Of my earliest memories was of a place called Ordside service. It was a corner lot owned by my Uncle Robert and housed a one-stop auto service center. It was a place where you could get the best Chevron gasoline. Three pumps provided the fully leaded Super, Ethel, and Regular. If my memory serves me well the regular was 29 cents a gallon and for Mom, two dollars would be enough to last a couple of weeks. Included in the complex was a car parts dealership serving the entire town of Marina and most of the Military personnel of Fort Ord. There was one of the first fully automatic car washes.

And my dad worked as a mechanic in the auto repair business behind the parts house. There were four giant roll-up doors for three repair bays and one for tires and oil changes.

Back and across the back of this family business was an area for cars that could not be repaired or fixed. High cement block walls went around this area with barbed wire on top. Occasionally a part from one of these cars was used to fix another. It was called the salvage yard.

I was not a church kid. There were 16 cousins in our little town of 1,645.  There was a little church about a ¼ of a mile away where I got my first encounter with all the “Church words”. When I heard salvation.  I immediately thought about that section of Ordside service.  The salvage yard. Salvage, Salvation, it sounded close enough. I figured salvation had to do with finding worth in something that nobody else wanted or needed. Salvation was about going out back and claiming something that was broken and messed up and then using it to fix something else. 

My idea of Salvation became an outgrowth of this idea. I was broken and I needed something to fix me from the salvage yard. Salvation was getting worth from something that was very broken. Salvation was making something good out of the worthless.

So when I attended that little church the youth leader told us we needed to be saved. I saw myself as something that was worthless and I had parts that needed to be used for better things.

I guess I was pretty close.