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<\/a><\/div>\nAllison recently wrote a good post about soccer and sports<\/a>. I want to be clear: This is not a rebuttal to her post.<\/em> I agree with much of what she had to say in that post, and with many of the comments as well. But forget sports, school work, home work, our careers, our relationships, our involvement in society, our intelligence, our physical gifts or impediments for a second. None of it matters unless our love of Christ is the center of our existence. For as Qoheleth says in Ecclesiastes, all is vanity. However, when we are Christ centered people, then everything matters. You may remember from an earlier post<\/a> that I hinted that I am a gearhead<\/a><\/em>. I willfully dismantled a perfectly good engine in my Mustang in an effort to make it better, stronger, faster. I did this before I became a Catholic. I have always had an interest in motors, engines, airplanes, trucks, etc. I was just born with this attraction and with mechanical ability. So, new exhaust manifolds, intake manifold, cylinder heads, fuel injectors, camshaft\u2014all were removed and replaced in my driveway with hand tools and moxie back in 1999.<\/p>\n Just to see if I still could, I swapped the cylinder heads on the motor again in 2002 (after my near brush with death). And actually, I had blown a head gasket and took\u00a0that incident\u00a0as an opportunity to\u00a0add ported and polished heads.\u00a0 That is an example of clear, focused, gearhead thinking for you. In 2005, I drove this car\u00a02100 miles\u00a0across the country from California to our new home. She is a runner and one spirited pony. And none of this matters for my salvation. That is, until it did.<\/p>\n A\u00a0few months after our move, she (cars are feminine) broke down and I couldn\u2019t figure out the problem. I started her up one day and she was running really rough. I opened the hood, checked the spark-plug wires, fuel injectors, sensors, etc. All was fine. But still, the motor had a wicked shimmy and was seemingly trying to tear herself off the motor mounts. Have I lost you with all the gearhead jargon? Sorry. Long story short, I put the pony to pasture for a while because I was busy with other chores, like building a stair-case<\/a> and contemplating swimming the Tiber.<\/p>\n Eventually (over a year later) I finished the home improvement projects and decided to tackle the engine problem again. Knowing my limitations though, I took it to a professional. I learned early on that throwing money and personal labor at problems a professional can diagnose quicker and cheaper is silly. The problem? The harmonic balancer was slipping off the crankshaft key.<\/p>\n The balancer is a big counterweight that dampens the vibrations in the mechanical workings of an internal combustion engine. It probably went a little off kilter when I swapped the camshaft, and eventually it manifested itself as\u00a0a wicked shimmy. See this photograph? The balancer is that thingy that looks like a wheel on the end of the crankshaft. Without the balancer, centered perfectly on the crankshaft, the engine will tear itself apart. With the balancer in place, the engine will run smoothly.<\/p>\n At the time my car\u2019s motor broke, I was wrestling with my practice of Christianity. I knew that up to this time in my life, Christ definitely had not been the center of my existence. I had pushed him way out on the periphery. Of course, by doing that, the big counterweight that should have been my center was removed. Thus all the other moving parts in my life were vying for the central position. As a result, I was running as rough as my Mustang motor had been with the broken balancer. So this idea popped into my gearhead\u2013Joe Sixpack mind: Christ is our harmonic balancer.<\/p>\n
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