Audience of One

Car miracle

For a long time we owned one car, and there was no chance of me learning to drive on it. My dad needs a large car boot for carrying around displays as part of his job as a charity director. As a result, our car is quite large, and therefore expensive to insure. As a teenage male I am particularly expensive to insure (in fact, the only people with bigger premiums are teenage males, having passed their tests, who have then been involved in accidents that are their own fault and are re-learning after being disqualified).

My only hope at learning to drive was for us to get a second car with a smaller engine, so that we could afford the insurance. The second car would have to be a manual, not automatic (obviously – no-one drives automatics in the UK), and cheap enough to buy.

One out of two wasn’t bad, but wasn’t enough. American friends of ours who owned an automatic were returning to Michigan. They kindly gave us their car free of charge. It’s such a pity it was useless to me learning, as it was an automatic. (Having learnt to drive on an automatic in the US, this couple couldn’t legally drive a manual.)

So, almost there but not quite. My parents decided to sell the car (which wouldn’t get much) and buy one that I could learn on (and my mum could use while my dad was driving around the country). Where to find one cheap enough though? A couple of days later, we got not one but two offers of cars for sale.

In a period of about three weeks I went from having no idea of when I’d be able to learn to drive, to having a car arriving in the near future. I rushed to get my provisional licence, and a couple of weeks after the car arrived (a small Peugeot) I had my first drive.

Today I’m having my third driving lesson with my dad. A couple of months ago I was expecting this to be happening within three or four years if I was lucky. Then just as my parents and I collectively realised that I should probably start learning now if I was going to learn ever, everything started slotting into place and we now have a second car. We sold the automatic today (thank goodness – not only will my bike be easier to get out but we look far less North Oxfordy now with only two cars instead of three in the drive), after a friend who really needed a car heard we were selling after two weeks of no bites on a newspaper advert. Everything working out, everything falling into place… amazing what God can do, really. You can shout co-incidence all you like. All I know is that co-incidences seem to happen to praying Christians at a much higher rate than to others.

Matthew @ 16:56, June 11, 2005 to Diary | Comments (8)