, the ol’ vision and reflexes aren’t what they used to be. Frankly, we can use the help when we’re on the road.
And who knows? In three years’ time, technological advances may be notable again. So how smart is it, really, to be attached to a given vehicle for 12 or 13-year intervals these days?
Father Terrance Klein, writing in America magazine, suggests that I may even have stumbled upon something like a spiritual truth when I did my car-dealin’ this time around. “Our Lord compares us to stewards,” he says. “[N]ote that well—because we do not own the worlds we inhabit, though we certainly convince ourselves that we do. In the eyes of God, we are all renters, day laborers who must move on. All that we have, all that we are, comes from another.”
Perhaps this is along the lines of what Jesus seeks to teach us, when he (confoundingly) says in this week’s gospel passage: “I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.”
Did I make a good deal by leasing a vehicle this time around? Who knows? But on some level, I suppose have learned to think of “owning” as a species of dishonest wealth. Owning, in a sense, is an illusion. It will fail in the end. It will pass away. The really shrewd move then is to fix my eyes, my heart, my spirit on the things that will last – the eternal dwellings that a “life in Jesus” offers.
Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.
IHS
With Us Still 