The Engine That Never Turned Over

Every autumn in Rochester, Minnesota, old Mr. Halverson would spend three weekends detailing his 1967 Chevrolet Camaro. He buffed the cherry-red paint until it gleamed. He conditioned the leather seats. He polished the chrome until you could see your reflection from across the driveway. Neighbors would stop and admire it, and Halverson would beam with pride. But here was the thing everyone on Elm Street knew — that Camaro hadn't started in eleven years. The engine was seized. The fuel lines were cracked. The battery was long dead. For all its beauty, that car could not do the one thing a car is made to do: move.

A mechanic friend once offered to rebuild the engine for free. Halverson waved him off. "She looks perfect just the way she is," he said.

James would have understood that old Camaro. "Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead," he writes in chapter 2, verse 17. Not weak. Not sleeping. Dead — like an engine that will never fire. A faith that looks polished on Sunday morning but never moves us toward the hungry, the lonely, or the stranger is a faith that has seized up from the inside. It may gleam under the lights, but it cannot carry anyone anywhere. The Almighty did not save us to sit in the driveway. He saved us to run.