Month: January 2019

CAR BUYING AND CLIFFORD THE BIG RED DODGE

CAR BUYING AND CLIFFORD THE BIG RED DODGE

The government is back in business which means so is the IRS! Looks like you’ll have to do that tax return after all.

Tax season is also car buying season. The annual refund, the largest chunk of cash some people see during the year, is often planned for a down payment on new wheels. I was an ASE certified technician before I was ordained. I like helping people with their cars and I really hate it when unscrupulous dealers and technicians take advantage of my friends. So, here are a few tips on lowering your cost of transportation.

Spend Smart

Financial guru Larry Burkette said, “The cheapest car you will ever own is the one you’re driving right now.” I’ve seen the exception, but the exceptions prove the rule.

The costs of owning a car will continue to rise. Borrowing money to finance a new car over many years will cost much more than the average repair bills for the same car if you keep it five to ten years after it is paid off. I’ve driven Clifford the Big Red Dodge for eleven years and 100,000 miles and, even though I no longer perform all repairs myself, he pays me to drive him now.

Cash is the best way to buy. Driving isn’t free, so why kiss off all that interest on a loan? Make car payments to yourself, even after you pay off the one you’re driving now. In five years you will be able to afford a nicer used car. If you can’t pay cash, borrow smart. Home equity loans usually have better interest rates than car loans. Military and Credit Unions are also good bets. Shop the lenders and remember most used car lots that provide their own financing make more money loaning money than they do selling cars. The interest rates are exorbitant. You don’t have to pay them if you’re willing to shop.

Shop Smart

Most private sellers have migrated to Craigslist but watch for scammers there. My two favorite sites are Autolist, which has a very usable smartphone app, and Auto Trader.

Tap the net for reliability ratings. Consumer reports.org offers a one-month subscription to its auto ratings web-site. Their reliability ratings are the best and most objective in the business. Study results for engine, transmission, brakes, and air conditioning as these are the most expensive repair items. The higher the rating, the less the car will cost to own in the long run. Also, the higher the mechanical reliability, the higher mileage car you can purchase. A ten-year-old car with 110,000 miles on the clock can cost 25% less than a six-year-old car with 90,000 miles on it, and the difference in quality and reliability is negligible. Older cars are also cheaper to insure and incur lower taxes.

Look for ‘One-Owners.’ When buying from a dealer check the CARFAX and look for one owner cars with no damage history and clean titles that come from low corrosion, low flood probability parts of the country.

The best used cars come from the best owners. A guy who bought it new and had all the maintenance done as per ‘the book’ is rare, but he is the best because he can substantiate its history. Older sellers are usually better because they drive less and can afford to take care of their cars.

Talk to the owner. The seller’s character is as much a part of the deal as the new tires he just installed. Take someone along who is a good judge of character if you aren’t. You aren’t just buying a car; you’re buying a maintenance history. After I’ve picked a make and model I shop for the guy who’s been taking care of it for me for the past six or eight years.

Run Smart

Finally, have it inspected by a competent technician. Have him provide a list of potential problems and costs. If he has any serious reservations, walk away from the deal. Also, use him for regular oil changes and ask him to keep an eye on critical systems. He will save you money and increase reliability by doing required maintenance that can be budgeted and scheduled, rather than waiting for an expensive breakdown.

You can save thousands of dollars per year on the costs of driving. You don’t have to be a mechanic, and you don’t have to drive a ‘junker’ to do it. All it takes is a little homework and a little discipline and you can enjoy a great car as well as a higher standard of living.

THE SAINTS GOT ROBBED! NFL No-calls and the Judgment of God

THE SAINTS GOT ROBBED! NFL No-calls and the Judgment of God

The Saints got robbed! Or, maybe not. It depends on your point of view.

In case you don’t care about sports or have been living under a rock, the New Orleans Saints came within a few seconds of being the NFC champions last week and going to their second Super Bowl under coach Sean Payton, and quarterback Drew Brees. They were tied 20-20 on the Rams 13 yard-line, third-down and ten to go with 1:45 left on the clock and had possession of the ball. They only needed one more first down and a chip-shot field goal to run out the clock and win. Brees threw to Tommy Lee Lewis who was hit by Rams defensive back Nickell Robey Coleman and knocked out of bounds before he could touch the ball. It was obvious pass interference, but the ref made no call. The Rams kicker tied the game with a fifty-seven-yard field goal and LA won it in overtime.

