Bob Barker Says...

It's a New Car!
Okay-- it is not new, but it is the newest car we have ever owned and it is new to us. Here's the story.

We have been talking about what we are going to do about the car situation with us going to Las Vegas this summer. I was really not comfortable with going down to a city where we don't really know anyone and then leaving Jenny alone with two kids and no car all day.

We have been batting different ideas back and forth for a couple of months, and we finally settled on the idea of a CUV or something similar that would accommodate all of us plus one or two, but wouldn't cost a fortune or get the kind of atrocious mileage that most minivans and SUVs get. We also decided that we would wait until we got our taxes filed and take what we could get from our return and what we needed from our savings so that we could put a reasonable down payment on a new vehicle.

Being the car nerd that I am, I looked around and found the Mazda5, which is basically a mini-minivan based on the Volvo S40/Mazda 3 architecture. It is a little bit funky looking, but it is also compact, lightweight, seats 6, and has a 153-hp all-aluminum inline 4 that does the job and still returns up to 28mpg.

Anydangway, we had decided that we would start looking as soon as we got our return back, and on Wednesday, I found an '06 with only 16,500 miles on it that was right where we wanted it in terms of price, features and even had the 5-speed manual transmission instead of the 4-speed slushbox. (Lemme think. More Zoom, Better mileage, less money, more fun to drive... that was an easy choice). By Friday night we had it parked in our lot--things sometimes happen much quicker than you think that they will!


I called Ian when I was on my way home with it and told him that I was coming with his new car, so he was watching out the window. I pulled up and he said, "that's not Ian's car!" He has bonded with it pretty quickly, though. He sits up higher and has a big side window out of which to look at the world-- both improvements over our Legacy.

On that note, I just have to mention something. This is the sixth car I have purchased since I got home from my mission in September of 2001, and something odd has happened with all of them. Every time we have gone to buy a new car, we have sat down and tried to think of what we wanted and needed and what we could afford. We have prayed about it and tried to decide whether the time was right to spend the money or whether we needed to wait (incidentally, there have been a couple of times when we have felt that we needed to wait and we have done nothing). Every time that we have spent the time to decide what we wanted, needed and could afford, taken the decision to the Lord and felt that it was time to go forward, we have always found exactly what we wanted at the price that we needed and things have happened very quickly. And we have yet to have a lemon. We are very blessed.

One more thing. My Dad tells a story about how he really gained a testimony of tithing, and it involves his paying his tithing and then finding the exact fishing pole that he had been saving for (but could not afford because he had paid a full tithe) at less than 1/4th its normal price. One of the things that he took away from that experience is that the Lord knows and understands us-- and speaks to each of us in ways that are personally meaningful. For my Dad, it was a fishing pole- something which would probably not get my attention the way that it did his.

Those of you who know me-- even a little bit--know that if you want to get my attention, you should talk to me about cars (or submarines). I can't help but think that our experiences with cars are not coincidental, that the Lord answers our prayers while he knows that I am paying attention. If any of you have experiences where you feel that your prayers are answered in ways that are significant to you individually, we would love to hear about them. You know where the comments are.