Car Shopping

“I’m sorry, but did you say a weasel did this?” I stood with my hands in my pockets staring down into the open hood of the car. Beside me a thin-faced German man with small spectacles stuttered a bit as he looked for the words in English. “Perhaps, y-y-yes, it maybe vas veasel, but… I do not know… it was…” he gave up on words and instead brought his hands up to his face like little paws and pretended to nibble on something with his little teeth.“Okay. Yes. Thank you,” I said, wishing the poor man would give up trying to tell me exactly what creature had taken up residence in the front end of his car during COVID lockdowns. It was clearly a little guy that liked to party. The insulation was torn to shreds and was hanging from all the components like tattered yellow and black curtains. The top of the engine was littered with little bits of it like ash-covered snow. It looked like the engine had been thrown in a cardboard box full of moldy packing peanuts.

“I’m sorry, but did you say a weasel did this?” I stood with my hands in my pockets staring down into the open hood of the car. Beside me a thin-faced German man with small spectacles stuttered a bit as he looked for the words in English. “Perhaps, y-y-yes, it maybe vas veasel, but… I do not know… it was…” he gave up on words and instead brought his hands up to his face like little paws and pretended to nibble on something with his little teeth.

“Okay. Yes. Thank you,” I said, wishing the poor man would give up trying to tell me exactly what creature had taken up residence in the front end of his car during COVID lockdowns. It was clearly a little guy that liked to party. The insulation was torn to shreds and was hanging from all the components like tattered yellow and black curtains. The top of the engine was littered with little bits of it like ash-covered snow. It looked like the engine had been thrown in a cardboard box full of moldy packing peanuts.

.“It still runs goot,” the man said. “And the creature. He will not be back.” He leaned down to point dramatically at one of several cloth pouches that were hung around the engine area. “It is hair of the dog.”He gestured to the window of his house, where a small terrier was sitting watching us.

“Smart,” I said nodding my head as if I understood anything about cars and weasels. But I know nothing.

Of course, the car HAD run “goot”, for the most part. Maybe. Although the clutch peddle had rollicked like a discotheque and was probably on its way out. And the windshield was so deeply angled that I could have driven with all three of my children asleep on the dashboard. The car was strange. My kids loved it. I was disappointed.

I shook the man’s hand and walked back to our car.

This was our eighth day of car shopping and this was the first car we had actually sat in.

We had arrived expecting to talk to dealerships. We were promised acres of used cars, a land flowing with milk and honey, but all of the dealerships only wanted to work with military personnel. And when we finally found one that would work with us, we could only look at cars with European designs instead of American designs (since we would need to find local mechanics and parts in Albania) and we learned that 80% of the cars on the lots here are American spec. Which didn’t much matter because we also had only one criterion for our car search: 7 seats. And in the land of lilliput- I mean Europe, cars only come in two sizes: Matchbox and Hot Wheels. A 7-passenger car was a dodo bird that hadn’t walked these hills since before World War II.

So, we expanded our search to include all private car sales in the entire bottom left side of the nation of Germany. And that’s how we came to drive an hour and a half to the French border to look at a car that had been eaten by what may or may not have been a weasel.

Five hours later we were on a completely different side of the country standing in a man’s driveway in total darkness looking at a car that was nothing more than a nondescript shadow.

“So… can we drive it?”

The man shook his head and struggled to find vocabulary words he probably had only ever heard in Fast and the Furious. “No no no. See. It is not registered. There are no license plates.”

“So, how can we drive it to know if it is an okay car?”

He blinked in the darkness. “Because it is goot car. You pay for car. We go to de office and have it… registered. Then you come back and drive it. It will be yours and you will see.” He smiled.

I believed him. But I was frustrated and defeated to have come so far in a day only to have seen a car that was eaten by a weasel and another that we hardly could see in the dark and couldn’t ever drive until after we had handed over almost $20k in cash.

I shook his hand and drove my very exhausted family home. My mind was a smear of grey paint. We had spent endless days stuck in a loop of no progress towards owning a car. No leads. No hope. No direction. No revelations. We were staying with wonderful friends that we had only just met when we arrived in the country over a week ago, and they no doubt were ready for us to find a clean solution and move on. And yet, here I was, no closer than when I arrived. I could not provide for my family. I could not protect them and buy them a car to support our life and our work in Albania. The car just didn’t exist. Here.

