Stick shifts and safety belts

One of my favorite Cake songs is "Stick shifts and Safety Belts." I love cars and songs about cars from one of my favorite bands, well it's a recipe for a hit in my book. Today during church (I am a Christian of the LDS faith, or Mormon as most people know us), I was thinking about how the Spirit of God works with us much as a car that is tuned up. When the Spirit is communicating with us, we are humming a long and in tune with God. But, just as an old carburated car, after time, our timing gets a little off. I have taken the distributor cap in my hand on a running car (my old 1975 Chevy Nova - which was my first car) and rotated it a little clockwise listening to the sound of the engine. There is a sweet spot where it would run really well. Turn it too far one way, and it would start to miss, or run rough. Turn it too far the other way, it would do the same thing. This is how you adjust the timing on a car. You loosen the distributor and rotate it slightly. The right way to do it is not by ear, though that is how most people did it, but with a timing gun. Now it's been a long time since I've done this, but from memory, you have a notch on the main pulley on the crank shaft and one on block. You mark it so it's easy to see. Then with the timing gun pointed at it, it freezes the image like a strobe light would freeze me dancing to Depeche Mode back at the Ritz dance club in Salt Lake in 1986. (Wow! That was random!) And then you adjust clockwise or counterclockwise the distributor to get the timing correct. Again, you'll hear it as well. The timing gun is connected to the battery and has a clamp that goes around spark plug #1. As you know, I didn't continue my career as a mechanic, so my knowledge is really basic, but you get the idea. So over time, cars need to adjust the timing. New cars do this through on board computers. We, like these great cars, need to be fine tuned very often or our timing gets off and we find it hard to be in tune with the Spirit of the Lord.

What we do to get in tune withe the Spirit is a little different than what we do to get the car in tune. We need daily personal prayer with our Heavenly Father. We need to feast upon the words of Christ by reading in the scriptures. (by scriptures I believe in both the Bible and Book of Mormon.) We need to repent of our sins and follow Christ. This is a constant process because on a daily basis the world draws our thoughts and actions away from the Lord. We get our minds filled with junk, some good, but just not important, and some things that are just bad. If we don't tune ourselves often, we lose the Spirit, and God finds it hard to communicate with us. When doing a tune up on my own car back at Hillcrest High School, in auto shop, I took out the six spark plugs in my 1975 Nova, (straight six) and saw a lot of carbon build up on each plug. My teacher showed me how to clean and gap each spark plug. The carbon build up was just what happened while driving the car. The car would not run properly with all the build up because the spark plug could not spark properly - the whole idea behind the internal combustion engine. Again, things change. 1. Nobody wastes time cleaning and gapping spark plugs now days. You just buy new ones. 2. If you are like me, you just have the dealer or your trusted mechanic do it, because the cars are complicated computer driven machines now and you don't want to mess anything up.

Well, this has been a more spiritual post, but as this blog is not endorsed by my company, this is purely Jason Bringhurst speaking here. And after all, my religion is part of who I am and does make up some of the basic philosophies of our company culture. We strive to be an honest good company, which in turn makes both our suppliers and customers want to do business with us. They like doing business with us because we are fair, understanding and honest. There ain't nothing wrong with that. It's just good business practice. In the words of Joseph Smith, "We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul—We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things."

Until next time -
Jason Bringhurst
The Cable Guy
http://www.professionalcable.com/