Hand-Selected
The best rat rods are more than the sum of their parts, but the sum of their parts had better be pretty spectacular anyway. Maybe a frame from a 1947 Studebaker M5 pickup, with a nice and easy Chevy 327/TH350 powertrain. That’s a good start. Then some distinctive turn signals, like from a 1949 Nash Ambassador Custom Airflite, something really unusual like a 1965 Daimler hood ornament or a tarnished chrome horn from a 1930s Lagonda, and an interior mostly made out of old license plates and corrugated steel. Bonus points for a Buick Autronic eye, or maybe a siren lifted from a Mack firetruck. Mount some whitewalls on it, get your tetanus shot, and have a good day.
These parts couldn’t have come together by accident. No tornado in a junkyard could have assembled this, and no one working for any of those car companies – Studebaker, Chevy, Nash, Daimler, Lagonda, Buick, Mack – could have imagined that their parts would end up welded together in a drivable vehicle. It’s just wild to think about.
God could have imagined it, though. In fact, an all-knowing God isn’t surprised by much. But imagine him delighting in seeing the pieces come together.
God’s delight was obvious when Jesus interacted with the “woman at the well” (John 4). Jesus was traveling to Galilee and chose to go through Samaria, a region so reviled that most people crossed a river twice to avoid it. He stopped in Sychar, a town believed by some to have a demonic presence. He sat down by the well, and because Jesus knew what would happen next, he waited for someone who would have a conversation with him that would change countless lives for the remainder of history.
The woman came to draw water at noon, the heat of the day, because she was a social outcast. She didn’t directly answer Jesus’ first question because she knew that associating with a Jew was unthinkable for someone as lowly as her. She was ashamed of her past, and she wore shame from her past like a permanent mask. She viewed herself as the sum of her broken, mismatched, tarnished parts of her life. She was a rolling wreck.
But God viewed her differently. He was watching over her during every painful chapter of her life, piecing her together and keeping her rolling along the way because he knew she had a purpose.
Imagine God watching her suffer, hearing her desperation, and feeling the heartache she felt. God feels emotions, and grieves when people feel grief. Yet he also knows that the pain doesn’t mark the end of the story, but the next step in life’s journey toward restoration to him. When the Samaritan woman was rejected by her peers and had to learn how to fend for herself, God knew that the generosity and free gift of living water offered by Jesus would be especially sweet to her. When she felt the sting of inferiority after being denied the chance to even worship with people who thought they were cleaner than her, God knew that her story would inspire people for generations to come to make their churches more welcoming and accepting. When she suffered through each of her five painful separations from her past husbands, God knew that her resilience would translate into excellent evangelism skills, as she took this message to “many of the Samaritans from that town,” who “believed in [Jesus] because of the woman’s testimony” (John 4:39).
Sometimes you may feel mismatched and filthy. But to God, you’re handmade with a purpose. Maybe that’s why car folks are drawn to rat rods – the process of trial and error, frustration and failure is inherent in any car project. That’s definitely why the Samaritan woman was so drawn to the restoration Jesus offered. As author and evangelist Anne Graham Lotz once said, “Like a rose whose fragrance is sweetest when it’s crushed, the fragrance of Christ is made sweeter in our lives by affliction.”
No rat rod is ever truly finished. It takes courage to bring one to a car show and reveal the work in progress. Maybe seeing that honest incompletion is the inspiration someone needs to lay themselves, and all their tarnished parts, at the foot of the cross and see how God is already restoring them to become a new creation.
