I am sitting at Les Schwab replacing tires that have not yet failed.
There are still many miles left in them. The question is whether they are the right miles for what lies ahead.
Soon I will begin a twelve-week grape-hauling season. Long days, heavy loads and changing road conditions will ask more of these tires than an ordinary trip across town. So I am replacing them early—not because they cannot carry me through today, but because I am responsible for where they must carry me tomorrow.
If I judged the tires only by today’s demands, replacing them might seem unnecessary. They brought me to the shop. They could probably take me home again. Nothing about them demands immediate attention.
The coming season does.
We tend to think of maintenance as repairing something that has broken. A warning light appears, a belt begins to squeal or a tire goes flat, and we respond. By then, however, maintenance has given way to an emergency.
Proper maintenance usually happens earlier and receives very little attention. No one sees the breakdown that never occurred. No one knows about the dangerous moment that was avoided or the delivery that arrived on time because someone acted before action became urgent.
Neglect is equally quiet.
It rarely announces itself with a catastrophe. More often, it whispers, “You can get a little more out of this.”
And sometimes we can.
One more trip. One more week. One more season.
Each time nothing goes wrong, postponement begins to feel like wisdom. We congratulate ourselves for extracting a little more value from something, never considering that we may be spending the margin we will need later.
Tires that perform adequately on a warm afternoon may tell a different story on a wet highway under a heavy load. The weakness was already present. The difficult conditions merely revealed it.
Life works that way too.
We often measure our condition by whether we are still functioning. We are getting the work done, meeting our obligations and making it home at the end of the day. Because nothing has failed, we assume everything is ready.
But being functional today is not the same as being prepared for tomorrow.
We should not wait until parts of our lives are completely worn out before caring for them. Our strength, our health, our relationships and our spiritual lives all require attention before something breaks.
Not everything needs to be replaced, of course. Some things need rest. Some need adjustment. Some need repair. Others simply need us to notice that the demands ahead will be greater than those behind us.
Maintenance is the discipline of paying attention before something has to cry out.
It is also an act of stewardship.
Stewardship is not squeezing the final mile out of everything we have been given. It is caring for what has been entrusted to us so that it remains dependable when it matters most. The consequences of neglect, however, rarely belong to us alone.
The grapes these tires will help me retrieve belong to us, and our winery depends upon their safe arrival. We have too much invested in the harvest to be careless about how it gets home.
But the road home does not belong to me. I will share it with people who know nothing about my grapes, our winery or the twelve-week season ahead. They should not have to bear the consequences of maintenance I chose to postpone.
Preparing well is one way I can honor both—the harvest I am bringing home and the people traveling beside me.
Soon the work at the tire shop will be finished, and I will drive away on new tires. Nothing dramatic will happen. There will be no evidence that replacing them early prevented anything at all.
That is all right. The best results of proper maintenance are often the things that never happen.
Today I am preparing for miles I have not yet traveled and responsibilities that have not yet arrived. Some things deserve our attention not because they have failed, but because they matter too much to wait until they do.
Until next time,
George
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