Life in A Garage

Uh oh.

I can almost hear the embarrassment as the realization settles in. The door’s too narrow. I'll have to break down the whole thing, every brick.

Henry Ford swung the ax, broke down the wall, and released for the first time into the public his gasoline powered automobile. 

While Ford envisioned people everywhere driving affordable cars, his plan did not include how to get that first vehicle out from its confinement. In a very real way, though, his vision to improve life for the average person had already obliterated any obstacles to its success.

Some of the most famous businesses in the world were started in somebody's garage. This inauspicious room, often annexed to the house, sometimes under, beside, in front or behind it, has a reputation as an entrepreneur’s workshop to produce great things, forge destinies, and help dreams come true, but the truth of the matter is not glamorous.

Before each business broke out into the world, there was nothing extraordinary about the place it started. Far from looking like fertile ground for growing life-changing ideas, each garage is common and ordinary. They store memories in old boxes. They house everything from Christmas decorations to boogie boards, saws and drills, bicycles and dolls, not to mention cars themselves. Having established how un-extraordinary these places are in no way dismisses how surprisingly important these places turn out to be, so much so, that I have to say this. If you do not have a garage, do not wait. It is time to build one. 

Standing inside looking out of a garage, it’s easy to see two nearly contradictory worlds at the same time. Fresh air blowing in through an open bay door battles to drive out the smell of poured concrete. Inside, there is the reality of confinement and potential, and outside, the place where ideas expand to make a wide-ranging, genuine difference in the world.  Looking in from outside, labels on boxes hint at their contents like chapter titles in a book. The more private people close off the details of their lives behind locked cabinet doors.

The inherent value or potential of a garage cannot be discovered by perusing their shelves, pulling open drawers, or climbing pull-down folding stairs to see what's above the ceiling. Doing so, for example, would not have unveiled the secret to the amazing success of Bill Gates, Michael Dell, William Hewlett, or his partner Dave Packard. Ironically, its value rises—as all world-transforming endeavors do—out of obscurity. A garage is relatively unimportant compared to other rooms such as the kitchen, living room, and bedrooms, that is, until something happens within it to potentially change the world.

Every one of us sit today in a place of lived and not yet realized potential. There is no better place to be. 

When someone lives in a cave, the garage of an earlier day, the expectation for success is low. Who expects greatness to emerge from a cave anyway? As a matter of fact, us cave-dwellers cannot just go out of our caves with what we think are our greatest ideas and inventions, unless it is the right time to do so.

 

Elijah, the Old Testament prophet knew this, and we can learn from him.  While outside experienced extreme winds, an earthquake, and fire, the prophet would not leave the cave, even though the Lord, blessed be His name forever, told Him to go out and stand on the mountain, the same mountain by the way where Moses stood in his generation and beheld the glory of the true and everlasting God. 

Elijah had heard the word of God but did not step out until He heard the voice of God speaking in His still, small voice. Less like a fierce wind and more like a gentle breeze, the voice of God to come out speaks to us in our innermost place where He dwells by His Holy Spirit and where we must welcome Him.

Elijah was alone with God. Maybe, that is the reason why he was wrong in his estimation of the numbers of true servants the Lord had also kept for Himself. Elijah really was not alone. The Lord told him 7,000 people of Israel had not bowed their knee or kissed the mouth of Baal. In addition, the Lord had instructed Obadiah, who hid 100 prophets of God in groups of fifty. They hid in a cave where they were safe and food was provided for them. Everywhere, as a matter of fact, where Elijah walked in obedience to the voice of God, the Lord provided for him as well, sometimes, often times, in miraculous ways. 

God is not in what makes us afraid, not in a tornado, not in an earthquake, not in a fire or flood. God speaks in obscurity and rewards in public. 

Will a tornado potentially devastate a believer in Christ? One thing about a garage is its resemblance to a tabernacle or tent. The great thing is that if a whirlwind does come, we who are being tabernacled over by the Lord will be carried up into the clouds to be forever with Him.

Is there any place we would rather be?