I thought about the car that we had left behind in Alaska, and I wept quietly in the darkness as I drove the long unlit autobahn back to our apartment for the night. The car we had left behind. The car we all loved. The car that was impossible to replace. The car my children were expecting to see every time we pulled up to the next used car. We would not be replacing that car. We would be paying double the price for less.

I lay awake in the night staring into the black room. Outside on the street, strange cars drove by. What was I doing? I wasn’t being selfish, was I? I asked God. I wanted 7 seats because we want to carry more than just our family of five. Five seats would be selfish, right? And, I wanted something reliable because I want to be able to drive members of the church in Berat to appointments in Tirana and take the youth to visit nearby congregations. I would probably be happier with something smaller and easier to navigate the streets of Albania. I wasn’t being selfish right? So, God, where is the car? Why did you bring me here to buy a car and then not let me find the car? Why am I trapped in this limbo space, waiting, looking, finding nothing?

I fell asleep asking these questions over and over and over in my mind. Wrestling with God on the bank of the river of dreams.

I woke up the next morning with a new optimism. I woke up with a thought that I had never thought to have before.

“I think maybe I’ve been doing it wrong,” I told my wife.

“You what?” she asked.

“The car search. I think I have been doing it wrong. I realized I haven’t been honest with God,” I said. “I think I haven’t told him what I want. I’m being too vague. I want something too simple. Maybe we should be very specific and let him surprise us.”

She smiled and touched my hand. Maybe I was losing my mind.

I opened the search engine again like I had done so many times before. Only this time I actually started checking the boxes I had previously ignored. Type of car? I have seen enough of these videos to know they are basically the same, but how about this one. It’s actually the one I think is my favorite. I like the layout. It feels familiar. I like the shape of it. Do I want a backup camera? Of course, I want a backup camera. Don’t even show me it if it doesn’t have a backup camera. I even picked the color I would prefer. I did all of it. I custom-built my dream car.

My dream car. I read over the list of criteria one last time. Wow. I didn’t realize I actually had so many preferences. I had made myself so flexible, I had never once thought to actually see. To Ask. Of course, this car doesn’t exist. But it was worth the exercise to actually dream about what I wanted and pray to God to show it to me.

I opened my eyes.

“1 result found.”

I was dumbstruck. There it was. It was right there in the picture. Not the car I left back home, but something possibly better. And it was real, and it had been listed last night. Last night, when I had been lying in bed wrestling with God on the banks of the River of Dreams. Someone had posted this beautiful answer. Before I had even asked. We could be free of this trap by tomorrow. We would be on our way back home to Albania, by this weekend.

We had two more cars arranged to look at. My dream car was about five minutes away from the location we were going to be that very afternoon. The impossibility of it all made my chest quiver.

I messaged the owner to see if it was available to look at. And they responded that it was.

The clouds around my heart lifted away. And for the first time in over a week, I felt peace.

We drove to the area and my children started wandering through a local bookstore to pass the time while I messaged the owner on Wi-Fi. “Where can we meet to look at the car?” I asked.

After a long silence, the owner responded. “I’m sorry to have to ask this, but where are you from?”

I found this question peculiar. “We are American missionaries. We are visiting Germany to buy a car to use for our work with the church in Albania.”

Another long silence. “What church?”

I sighed and closed my eyes and typed my answer, briefly describing who we were and who the church was, and what we would be doing with the car. I wanted to be honest. I wanted to put them at ease and let them know I was not a threat in some way. I was just a nice Christian guy that was wanting to buy a car for nice Christian guy reasons. He should be proud to sell his car to me.

The response came back. “No. I’m not sure about that.”

“Not sure about what?” I was distraught. “We are paying cash. We are not wanting to negotiate the price. We are a good family wanting to buy your car.”

“That’s too much cash.”

This was the final message. I felt a weasel in my chest as it started eating the insulation surrounding my heart.

We were in the car now. My family knew what had happened. Everyone was silent while we drove the streets of this weird city on our way to our meeting. I parked angrily on a side street and we walked together to the location where we were looking at a different car, a car I was not actually excited about seeing. I went through the motions. We found the building. We found the door. But, my brain was occupied. I couldn’t make sense of it.

“Why? I don’t understand. They are selling a car. Why do they care that I’m an American? Why is it any of their business that I work for a church? What does it matter? What do they mean by, ‘That’s too much cash,’? I mean, come on. Meet me at a bank and I’ll put the money directly into your account!”