The Superdome exploded in rage and the whole sports world is still talking about it. Some fans are so upset, they are suing the NFL over the call. Maybe they shouldn’t have bet so much on the game.

New Orleans Saints Tight End, Benjamin Watson, interviewed by Fox News Laura Ingraham, said, “We as athletes have a saying: It’s an imperfect game played by imperfect people and obviously, refereed by imperfect humans … When you have a non-call at a clutch time in a game like this, that’s not how any team wants to win or lose … but we understand that life goes on and life isn’t fair.”[1]

Watson, who is an evangelical Christian, nailed the biblical worldview, not only about the NFC championship, but about football in general. One of the reasons we love football so much is that it’s a microcosm of life. The referees are imperfect, the players are imperfect, and the game is imperfect. That’s what happens in a fallen world. Rules are important, especially where player safety is concerned. But the more perfect we try to make the competition with rules and video reviews the less it will look like real life—unless you like lawyers—and the less we will like it.

What Watson said about the game is also true about life. “We as a league, the NFL, try to put forth a product that is full of integrity, something that we can be proud of. But these things happen, and the sad thing is that there is no remedy.”[2]

No matter how long God allows us to live on this earth we will be imperfect players in an imperfect game being refereed by imperfect people. We try our best to represent the perfection Jesus modeled. But we will fail, life won’t be fair, and bad things will happen. The good news is that there is Someone watching who sees everything, who is completely impartial, who never blows a call, and who will render just judgment when the game of life is over. We can make peace with injustice and unfairness because we know he will make things right in the end.

13 And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account. [3]

 17 Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear.[4]

The even better news? Christ has taken all the penalties that we deserved with him to the Cross. We—including NFL referees—are free to pursue excellence without worrying about our mistakes, yet conscious of what our sins cost him and motivated not to repeat them. Put your faith in him.

[1] https://video.foxnews.com/v/5992638275001/#sp=show-clips

[2] ibid

[3] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). (Heb 4:13). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

[4] The New International Version. (2011). (1 Pe 1:17). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

REBUILDING PEARLAND: A Day in the Life of a Samaritan’s Purse Volunteer

REBUILDING PEARLAND: A Day in the Life of a Samaritan’s Purse Volunteer

$125 Billion dollars. It’s hard to wrap your head around that number, especially when the city you are in seems to be functioning normally. But that’s the what Hurricane Harvey cost Houston, Texas when it dumped sixty-plus inches of rain on the utterly flat city over four days in August of 2017. That ties it with Hurricane Katrina as the costliest tropical cyclone on record.

Houston metro has about 6.6 million residents and Harvey damaged roughly 204,000 homes, seventy-five percent of which were outside of the 100-year flood plain.[1] Most were not covered by flood insurance. Only when you drive through the neighborhoods and see some new looking houses next to obvious rebuild sites with FEMA trailers in the driveways, others with swollen siding and water stains half way up the walls, and empty lots with camper trailers, do you begin to comprehend the scope of the damage. It’s everywhere.

That’s why Samaritan’s Purse has made a two-year, twenty-five-million-dollar commitment to the Houston area: to help homeowners rebuild. Our team of thirteen joined eleven others from Idaho, Oregon, Texas, and Georgia at SP’s Pearland, Texas base. From there we split up into four teams and traveled from ten to twenty miles to help rebuild flood-damaged homes. The base can host a total of about thirty volunteers per week and SP schedules crews at least two months out. Another indicator of the size of the disaster: SP has a similar base in Rockport, Texas three hours west of Pearland.

The day begins with lights on at 6:30 AM. Pack your lunch in the kitchen between 6:45 and 7:00, followed by a big breakfast—the food was great!— and devotions at 7:30 usually led by one of the volunteers. Crew assignments are issued at 8:00 and teams work together to load up the specially equipped construction trailers with supplies. The trailers, essentially customized fifth-wheel horse haulers, were a marvel of efficiency. SP engineers designed them one winter when work was slow and each one has a slot or shelf equipped with every tool a builder would need.

By 9:00 AM crews are on site and ready—after a brief prayer—to work. Local building codes do not allow unlicensed workers to do the technical stuff like plumbing and electrical installation, but there is plenty to do. Our crews painted, installed soffit and siding, did light carpentry, and installed flooring. SP has already helped rebuild over forty homes and helped other agencies pay for over 500 in Houston. Permitting has proved difficult with the city, but they expect to be building many new homes in the future.

