Today in church our pastor delivered another strong sermon, this time beseeching us to be more generous and humble. (Of course I can’t report that I am humble as doing so would prove my assertion false, a catch-22 first reported by Ben Franklin in his autobiography.) Anyway before evoking the passage of it being “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man . . .” our pastor recounted his having owned a Chevrolet Chevette in his days as a seminary student.

His story about his Chevette was quite good as he described the Chevette model as precisely opposite a Corvette in terms of performance and design. The one redeeming quality of his chug-a-lug Chevette was that it was cheap. When he became a pastor and received a real paycheck he was able to upgrade to a better vehicle. The point of his story was admitting, now the proud owner of a Ford Taurus, looking down (ever so unnoticed to anyone else) on any Chevette pulling up next to him.

I would like to say the reason for posting this bit is it serves an analogous lesson to our student body; the duty of being educated is to not look down on others but to exhalt them. And be humbled by the perfect wisdom of God. Actually, this is a good reason. But my curiosity this morning upon hearing the story was more worldly: Was the Chevy Chevette really that bad? I know General Motors has been poorly run for quite some time now, but was Chevette the GM version of the Edsel? Most of our Rockhurst students are too young to remember the Chevette, but I’m not. It is worth doing a little research . . .