Getting the Voodoo Out of My Car

By Peter Bauer

I drive a 2000 Jeep Cherokee Sport. It’s black and it has over 283,000 miles on it. It has been a very dependable vehicle until about the last two years. I don’t know, but I think it’s possessed. There are times for no predictable reason the engine light will come on and then there have been several occasions when the odometer will flat line out and read “No bus” and sometimes even when the speedometer and RPM gauge will bounce back and forth. I have taken this car into be “repaired” several times and yet the peculiar problems continue.

The latest incident was this morning. I was leaving my apartment at Fort McPherson, and I had on NPR. Garrison Keillor ( bless his heart, I hope he recovers completely from the minor stroke ) was doing a piece on the 10th anniversary of President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewisnsky. Garrison stated “Bill Clinton did a terrible thing,” but then he added, “Kenneth Starr has spent millions of dollars in investigation costs, and what has resulted resembles a Harold Robbins novel.” I chuckled as I heard this and then I heard Garrison Keillor mention Monica Lewinsky’s friendship with Linda Tripp.

Ah yes, all of those names and all of those scenes from 10 years ago were coming back to me.

At this point, I looked down at my speedometer and it read “ No bus.” Was my car reacting to the retelling of this steamy, torrid story involving a former president and a White House intern ? Was this just too much for this 10-year-old car to hear ?

This morning at church and during the Christian Education hour, I thought a lot about justice. We have become so desensitized as a nation and society to all of the suffering that is around us. It’s pathetic that we now react with “good news” that there are only nine million children dying of starvation in the world.

Yes, justice means that we have to be intentional; we have to repair what has gone wrong. We have to do beyond the dispensation that we are forgiven and we actually have to do something. When Jesus heals Jairius’ daughter and the girl revives, it’s interesting that the first thing he says to her family is to get her something to eat.

We come to church to worship but we also come to church to be fed on the Word of God as well as to experience life in the spirit of God and in Christian community. This becomes the medicine that helps either to inoculate or heal and disintegrate the “voodoo” that affects our lives and our world.

I am still going to try and get my car well. A friend of mine at work recently gave me a Kleenex box cover. He picked it up in New Orleans and the cover has the logo of a Louisiana license plate, with white back ground and red lettering with Louisiana at the top and Sportsman Paradise at the bottom.

But the blue letter on the plate reads “ VOODOO.”

I am fond of saying at work when anything goes awry, “Get the Voodoo out.”

I hope I can get the voodoo out of my car.