The Trailer

My last post described how my friend Mike and I became roadies for all the equipment required by our church’s new seeker sensitive format. The only feeble resistance we offered to these new roles was to note that neither of us had a vehicle capable of pulling a trailer loaded with approximately 7,500 pounds of Christian gear.

“I’ve already taken care of that,” Pastor John assured us. “Phil is going to loan you his truck on Sundays.” This was definitely a case of a situation going from bad to worse. Phil was a fellow seminary student and a great guy, but the last time I had seen a truck like his, it was up on blocks in front of a double-wide trailer. The ancient GMC appeared to have been red at one time, though it was difficult to say for sure. Lumbering along on bald tires, it rattled, coughed, and belched thick smoke from every orifice. The thought of tooling around swank Marin in such a monstrosity was galling, though I was comforted by the fact that it only started about half the time.

For the next several months, a grim pattern unfolded for Mike and me on Sundays. Rising early, we would hoof it over to Phil’s place to get his truck. After starting the beast and letting it warm up for several minutes, we then chugged to a seldom-used parking lot on campus where the trailer was stored. Reluctant to shut the truck off lest it never reawaken, we were forced to grapple with the trailer hook-up while breathing clouds of noxious exhaust fumes.

Once at the elementary school, Mike and I were met by the remaining members of the “Set-up Team” and spent the next 90 minutes unloading and setting up equipment in the worship area and children’s classes. Bathed in sweat, we quickly pulled on fresh T-shirts before the service began and found seats near the back. There we scanned the crowd for new faces to convince ourselves that our efforts were bearing fruit, then settled in for John’s sermon (which always had a catchy title like Take This Job and Love It).

But just when we were starting to relax, it all ended. Parents collected their children from the classrooms, people began to drift off to the parking lot, and an empty trailer waited outside—its hellish craw hungry to be refilled. And once the repacking was finished, the worst was still to come.

As luck would have it, between the elementary school in Corte Madera and the seminary in Mill Valley lay a long, steep hill that taxed Phil’s ancient truck to its uttermost limits. Of course, the wreck topped out at 50 mph under the best of conditions. Faced with pulling a heavily-loaded trailer up this incline, it spewed forth extra quantities of smoke and refused to reach double digits on the speedometer.

Depending on how spiritual we were feeling during the tortuous assent, Mike and I would either pray fervently or mutter expletives that called the truck’s parental origins into question. Sometimes both. At all times, angry Marinites would fly past in their sparkling BMW’s, fixing us with glares that clearly said, “Go back to West Virgina, assholes!”