The Parable of the Car

One day while teaching, Josh was asked, ”Teacher, how long is too long?”

Josh spoke thus:

A car was about to turn over 200,000 miles on its odometer.  The owner of the car needed to replace several very expensive parts on the car, and the car’s value would be nowhere near the cost fixing it.
“What price can one put on love?” the owner of the car said to the car as it sat broken in the car owner’s driveway, “You are like a part of my family.  You are, in fact, my family.”
The owner of the car knew that the car would not reply to what the owner of the car said.  The owner of the car knew that the car was an inanimate object.  The owner of the car knew that the car did not hear or listen to the owner of the car.  Yet the owner of the car still spoke to the car.
“We’ve been through so much together, you and I,” the owner of the car said to the car, “Two-hundred thousand miles of so much together.  I haven’t spent two-hundred thousand miles with anybody but you, and you have never complained.”
The owner of the car knew that this statement was not accurate.  The car had indeed complained. When the left front bearing on the car began to let go, the car had made a tremendous noise, and the left front of the car had vibrated terribly.  When the muffler and exhaust pipe corroded, the car had thundered.  The car squealed to a frightening degree when its fan belt stretched to loose, and the car had shuddered violently when its brake rotors had warped.
These were small and rare complaints, however.  The car had never complained that it was left home alone on a Saturday night.  The car had never complained that it had to carry groceries, had to carry lumber, had to carry countless objects, many too large for the car but somehow carried by the car.  The car had never wanted to be cuddled, the car had never wanted to be coddled.
But the owner of the car did coddle the car.  The owner of the car washed and waxed the car.  The owner of the car vacuumed the car’s interior, polished its chrome, protected its plastics, changed its oil and other liquids.  These simple acts of maintenance were more then maintenance to the owner of the car.  To the owner of the car these were acts of love.  It was the one requited love of the life of the owner of the car.
“Let me know how much it costs,” the owner of the car said to the service mechanic writing the repair estimate, “This car is the love of my life.”
“It’s throwing money away,” the service mechanic said.
“That’s better than throwing away a life,” the owner of the car said.
“It’s your money, it’s your life,” the service mechanic said.
“It’s our life,” the owner of the car said.