I had never faced racism or religious disrespect before. Is that what this was? It felt hopeless and wrong and stupid. It felt arrogant. It felt like a slap in the face. And it wasn’t from the person selling the car. It was a slap that came from much higher up.

“Settle down,” Andrea told me, as I furiously rang the buzzer on the door. “We should rejoice when God slams a door. It’s a pretty clear message.”

I waved my arms in the air. “Message of what?! WHAT message? We have been looking for a car for a week and a half and we have ZERO options. ZE-RO! Sure, slam a door if I have two options. Slam five of them if I have six, but give me SOMETHING! Why produce my dream car if I’m not even going to get to look at it? Andrea, we were so close. SO CLOSE to everything making sense for once! Why was the door open in the first place? Just to taunt me? Just to make me look like an idiot when I started walking towards it? Did God open it so he could slam it in my face just as I was saying, ‘Wow! Thank you!’. BAM! I just don’t understand.”

This is what I was saying. And my face was in my hands. So, I didn’t even see when the door opened, and Diego arrived.

“Hello!” said a friendly voice. It sounded instantly familiar. The short round-faced man with glasses that greeted us at the apartment building entrance looked somehow familiar as well.

I hung back as we walked. I let my wife talk to him and I brooded over my children and shook my head at the tile floor.

“So, why are you guys buying a car in Germany?” he asked.

“…Here it comes,” I thought.

My wife explained where we were from and what we were doing. At the mention of being missionaries, his face lit up. “Wait, you are missionaries? This is amazing! I can’t believe this!” he said. “I need to tell my wife. She is going to pass out! We are both from missionary families. I’m here for work at the factory, but we love missionaries. We would LOVE for our car to go to a church in Albania.”

I woke up and stepped ahead of my children. “Where are you from?” I asked.

“I am Brazilian.”

My children exploded in cheers of laughter. “Our uncle just came home from doing mission work in Brazil!” they said. It was a small cup of water in a desert, but I accepted it gladly. Maybe less a cup of water and more a wet fleece, but one that was wet with familiar water.

He led us through a parking garage to a car. It was small. Seven seats. In good condition. It was sensible. I sat in the driver’s seat and nodded. This was a car that seemed to belong to a missionary in Berat, Albania. And it was considerably cheaper than the car I had been hoping to look at that same afternoon.

We drove it down the street, and then we quickly got lost while talking about life with our new Brazilian friend.

When we finally arrived back at the apartment, Diego’s wife was waiting for us in the parking garage. She was crying. We were an answer to their prayers as much as they were an answer to ours. We went to their apartment and shared a sleeve of “American-Style” cookies. We talked more about life in Germany. We talked about Brazil. We talked about God and the strange things he has done in both of our lives.

When we had to leave, Diego and his family prayed over us and our work. It was understood that we may not be back to buy the car. We had other cars to consider. In fact, there was one more that we were going to be seeing that same day about an hour away in a different town. But we parted ways with the hopes of one-day meeting again.

We shook hands and drove away. My car was buzzing with dizzy conversations. Clara especially was awe-struck and couldn’t seem to believe what had just happened. “There are no coincidences with God,” Diego had said. This was a family that was financially burdened, dealing with loss and injustice and working at a company that was suffering because of moral decisions that Germany is making to cut ties with Russia because of the war in Ukraine. And when we arrived and they heard that we were missionaries their first response was to ask, “Is this God coming to take our car?”

We stopped quickly in a McDonald’s parking lot near the edge of town, so the kids could eat something and I could message the next person we were meeting to say that we were possibly going to be late. When I checked my phone, I found a message from the owner of the next car.

“Call me,” it said simply.

So, I called. And the poor German man very respectfully explained as best he could that something had happened that morning. His car had mysteriously sprung a leak from the transmission. It had never done this before, and he didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t feel like it was fair for me to come look at it before he found the answers.

I pretended to be surprised. “I’m so sorry that happened. I appreciate and respect that you would call me to tell me this.” And I hung up the phone.

I sat on a low concrete wall and looked out as the sun was setting behind the industrial park.

God was at work in the world. I didn’t understand him. I still didn’t know what he was wanting me to do. But he was at work. And it felt amazing to realize that. It was enough.

I thought about the car I had left behind in America. I thought about my dream car. And I laughed and held my head in my hands again until my laughter turned to tears. I don’t want to dream about cars anymore. I'm sick and tired of dreaming about cars. Why would I ever pray for a car, when I could instead pray to know God and see him at work in the world.

I brushed myself off, walked inside, and told Andrea it was time to go home.