God's Plans

This summer I spent several weeks fighting problems with my 1973 Porsche 914. It started when I was bringing Nate home from his first day of Discovery camp. The engine suddenly bucked and misfired terribly and I didn't think we would make it home under our own power.

Now normally, the fuel injection system on a 914 is very reliable, in spite of the fact that it is 50 year-old technology. In addition, I had the distributor rebuilt only 5,000 miles previously so I really didn't suspect the component that ultimately turned out to be the problem - the injector points that reside in the bottom section of the distributor.

One of the best ways to diagnose a problem like this is to change out parts with known good/new parts. One of the parts that I changed out along the way was the cylinder head temperature sender. The one which I bought turned out to be the wrong one for my car, but the resistance measurements were very close to the correct unit and it seemed to run pretty well so I left it in place because I wanted to see how it did over the long term (since the correct part is made of unobtainium). Of course the original unit got safely tucked away in the glove box for "just in case".

That's my friends Brant, Jim and Kevin at the Red Rock Classic event in Beaver, Utah the weekend of September 8th. My car ran flawlessly for the whole 800+ mile weekend, but Jim's orange 914 had a fuel pump go out on the way there. After the Saturday drive to Cedar Breaks National Monument, a new problem developed when Jim's car suddenly died and was obviously flooded. Although we could get it restarted, it would not stay running. Finally Ed Morrow (who came all the way from Massachusetts) diagnosed the problem as an intermittent problem with the cylinder head temperature sender - something he'd never experienced before (and Ed has years of professional 914 experience!).

As is usual for these kinds of things, the question get's asked "who has a spare xxxx", and often I'm the guy who has a spare because of some previous failure. So that's Brant in the photo, changing out the bad unit for the spare that I had in my glove box. Not only did I have a spare, but the new unit which I had purchased was the right one for Jim's car.

The conversation after the successful fix was something like this: "Since CHTs almost never go bad, what are the odds that someone would have a spare along, and the right spare too?" My answer was a line from an old hymn from the Psalter Hymnal - "God works in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform", which got an affirmation from Kevin.

There's a verse that also came to mind, and which came up again in this morning's sermon at Church of the Resurrection - Ephesians 2:10 "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."

As I was fighting with my car problems in August and wondering if I was going to have my car roadworthy in time to make the trip to the event, I often muttered to myself "why me, why now?" Well, God was preparing in advance a good work for me to do and an opportunity to share my faith.

You just can't make this stuff up.