Pumping Gas: Lessons Learned in Changing Seasons

When I was a senior, I didn’t know how to put gas in my car.

I kind of can’t believe I just admitted that because, well, I WAS A SENIOR.  And I really don’t have a good excuse for this lack of knowledge during this stage in my life except that my dad kept the car filled all the time.  Each week he’d take it out, put gas in it, and check to see if their were any issues with the vehicle.

My sweet and thoughtful dad.

But for heaven’s sake, he should have made sure I knew how to put in a tank of gas.  Parents, lest you find yourselves deciding to do something sweet and thoughtful, like continuously filling up your seniors car, allow me to share why you should reconsider:

I was leaving my piano teacher’s house early one morning to head to school.  A sense of dread swept over me when I turned on the ignition and realized my tank was empty. Initially, the dread was not due to the fact that I didn’t know how to fill up my car,  but it was because I didn’t have any money to do it.   No cell phones, no Siris, it was just me and my empty gas tank, slightly panicking, until I remembered I had lunch money.

Folks, I had $2.50 in quarters.  I figured it would at least be enough to get me to school, so I made my way to a nearby gas station, got out of the car, and looked at the directions.

Did you even know there are directions on the pumps?  There are.  For people like me.

I decided to pay first, so I brought my quarters into the station, told the employee I needed gas, and put my 10 quarters on the counter.  After confirming that I only wanted to put in $2.50 worth of gas, he asked me which pump.  I had no idea what in the world he was talking about, so I pointed and said something along the lines of, “that car.”

Again I found myself a little nervous.   My concern still wasn’t about filling up the car; besides, I had directions on the pump.  No, no.  I was nervous about what I was going to eat for lunch.

There were certain priorities I had as a senior.  Getting to school with a full tank of gas wasn’t one of them.  Eating lunch, however, was a priority.

I reviewed the directions, took the cap off , and put the pump in.  Who knew it had to be pushed in all the way?  I did not.  I barely set it on the edge of the tank, and when I pressed the pump, gas literally poured out onto my jeans and my boots.  And lest you’re imagining a few drops, let me clarify.  My pants were WET with gasoline and my shoes were essentially standing in a puddle of it.  I easily wasted at least one of those quarters on my clothes.

I reviewed the directions for dumb people and figured out that the pump needed to be pushed in completely.  And so the $2.25 was put in my tank, and I felt a small sense of accomplishment.

This sense didn’t last long.  In fact, on that short drive to school, I think I lost all of my senses.  The smell of gas was so strong that I became pretty queasy…and senseless.  And so, a new anxiety:  forget having to fill up a tank and skip lunch altogether, I was worried about going to school and smelling like gas.

Since I was as brilliant as you can imagine as a seventeen year old, I went immediately to the locker room when I arrived at school, figuring I could scrub out the smell.

Just in case you ever wondered, you can’t scrub out the smell of gasoline.

In fact, within minutes of my scrubbing process, I overheard some girls in the stalls asking each other if they smelled gas?  Do you smell that?  It reeks like gas!  

And then they came out of the stall and stared at me with my boots in the sink.   Any kind of cool factor that seniors have went totally and completely out the window in that moment.  But I thought I had taken care of the smell, generally speaking.  In actuality, though, I was just becoming somewhat used to it.  Apparently, it was still ridiculously potent.

And I discovered this in first hour.  Because in first hour, the students started fake gaging and holding their noses while moving to the back side of the room.  As an educator, what happened next was simultaneously awesome and ridiculous.

The teacher asked where on earth that smell was coming from. It was a rhetorical question because at this point, every student was in the back of the room except for me.  I was in the front row, to be exact.  The source of the smell was just a little bit obvious, so the teacher then asked a very legitimate question:

What Happened? 

And I lied.  Yes, folks.  I lied.  Because for the love of filling up cars.  Would you have admitted as a senior that you didn’t know how to fill a tank of gas and so it squirted out on you thus wasting one of your precious quarters of lunch money? 

I think not.

And so I told her I accidentally stepped in a big puddle of gasoline.

“So, then give me your shoes.”  

I have no idea what I said….if I even said anything….but I do remember promptly removing my boots and setting them next to the teacher’s desk.  But that wasn’t what the teacher had in mind.  Of course not.  My shoes stunk.  And so instead, the teacher took my boots and threw them out the window.

Duh.

Admittedly, that may have been the only solution to the problem.  It just, well, you know, threw me off guard a little.

But I still smelled.  The scrubbing didn’t take it out of my pants, and, well, those couldn’t go out the window too, so a friend, who lived next door to the school, brought me the keys to her house generously offering her closet so I could change my clothes.

Her parents weren’t home, she made clear, so it was totally fine to just unlock the front door and go in.

Barefoot, I got in my car, still reeking like gas, and drove to my friend’s house.  As instructed, I unlocked the front door, walked in, and immediately saw her parents having breakfast at the kitchen table.

I stood in front of my friend’s parents, in their house, at their kitchen table, barefoot, and smelling very strongly like gas.

I mean, it’s a wonder I don’t need counseling from this whole incident.  Or maybe I do.  Or maybe those parents do.   I’m not entirely sure.  All I know is that I really didn’t know how to explain why I was standing in their kitchen.  And so, I awkwardly tried to recap my morning with as few details as possible.

And instead of probing, the mom merely offered me some yogurt.

