I guess I forgot to write my post yesterday?
Huh.
Well, here goes… Yesterday I struggled a good bit again. I was the same zombie faced, depressed, whatever that I was the day before.
But I didn’t want to push my customers back another day, even if it was going to rain again. To be fair, I hadn’t checked the weather I don’t think.
Anyway, I didn’t have very many cars on the schedule because I just haven’t been accepting new cars because of how much I’ve been struggling.
What that translated into was me doing only two cars today. I didn’t even get to the first one until I think after 3:00. Gosh, I don’t even remember what I did before that. I know I went to the grocery store. I brought donuts to the workers at the Bentonville AutoZone.
Hmmm…
First car of the day was going back to that young man who wanted me to do a pre-purchase inspection for him the other day whom I convinced to not sell his car after the dealership he worked for quoted him $4,000 to fix it. I went over there, found that he had several cylinders misfiring, most notably from two bad coils.
He had cylinder misfire codes for cylinders 4, 5, 7, and 8. Cylinders 5 and 8 we’re dead misfires, meaning that they were misfiring every single combustion cycle or close to it. So I replaced those two coils, and suddenly, the car that he was ready to get rid of was driving well enough to make him smile and be happy.
I couldn’t get it to reproduce the misfires on cylinders 4 and 7, but I’m expecting he’ll likely need some spark plugs and coils. Still, it’s going to be a far cry from the $4,000. Today’s bill was under $300.
So I told him to watch how it drives for the next few days, and we’ll see if any of those other codes come back, and I let him know that we likely would probably need to put spark plugs in it or something, but given everything the dealer had told him, I figured it would be best to have him drive it for a few days just to see what might pop up.
Still, it’s a heck of a lot better than what it was before, and all it needed was just a couple of coils to get to at least this point.
(sigh)
The second car was a 2018 Nissan rogue that had a broken door handle. He had bought another door handle for it to replace it with, but once I got the door handle off the vehicle, I realized that the only problem was that somehow a bolt that fastened two parts of the handle together was missing. I looked inside the door for the bolt, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I went to my little bolt pile in my van, found one that would work, tightened down the two pieces of the door handle, put it back in, and he was good to go, good is new.
The rain came on a couple times during the day, and after the second car, it came back again, so the third and fourth cars that I had on the schedule were postponed.
After being able to help the young man with his car and getting it driving much better than it had been before, I was starting to feel better. The depression head pretty much cleared up, and I was definitely on the up.
I’m not great, but I’m not anywhere near as bad as I was before.
Had a really great conversation with one of my brothers this morning, and then we chatted again after I finished my last job, talking for more than 2 hours, another great conversation.
It’s nice to be building my relationship with my brother. I’m hoping to be able to do that with all of my siblings and my parents.
I tried to fix my hill sister Liz’s blower today, and I was once again reminded of why I just should pay people to do this stuff. It makes more sense for me to just go out and fix one more car than it does to spend the time trying to figure out what’s wrong with something I’m not familiar with and fix it. At least for stuff like this when fixing it is relatively cheap to do.
I thought I did everything exactly as I was supposed to, but for some reason the trigger doesn’t feel right, it’s not working properly after putting it back together multiple times, and the choke doesn’t feel right either, so I’m a bit baffled.
🤔
Anyway, my mind has been on the topic of god a little bit more lately, as y’all well know… As I’ve said multiple times, I miss God. I miss the relationship I had with him. I miss the inspiration. I miss the light. I miss the knowledge that filled me.
It seems pretty funny to me that I can even question, but I do. I have such a logical brain. Certainly I’ve got emotions that drive me in many different ways, but a lot of me is just… 🧠.
I want that relationship back. I want the light, the piece, the strength…
But if I go back, I want to be solid. I don’t want to lose my faith again. I want to be able to weather the hardest challenges without questioning again.
I just want to be solid.
That’s one reason I hesitate turning back toward God. I don’t just want to turn back toward him because I’m hungry for that relationship again, and not just because I’m tired of all this pain and I’m looking for relief.
If I go back, I want to go back, if it’s even possible, having tested and proven beyond anything that is possible for me to doubt. I don’t just want to run back: I want to take my time.
But there’s a part of me that just wants to run back because I’m so tired, and I don’t want to go through all the effort that may not even be necessary if I were to just go back and look at all my experiences.
Ugh…
Like I told my brother today, I’m afraid to go back to God because I’m afraid he’s just going to keep telling me the same thing, that the path that I was on, the things that I trusted in, were true, the experience is in revelations that I felt like I received were real, and that I should keep trusting them.
I’m afraid of that.
I’m afraid of that because it means still having to wait for what I longed for most in this life–having to wait with no end in sight. With nothing I can do but hope and trust and… wait.
That’s effectively what’s happening anyway. I’m just doing it miserably instead of hopefully and faithfully.
I can’t stop believing in the experiences that I had. Do I trust them? No. But there’s no way that I can deny them either. I would die first.
I just… don’t know.
Fear and pain have an amazing ability to cloud reality, change perceptions, twist truth, and cause one to focus so narrowly on specific feelings and experiences that critically relevant data slips beyond consideration.
And there is a lot of fear and pain.
I want relief.
But I don’t want to be here again. If I go back… I want to stay back.
So I have a lot to figure out. And I’m going to take some time off work to start processing. That’s one of my sisters suggested, just go down by the creek and chill. Just listen and take in the world around me.
I need to breathe.
In the last 3 months since I’ve been home, I’ve put in as many hours of work as one would probably do in 7 or 8 months of regular full-time work.
I’m exhausted–but that exhaustion is mostly emotional and mental and spiritual..
I’m going to take the weekend off, except for one job that I already said I was going to do. But it’s out toward the lake instead of into town, so it feels a little different than going to work, because it’s… going the other direction. 🙃
I want to find truth. I want to be able to hold onto it and not doubt it.
Today will likely be an interesting day…
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 