Buying a tire
I brought my hoopdie in because it sounded like a wheel bearing was going. Jim put it up on a lift and saw that everything was fine, except for a bad tire, and he didn't charge me for his trouble.
So I called around and went to the place that had a good deal and agreed at $57 out the door. Then I heard that I'd have to wait an hour and a half, and I had to get to work, so I went elsewhere
Their price was $59 for a slightly lower quality tire, and I said fine. Then the guy proceeded to give me the 4-tire price for one tire and to knock a couple of bucks off the labor, $49 in all.
I stood there reflecting that God arranged some kindness to me, completely without my pushing back at all - in fact, probably because I didn't. The Bible says to expect this, of course, but I realized I really had no clue.
Then I realized something else that I had never seen before. Expecting nothing without my own pushback is indeed living by the sword, and that was a shocking thought. I went out of there seeing that I really have to review everything.
Dangerous as it is, there are times to use the sword, just as there is a time for morphine even with the danger of addiction. But to find my security in that in any form - that's death!
So I called around and went to the place that had a good deal and agreed at $57 out the door. Then I heard that I'd have to wait an hour and a half, and I had to get to work, so I went elsewhere
Their price was $59 for a slightly lower quality tire, and I said fine. Then the guy proceeded to give me the 4-tire price for one tire and to knock a couple of bucks off the labor, $49 in all.
I stood there reflecting that God arranged some kindness to me, completely without my pushing back at all - in fact, probably because I didn't. The Bible says to expect this, of course, but I realized I really had no clue.
Then I realized something else that I had never seen before. Expecting nothing without my own pushback is indeed living by the sword, and that was a shocking thought. I went out of there seeing that I really have to review everything.
Dangerous as it is, there are times to use the sword, just as there is a time for morphine even with the danger of addiction. But to find my security in that in any form - that's death!
posted by Peter Attwood at 12/30/2006 08:01:00 PM
7 Comments:
Excellent point about how flexible is the use of the sword and how varied. I have seen this too and now see it better. As the Scripture says, "the snare is laid in vain in the sight of any bird."
Superstitions can be super.
Really.
I am not sure that I understand your second to the last paragraph. Do you mean that when someone gives you a rally good deal on a product that you should refuse to take it?
I can imagine that a deep thinking person might come to that conclusion.
The thing is who is in a better position to know how low of a price the seller can afford to sell a product for, the seller or the buyer?
If one tire seller is offering one kind of tires at 50 dollars a piece and then the tire seller down the street starts offering them for 35 dollars a piece I think that it would be reasonable to wonder if
the second tire seller is trying to
drive the first out of business by accepting a losses for a longer period than the first seller can accept losses. By libertarian standards that is fair policy.
But should the members of a community contribute to a policy that will leave the community with only one tire seller? Would this one tire seller then be able to get better prices from the manufactures because he now orders a higher volume and would he pass these saving along to consumers?
There could be a legitimate reason that the second tire seller is selling his tires at a price 40% lower than the competition. How much responsibility must a lone consumer carry for figuring this out and what is a reasonable collective responsibility?
I imagine that one could read the Bible and come up with an answer.
Some Bible thumpers have tried to tell me that the answer to every question can be found in the Bible. The thing is the answers that they come up with often diverge from the answers that I come up with. I myself do not trust their methodology. But I also can not trust my own experience. I have access to only a small percent of the jigsaw pieces that there are.
I can not trust other peoples experience. Some of them are actually dishonest.
I declined the cheaper tire because it was going to cost me an hour and a half to get it. The experience reminded me that "Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God" are the constants it's wise to build everything else on, not other constraints such as effciencey, pleasure, security, or pain avoidance - various forms of the wisdom of this world.
These are fine as secondary values, but it's trouble when they're trump. For instance, a combination of pride, backscratching, and fear of Communism led the United States to get involved in trying to dominate Vietnam starting in about 1946, first through the French, and then on their own. Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God would have kept the American snout out of there, and the French would have been out of there in a year, because they had no money. Vietnam would have been Communist, but independent and friendly to the United States like Yugoslavia in Europe, and this would have accelerated the disintegration of monolithic Communism, just as Yugoslavia did.
None of this was easily foreseeable, although it is now obvious. But "do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God" would have forced that path, which would have been a pleasant surprise. Worldly cunning led to innumerable unpleasnt surprises.
We can't reliably foresee the consequences of most of what we do. But we can count on it that being smarter than God's advice gets us into unanticipated trouble, so that God "catches the wise in their own craftiness" regularly.
Well that is an interesting historical observation but it still leaves me wondering about your second to the last paragraph. In your last statement you repeated why you did not initially take the 57 dollar tire. Then you got a reduced price on the second tire which brought the price for the lower quality tire dwon to 49 dollars.
So I initially thought that by accepting the 49 dollar price you saw that as living by the sword.
But now based on what you just wrote today I am not at all sure what you meant. Also since you had to reconsider "it" did you reach any new conclusion?
Oh one other thing. I saw this article today that discussed a recent Supreme Court decision in the country of Slovenia. I no longer remember precisely what the topic was but the article pointed out two very interesting observations that were noted in this decision. The first was that the vast majority of people are no longer qualified to make important macro economic decisions because they no longer have any understanding of what the consequences will be to full filling their demands. The second one is that the so called experts are proving on a daily basis that they do not know any more than the masses and have risen to their level on incompetence. That the current rulers or the western world are unfit to rule becomes more clear with each passing day.
Well it is good to know that at least they know what is going on.
Being the citizens of a country with only 2 miillion people does not give them much clout though.
Reconsidering over the years has led me to want to fight less and receive more. Even Sun Tzu in The Art of War advises that to win without fighting is best.
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