It seemed like such an appropriate offer at the time, but I cannot stop laughing thinking back on those brief moments and her yogurt offer.  They were likely horrified, for so many different reasons, and yogurt probably seemed like a natural thing to offer a barefooted, gasoline smelling teenager who had freely walked into their house during school hours.

Rejecting the yogurt offer, I made my way to my friend’s closet and realized quickly that her clothes were about three times smaller than I was.  I tried to find an outfit that would work for nearly thirty minutes.  The skirt and shirt I walked out in kind of worked, but my only shoe option (because of my larger feet) was the basketball high tops in the back of my car.

It was a winner of a senior day. And my outfit made it that much better.  Let me tell you.

My parents ended up throwing away the boots.  They couldn’t get the smell out, and I was really OK with that decision because some artifacts are just best to not keep around.

I sat in my room that night and had a good cry.  This may not seem like a big surprise after, oh, getting my shoes thrown out the window by the teacher, but I wasn’t crying only about the bad day.  Tears flowed as I began to anticipate all the change ahead of me as a senior in high school.   It was the first time I became truly anxious about the change that was inevitable in my near future.

After retelling the story to my dad (yogurt offer and all), I went on to explain my deeper anxiety:   if I can’t fill up a tank of gas, how am I going to know how to get around college on my own?  How am I going make it without your help?  How am I going to figure out how to use the washing machines in the dorms? (yes, this was a fear).  I had legitimate fear of these changes.  I was excited, yes, but I was anxious.  My dad, who was always very to the point with his advice, simply said, “You just have to trust Jesus.”  

I have never been good with change.  And as suspected, I struggled the first semester of college trying to sort through the various adjustments I had to contend with at that point in my life.  I often found quiet solace in the midst of my anxiety in the chapel at Covenant College.  There were many late, quiet nights when I’d sit at the chapel’s piano and play.  With tears in my eyes because of homesickness, I’d let the deep truths of old hymns penetrate my soul while remembering my dad’s advice to “just trust Jesus.”

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the various ways I tend to respond to change.   Most of the time, change is just hard.  It’s often exciting and good, but it doesn’t come without at least some trepidation.  Whether it’s a new job, a kid who just keeps growing up (why do they do this?), the start of a new school, moving to a new place,  an impending marriage, a new addition to the family, or dropping off a child at college, there is no doubt that change can be tough.   Sometimes it’s sobbing tears kind of tough.

I’ve had a few of these sobbing moments of late thinking about the change in my own kiddos.  My youngest is slowly but surely loosing her squeaky voice (it’s really the worst when that happens), my son is not needing me like he used to, and my oldest is starting high school. As I’ve watched friends go through the child-rearing process, I’m all too aware of how quickly these last four years go.  My struggle has been finding the good and the happy in the change.   I’ve been kicking myself while trying to pull it together and buck up!  My tears seem ridiculous at times.

But they’re not.  There is a time and a place to mourn all the change that occurs in our lives.  And why wouldn’t we?  Change  disrupts the many good things that we hold dear.  As Scotty Smith puts it, “Precious things don’t become vintage things overnight.”  The process of adjusting doesn’t happen in an easy or perfect way, and it never will in this life.  And to not mourn the change around us would mean, in part, that we are not fully appreciating the good blessings that the Lord has placed in our lives.

But the mourning can’t be indefinite.  It’s easy to respond to change in the way that my youngest did when her Ya-Ya died:  “Mom, just leave me alone and let me watch Netflix under my covers.”  I so get it.  When things are unpredictable, sometimes I just want to push it all aside, crawl under my covers, let the tears flow, and watch Netflix.  Maybe I would add some ice cream.   But the need for predictability can become an idol if we allow ourselves to focus for too long on what used to be, try to predict with anxiety what could have been, and not relish in what is right now.

The answer in responding to change is neither to conjure up enough strength in order to push away the deep emotions that it often brings.  It’s not always about finding the good in the change, but instead, it’s about finding the good hand of God in the midst of it.

There is not one thing that catches Jesus off guard.  Ever.  I can look back and rehearse all the various ways the Lord has been steadfast and good in the changes in my life.  From college, to marriage, to different jobs and children, even the death of parents (and so much change in between), there were tangible ways that I felt His presence when I abandoned the need to control my circumstances, opened my tight-fisted hands, and with an often tear-stained face reached out and offered my full trust in the one who ordained the circumstances I was in.  The songs of my past, both major and minor, are full of God’s faithfulness from one line to the next. I just need to remember to sing them.

I noticed my youngest struggling after the first week of school, missing some aspects from the previous year.  So, I asked her if she thought change was hard.

Nope.  

Why not?

Mom, because I trust Jesus.   I had two immediate thoughts:  first, man, I was grateful to see that the Lord was growing her from the need for Netflix to the need for Him.  And second, I considered how much work we still had ahead of us with this feisty eight year old.  She answered with her teenage-like attitude, rolling her eyes like my question had nothing but an obvious answer.  I was even waiting for the “duh, Mom.”  Maybe I won’t teach her how to pump her own gas.

Kidding.  Kind of.

But my heart was still stirred by her response.  Just trust Jesus, Katie.  I don’t have to wait to relinquish myself to him until my eyes are dry and I have it all together.  Not at all.  Through the tears, through the joy, through the change from one season to the next…  Just trust Jesus.  

When I thought, ‘My foot slips,’ your steadfast love, O Lord help me up.  When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul. 

Psalm 94:18-19