"I'm as pure as the driven slush." - Tallulah Bankhead

At 4:00 p.m. the temp was 110 F, but it's a dry heat so the "feels like" was only 105 F. And that feels just fine.
Or not.

I worked in the garage all morning and by noon this was the result. The engine is naked and loaded in the back of the Kia ready for the shop. I found a guy who has an excellent rep on The Samba and is only 30 minutes away. The rap on Steve is that he's always busy and you should figure on waiting to get your engine back, but that the wait is worth it. The price quote from each of the three shops was pretty much the same so I guess I should accept it as a reasonable reality. Tomorrow morning I'll deliver the engine to Steve and wait to hear if it needs a total rebuild or if it can just get minor "freshening."

Pam thinks I should get one of these stickers for the window when it's all done. I may have to do that. I also saw a sticker that said, "The Original Smart Car."

While the engine and body are out I'll work on some of the pieces I took off, getting them ready for reinstallation. In some cases that means a thorough cleaning. Other parts need to be sanded down and repainted with spray paint.

I found this video fascinating and somehow sad at the same time. Is assembly line work still this mind numbing?

Necessarily Messy
The Arab spring has rolled through all but the last corners of Libya. With the exception of NATO air support (and that's been significant) this was an indigenous uprising. Same in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and Yemen. We still don't know how these popular revolutions will turn out. They may move from brutal dictator or monarch to bloody anarchy. At the very least it will take them decades and maybe generations to become stable democracies. They don't have a tradition of democracy but many of them have longstanding tribal conflicts, never mind the influences of Muslim extremists.

It will be messy but it will be their messy, and they'll own the outcomes. Instead of regime change where outsiders say, "We know what's best and we'll impose our vision on your culture through the use of force" they'll stumble and fumble through to their own vision. Hey, they may fail and fall under another, even worse oppression. Several African countries have been through that cycle. But if we're going to respect their dignity and if we want them to have a lasting democracy it has to be theirs from beginning to end.

The reason I find this so significant is because of what it says about missions.

There is one key difference: the gospel has to be taken to those who have not heard it. That initial presentation of God's love and grace through Christ is foreign to all of us, and those who have received have an obligation to share. But the goal of missions is indigenous churches. Indiginaeity necessarily requires some messiness. Instead of the patronizing and endless rule of missionaries the biblical pattern requires that we turn the ministry over to the nationals. It can be very difficult for those who have sacrificed everything to take the gospel to an unreached people to then stand by and watch them stumble and fumble and sometimes fail to turn that into an indigenous church. Note: the NT pattern certainly includes instruction and direction. But Paul left town, typically after just a few months. He wrote letters back giving them guidance on how the church should work, but in the end it was theirs to get right or wrong. Some of them got it very wrong and failed within the first few generations. But others flourished, and our status as the children of God is testament to their faithfulness.

Pathway Bible Church supports Geoff and Shannon Husa who are working with the Mibu in Papau New Guinea, a tribal group that had never heard about God before the Husas and the Tattaglias arrived. A people so remote that they can only be reached by helicopter are now in the process of establishing their own church. Geoff is busy translating the Bible so that when they leave in just a few years the Mibu will be equipped to carry on and spread the gospel to neighboring villages (a process they've already begun). The Tattaglias have left for other ministries, so the believers in the village are on their own with very minimal guidance from Geoff as they learn to put together a NT church. (He's translating 1 Timothy with its valuable instruction on the local church.)

Geoff tells us it sometimes gets kind of messy. They've never had anything like a church in their village before, with the elements the NT prescribes, and they stumble some. That's good. Like a toddler needs to fall the Mibu need to struggle.

Regime change isn't just bad policy, it's counterproductive. Colonialism in missions is the same.
Sometimes messy is good.