I never got an oil change

The first car I ever owned was a Pontiac Vibe named Sunny.

Sunny was the perfect car for me. Tiny, manual transmission, toyota engine, mismatched hatch door, sunroof, 6-CD changer, what more could I ask for? Sunny and I were together for five years, from my senior year of high school until I graduated from college. And never once did I get an oil change.

This is not—I repeat, not—me trying to convince you never to get an oil change. I am not an oil-change-conspiracy-theorist. There is good reason to check your oil and good reason to change it. You should, in fact, listen to your dad when he tells you to monitor the fluids in your car and do the bare minimum of maintenance on it.

What this is, is me telling you I did not do those things, and God did me five years worth of favors, ensuring I never paid the price for it.

I sold Sunny in 2019 and the only reason I chose to part with it was because the A/C went out and it would’ve been financially nonsensical to repair it. The engine still hummed like a dream when I drove it for the last time.

Actually, there were several times during my ownership of Sunny (definitely not enough times, but you already know I was a neglectful car owner) where I got nervous about the oil maintenance and checked it. And it always looked fine to me.

Maybe there’s a good scientific reason for that. But in my adult life I’ve never heard of a car going for five years without an oil change and still running perfectly normally. Every man I’ve told this fun fact about my first car has gasped in horror when they hear it.

The car was old when I bought it, it had been totalled before, I drove it around everywhere all the time, and I never got an oil change. It probably should have fallen apart and it didn’t. God just kept it rolling.

If you’ve talked to me for more than five minutes this summer you’ve probably gotten an earful about my wildflower garden and the monster tomato plants wreaking havoc on my raised bed. I love talking about the garden. Firstly, because I had so many flowers bloom this year after two years of trying to make the hill in front of my house less depressing and weed-choked. That involved much effort on my part, as well as prayers.

Secondly, I love talking about the garden because I refused to plant tomatoes this year and now I go out to the vegetable beds every couple days and pick five to seven massive tomatoes. It’s my favorite thing to brag about because I literally did nothing to make it happen.

I told God at the beginning of planting season: I’m going to just plant basil this year because I know I can at least keep up with that. Last year these dang tomato plants got so big I couldn’t keep up with harvesting them, and I’m not going to sign up for that this year. I’m not even going to touch the garden bed except to remove the dead tomato plants and the tomato stands that buckled under their weight last year, and plant some basil in the corner at some point.

If you want me to have tomatoes I trust you will plant them from the many unharvested tomatoes that have been decomposing in this bed all winter.

I spent a lot of time in the yard this spring, weeding my wildflower patch and barely glancing toward the garden bed. One day in mid-May I was chatting over the fence to my neighbor, who had planted her own salsa garden, and I said I hadn’t bothered this year.

“But you have some tomatoes coming up, it looks like,” she said. I looked behind me.

Sure enough, there were no fewer than fifty little tomato plants sprouting in the garden bed. I was amazed because I knew that there was no weed barrier left. I hadn’t even replaced the soil in the bed.

That afternoon I got to work plucking most of the plants. I left four still growing, and I went to the store to buy new tomato stands and a couple basil plants. I put all the basil in the garden bed because I’ve heard it keeps some of the tomato-chomping bugs away.

I remembered to water the garden probably every other day for a couple weeks, and the hotter it got outside the less I remembered.

But lo, a couple months later and the new tomato stands have been crushed by two-ton tomato plants. I’ve had to make marinara and picadillo salsa in batches and freeze it and I’m running out of containers.

Please, if you’re reading this just jump the fence and take a couple tomatoes from my garden. I need help.

Incidentally, on a basil-y note, a few days after planting the store-bought basil in the garden, I came out onto my porch steps and saw a tiny basil seedling in the pot where I had tried (and failed) to grow a basil plant from seed last summer.

What’s God trying to tell me? I’ve been thinking a lot about the garden and my first car and how they are essentially the same thing—and how I’ve been learning this same lesson over and over in different ways my whole life, how God is the master gardener, the great sustainer, and I am not expected to take that job, and my life is so much fuller and freer when I live out of that truth.

As a college student I, somewhat naively, didn’t change the oil in my car. I trusted God to work it out and it did.

This summer I just put my tomatoes in God’s hands and they grew.

That’s God’s faithfulness right there.

I didn’t plant the tomatoes in my garden. I didn’t have to plant anything in order for God to make it grow. And he invites me into the garden, to see what He’s done, to share in the work of cultivating it, to harvest its fruit and let it bless me.

What’s growing in the garden of your life right now?