Best Christmas Gift

Well, it wasn't under the tree on Christmas morning, but my best gift, which I feel dizzy with relief and thankfulness for, is a new used car. It's almost exactly like my old one, which was totaled just a week before Christmas.

Yeah, it was a little worse than I realized when I wrote this post.  So thankful for that airbag, which absorbed much of the shock to my body!

I dithered for a few hours about whether to look for the same car or something else.  But all my carefully thought-out reasoning for buying a Prius 2.5 years ago was still valid, and the decision was clinched by my experience with it--I had absolutely loved driving it!  To replace it, I would have to find the same model year or older for financial reasons, but low-mileage '02 Priuses are few and far between, I was told by many, and in '01 there were very few on the road. I couldn't even find '03's, '04's or '05's to consider.  But amazingly, there was an '02 for sale about an hour away that sounded perfect.  Papa Rooster and I set aside last Thursday to spend together for our anniversary, so in between lunch and dinner dates and picking up a settlement check, we bought a car.

On Facebook, when I posted about my accident and how devastated I was to lose my sweetheart car, a couple people said they were praying that my next car would be even better, or be more of a favorite.  It reminded me of something God has shown me before:  I remember long ago praying with a friend for her autistic son to not only not freak out when the organ started playing at a family wedding, but for him actually to be swept up in the music and enjoy it--and that's what happened!  I had just been praying as the Holy Spirit led, but my friend told me later that she felt like it was an important prayer principle to follow--to pray for positive things to happen, not just negative things not to happen.

So I appreciated those prayers from my Facebook friends, and maybe it will turn out to be true.  My new car isn't the color I was just delighted by every day, the bluish-purple of my old one.  But it's a very nice silver, with more of a champagne cast to it than gray, and I like it.  But even better, my new car has both a tape player and a CD player, while my old car only had a tape player.  This means I can check out any audiobook in the library!  What a gift!  And little things that weren't operational in my old car--a broken rear cupholder, a broken door to the storage compartment in the dash, and a burnt-out passenger reading light--are all unbroken and functional in my new car.  The interior is exactly the same color, so it seems like I'm in my old car when I'm driving.  Best of all, my new car has only 75,000 miles on it; my old Prius had 99,584.  Although we still had to chip in quite a bit to what the insurance company gave us--for our deductible, plus--it will undoubtedly be cheaper, over the next 75,000 miles, to maintain the lower mileage car.  So maybe in the long run, it will be a wash, I'm hoping.

All in all, the best material Christmas/anniversary gift ever.  So thankful to God.  And Papa Rooster and I ended up having a delightful day together, even so!

And I am feeling much better. It's now nine days post-accident, and I'm only a little stiff and sore still. Although I took a lot of ibuprofen for the first week, I never felt bad enough to take the time to go to my chiropractor or doctor.  It seemed like frequent stretching was what my body needed, and every day has brought improvement.  The last two days, I've only needed ibuprofen when I first woke up.

I am so grateful for life and health and God's mercy on me and on my family.  And soooooo happy about my new car.