My Life's A Wreck

Being an analyst by nature, I like the investigative television shows, CSI, NCIS, etc. There the people take a murder or an accident and re-create what happened from all the evidence. Sometimes the evidence is very limited and very complex tools are used to analyze sometimes minute pieces of evidence. I like it on NCIS when the analyst starts to explain a very complex analysis, and the star of the show (“Gibbs”) wants her to explain it more simply: “In English, Abby, in English”.

When we have a major (or ongoing) wreck in our life, it would be nice to be able to ask for explanation: “In English, God, in English”. What do you mean? What has happened, God, and why? I don’t understand why this happened to me. Unfortunately, God doesn’t work for us like Abby does for Gibbs. Fortunately, however, he hasn’t left us “without a clue”.

Abby, the analyst, learned how to analyze a wreck by reading about other wrecks which had been studied intensively. Although each wreck is unique, many have much in common. And, in studying a wreck, she could see clues of what caused it – and how it might have been avoided. We can learn what to do about our lives’ wrecks in the same way; we can look at the wrecks of other peoples’ lives – and how they fixed them. Unlike a car, a human life that has been in a wreck NEVER has to be totaled, it can always be repaired.

There are many good stories about wrecked human lives which have been repaired. Augustine is a good one. He had everything, and he had nothing. He was envied by most in society, but disgusted with himself. And he VERY, VERY reluctantly turned to a master mechanic to help fix his wrecked life. (I think, in part, he was reluctant to go to the master mechanic because his mother told him he should. In my mind, I could just hear him: “Aw mom, I can fix it myself. I don’t need any help.”) But after many attempts to fix himself and his life, he gave up and turned to the one who SHOULD know how to fix him, after all, the master mechanic had MADE him. (And besides, mother always knows best.)

In his attempts to fix his life, Augustine stepped back and looked at the bigger picture: Why was I made? What is my purpose? He looked for answers from the great philosophers, and then, ultimately, from God. Frank Sheed, in his book A Map Of Life, notes how critical Augustine’s question was. “Complete knowledge demands a knowledge of purpose. And in the face of the general proposition that nothing can be used aright until its purpose is known, the man who uses anything at all without such knowledge is acting blindly.” No wonder why many people’s lives are wrecks: they’re acting blindly; they don’t know the purpose for which they were created. And as Sheed further noted: “The perfect way to know the purpose of a thing is to find out from its maker.”

Your life’s a wreck? To fix it, and keep it fixed, you have to ask some questions of your maker. You can’t fix it alone; you can’t fix it blindly; you can’t fix it if you don’t know how it should work, what it was made to do. As Augustine found, sometimes the hardest thing is to accept, with humility, that we can’t fix some things. Like him, we so often try and try again to fix things ourselves. We change schools, we change jobs, we change churches, or we change spouses. We change drugs. And nothing seems to work. We know we are broken. It’s hard to be humble enough to admit we don’t know how to fix things, and to ask for help from our neighbor. Sometimes we find it even harder to ask from God.

It is very humiliating to say: “I failed”. I think, perhaps, part of the problem is that we are a little too hard on ourselves. The car analogy works again. It is one thing to wreck your car if you were totally careless, drunk driving, not looking at the road, or failing to do ANY maintenance on your vehicle, but it is another thing to wreck you car avoiding a child who jumps in front of your vehicle. Yes, some people almost deliberately wreck their lives through their carelessness, but I think most people are trying to do their best. And accidents happen anyway. Sometimes the CSI-type analysis of an accident has real benefits to help us avoid the accident in the future – we need to change our lives. Often, however, the re-hashing over and over again of the evidence does nothing but cause us unneeded stress: it was an accident, beyond much of our reasonable efforts to avoid. Get on with your life’s journey. You have a purpose, and you’ll never fulfill it unless you get going again.

Accidents will always be happening to some people at some time. Life has its crosses to bear. But we have an insurance policy for accidents, regardless of our level of contribution to the wreck. Jesus is our insurance policy. By his life, and death, he paid the cost to fix all our wrecks. The damage can and will be fixed by the manufacturer. All we have to do is file a claim. And what is the ongoing cost of this insurance policy? Well, I think all he asks is that you occasionally have dinner and chat with him – and if you come to mass he’ll even provide the food!

Analyzing a wreck is important, to avoid it again, but we shouldn’t so worry about the wrecks of the past that we don’t enjoy the journey today. God is good. All wrecks are repairable. There is still much to be enjoyed in this journey of life. You have a purpose.

Humbly get on your knees to ask the master repairman to fix your life, to help you steer it towards its purpose; ask the manufacturer to ease the pain of the visible scars. Then get on with your life, even if for a time you still have to drive around in the damaged vehicle while “the repair parts are on order”.

Just trust they will be delivered. They WERE paid for