Misplaced Sorrow?

I have been rather astounded this week and how attached I can become to certain inanimate objects.

My car died this week. The power steering is, for all practical purposes, gone. It is technically fixable, but my family doesn't really want to put that much more money into a minivan with almost 140,000 miles on it.

Those of you who know me well can probably guess that I was pretty devastated when it happened. I love that car. It's an 1998 Ford Windstar Limited . . . a pretty nice looking minivan (though it only has one back door . . . a characteristic that made my car exceedingly ghetto in the eyes of the kids I nannied last summer). It's the car I've driven since I got my permit. I've driven very few other cars . . . I've avoided it as much as possible. The Beast, as I've affectionately called it for years now (Becky the Beast, actually), has a character all its own. There's a short in both turn signals that occasionally causes them to buzz before actually turning on. The engine was pretty powerful for a minivan, and because of its rather advanced age, it absolutely roars when accelerating even a little bit. There are a few scuffs on some of the corners (learning experiences that, thankfully, haven't been repeated), and there's rust around one of the rear wheel-wells and under the gas cap, and there are two holes in the back bumper (recent installments . . . the result of me getting rear-ended just after school started).

I know just about every dent in the car. I can tell you where about half of them came from. I can tell you that the car pulls to the left no matter how many times the tires are realigned. I can tell you that on a good day, until the power steering went out, the car could handle going 80 down the freeway without any trouble. The fastest I ever got the car to go was 90 . . . I slowed down when I smelled something burning, and never saw any other negative results of that 5-second rush. :)

I just loved driving the Beast. I'd go get myself lost out in the middle of nowhere and just drive, perfectly content.

My car's been with me to hell and back. It's always been my place of safety . . . whenever I've needed to get away from everything, whenever I've just needed somewhere to be alone to think or pray or cry, I've hidden in my car. Thinking back on how many accidents I've probably narrowly avoided (the whole driving and crying thing doesn't work very well), I'm beginning to think that the Beast has been my inanimate guardian angel for the past few years.

I had to say goodbye to the Beast this afternoon.

I cried.

The whole time I kept trying to tell myself that it was just a car . . . that I shouldn't be so upset. After all, God has been faithful and has provided a "new" minivan (new being very relative . . . this one has just over 117k miles on it), so I still have a car that I can feel comfortable driving. And yet . . . part of me still feels like I lost a close friend today.

And it's making me wonder how my life would be different if I cared about the fate of people as much as I cared about my car.

I mean, really . . . we're donating the Beast to Courage Center (since it will be perfectly drivable once the power steering is replaced), so it's not really dying. I'm just not going to be able to see it anymore. But I have friends who are spiritually dead . . . friends who, if they died tomorrow, I would lose for all eternity. However . . . I can't remember the last time that made me cry.

I'm thinking there's something wrong with this picture.