Crews work until 4:00 PM before beginning clean-up and loading to head back to base. Meeting the homeowners is the highlight for most of the crews. Ours had prayer with Mrs. Williams each day before leaving. Watching the smile grow on her face as fresh paint brightened up her walls and the new flooring went down was a highlight of our trip.

Then it’s back to base for showers, supper—did I mention the food was great?—and sharing time which concludes by 7:00 PM. Crews entertain themselves (ours played a lot of Rook) till quiet time at 9:00 PM and lights out at 10:00.

If you’d like to volunteer, visit https://www.samaritanspurse.org/ and click “get involved” at the top of the page.

[1] https://www.thebalance.com/hurricane-harvey-facts-damage-costs-4150087

IT WASN’T ALWAYS THIS WAY: Why We Do Disaster Relief and Other Good Things

IT WASN’T ALWAYS THIS WAY: Why We Do Disaster Relief and Other Good Things

“If it hadn’t been for the Christians—all the churches that showed up—we’d still be mucking out,” said the man, a Casino worker in Biloxi, Mississippi. This was October 2006, a little over a year after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and much of Biloxi. A crew of about ten men from our church, partnering with Samaritan’s Purse, were in Mississippi to help a family rebuild. I had taken a break to do some man-on-the street interviews with my new video camera.

“My house didn’t get destroyed like some of my neighbors,” he said, “but it was full of mud and water up to waist high. I’m not a churchgoer, but as soon as the storm stopped this group of kids from a church showed up and asked if they could help me clean it out. I was ready to start the rebuild within a week. No way it would have happened without their help.”

That, in a nutshell, is why we’re taking a team of 13 people to Pearland, Texas, next week, to partner again with Samaritan’s Purse and help another family rebuild after Hurricane Harvey. And the thing is, no one is surprised that a small church group from Virginia is traveling on its own dime to help people in Texas. Americans just assume that is what people do, but it wasn’t always this way. That ethos came from Christianity.

Followers of Christ have, since the beginning of the church, shown up to serve when the rest of the world was headed for the hills. When a pandemic broke out in ancient Rome, Christians, including key leaders, stayed to help the sick and dying. When the plague took hundreds of thousands of lives in Europe in the middle ages, Christians stayed to serve while others fled. When the tsunami destroyed Banda Aceh, Indonesia in 2004, Christian missionaries already in country rushed to help the Muslim population there. When the Ebola epidemic hit Africa, Christian missionary doctors and nurses stayed to fight it. That service ethic, based on the individual’s value as an image-bearer of the living God and Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan, changed the world. Now, American’s just expect it.

Some people are wondering out loud these days what it would be like if we could just get rid of Christianity, or somehow limit its cultural impact. Nikolas Kristof, of the New York Times, reported in 2015 that, “In liberal circles, evangelicals constitute one of the few groups that it’s safe to mock openly.”[1]

This is especially true when Christians, who are called by God to love their neighbor as themselves and to stand for truth in all things, speak and act on their convictions regarding human sexuality, gender, marriage, abortion, and religious freedom.

But, historian and theologian Jeremiah Johnston, who along with his wife and five kids had to evacuate his home near Houston during Harvey, says, “It was the Christians, the people of faith, who immediately mobilized and invaded this city to help saying, ‘I love Jesus. I believe people are made in the image of God. We’re not going to sit here and let you suffer alone.’ I live in the most diverse county in America … but I never saw an Atheist tent anywhere, or an agnostic society tent, I never saw the ‘Free Thinkers’ helping people whose lives were destroyed. There’s a real world-view reason that is behind that.”[2]

Kristof concurs, it’s “true that there are plenty of secular doctors doing heroic work for Doctors Without Borders or Partners in Health. But I must say that a disproportionate share of the aid workers I’ve met in the wildest places over the years, long after anyone sensible had evacuated, have been evangelicals, nuns or priests.”[3]

The faith that causes Christians to serve disaster-stricken people is the same faith that causes us to provide free marriage counseling, speak up for the unborn, encourage adoption, help women with unplanned pregnancies, advocate for traditional marriage, fight porn and sex-trafficking, provide free meals, tell the truth about transgenderism, advocate for prison reform, and stand up for freedom of conscience and religion in the market place. The same Lord that calls us to serve tells us to speak truth in love to all who will hear. It’s why we do what we do

[1] nytimes.com/2015/03/29/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-a-little-respect-for-dr-foster

[2] Warren Cole Smith interview of Johnston on the Listening In podcast, December 21, 2018. See also Johnston’s book, UNIMAGINABLE: What Our World Would Be Like Without Christianity.

[3] ibid