It’s a frightening thing to awaken one Sunday and find that toddlers have discovered your car. The red one. The one that never had a scratch. Until now.

“An elderly lady owned her,” Honest Ed had informed me on a cloudless day the previous summer, while gently caressing her contoured roof and adjusting his purple suspenders. “She only drove it Sundays, you know. Between the church, her heated garage, and the car wash. Changed the oil after each drive. Triple-undercoated the body. Kept plastic on the seats. Heh, heh, this baby purrs like a Swiss watch. Ticks like a pacemaker. And it’s all ready to go. Of course, I’ll top up the tank before you take it.”

Ed looked as if he’d just stepped off a bad television ad. Nonetheless, I squinted at the paint job and thumbed the corners of my VISA card. I hadn’t taken her for a spin yet, but already the wheels were turning.

This was the kind of machine fate has you meet once in a lifetime, and you fall in love immediately, vowing to be true the rest of your days, or until rust separates you. And if for some reason you are an idiot and don’t buy it right now, you wake up in the middle of the night, cold and sweating, kicking yourself in the wallet, hoping fate hasn’t picked someone else and wondering if you should just hobble on down there right now in your Ford Pinto and sit on the dream until Honest Ed arrives and ties the knot.

“As it is, I’ll only be makin’ 25 bucks on the deal,” said Ed. “It’ll go toward crutches for the twins, should they survive the surgery. We’ve gotta get ’em separated, you know. They’re Siamese.” A tear wound its way down Ed’s pudgy cheek and splashed lightly on his tangerine tie.

There are times when life hands you an easy choice on a silver platter. This was one of those times.

After a short test drive and a long chat with my wife, I bought the car-hook, line, and cruise control. As I eased her out of the lot, Ed gently patted the hood and said goodbye, much like you would it your best friend had just climbed aboard a rowboat and was pointing it toward Italy. “I sure will miss her,” I heard him say.

Each Saturday I polished that red Ford.

The chrome rivaled sunshine in those days. We planted tomatoes near it, and they grew fat from the rays. On Saturdays my neighbor Vance would come by to sample the tomatoes and annoy me. “Polishing the tin god, eh?”

I chuckled above my irritation. “Just being a good steward, that’s all,” I would say. He’s jealous, I would think. I don’t blame him. How can you blame a guy who’s still making payments on a rust-colored ’66 Chevy Impala?

About this time my wife began having children. They came one at a time, unlike Honest Ed’s, but as they started to toddle, they would occasionally get together in bunches and hang out near my bright red Ford. This was rarely good news for anyone, least of all the Ford. Sometimes Siamese children aren’t the only ones who need separating, you know.

On that fateful Sunday just before the morning worship service, I opened the front door to find Rachael and Jeffrey standing on the hood, smiling at me. They were two and one respectively, and both were proud owners of sizable rock collections.

Apparently they planned to bring the collections to church, perhaps to put them in the offering, until they were sidetracked by a better idea: What about we place these atop the shiny red thing and dance on ’em? Maybe we could change it into a two-tone. Maybe we could change Dad into a towering inferno.

“It’s just a car,” said my wife as we drove to church, the smell of smoke lingering in the air. The blaze had been extinguished, but a little breeze could stir up the embers. After all, my investment had been devalued, my equity diminished.

“How can you say that? JUST A CAR. It’s not just a car. It’s …it’s…”

“Just a car,” she interrupted. “Hey, be glad the car didn’t decide to trample on the kids.”

I wasn’t so sure.

Upon reaching the parking lot, I was smiling at other parishioners, but my words were stumbling through clenched teeth. “Look at it this way,” I said. “What if the kids scratched your …your …vacuum cleaner or something? Or…damaged one of your plants? Or ripped one of your new dresses?”

“They have, Phil,” she said, waving kindly to someone. “By the way, what did you do with the kids?”

I don’t know if your pastor reads your mail. Mine does. Of course, I don’t have tangible proof of this. But even if he doesn’t, I highly suspect that our cordless phones are on the same frequency, or that Pastor John spends a significant percentage of his minister’s salary on high-tech surveillance equipment that he zooms in on my car, because almost every Sunday he seems to delight in nailing me to the wall.

On the morning in question, his topic was materialism, and before long he was reading from 1 Timothy 6, and I knew I was in trouble.

But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil …. But you, man of God, flee from all this and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness (1 Timothy 6:6-11).

Pastor John didn’t end there, so I picked up the bulletin and tried to drown out the remaining verses by thinking about auto repair shops and doing mental calculation exercises. The problem was, the verses came through loud and clear.

Tell those rich in this world’s wealth to quit being so full of themselves and so obsessed with money, which is here today and gone tomorrow. ‘Tell them to go after God, who piles on all the riches we could ever manage-to do good, to be rich in helping others, to he extravagantly generous. If they do that, they’ll build a treasury that will last, gaining life that is truly life (1 Timothy 6:17-19 The Message).

“Martin Luther once said, ‘I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.’ It’s funny, isn’t it?” Asked John. “North Americans possess more things than any other people in the world. We also have more books on how to find happiness.”

I was listening now.

“If you hold the things of this world too tightly you will spend your whole life making only a snail’s progress toward the Creator,” he said. “Things must never fill the place where God was meant to be.”

When we reached the car, I wasn’t smiling.

“I guess I have some things to learn,” I told my wife. “I guess anything we don’t give to God has a way of possessing us.”

She smiled in agreement. And watched me reach for the car keys.

It was time to let the children out of the trunk.

Callaway, Phil. Who Put My Life on Fast-Forward? Eugene: Harvest House Publishers, 2002, p. 89-94. Www.philcallaway.com