The Mechanic Who Wouldn't Stop Talking About the Cure

Carlos Gutierrez runs a small auto repair shop on Riverside Drive in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He's known for two things: honest brake jobs and telling every single customer how he got sober. He doesn't care if you're a lawyer in a three-piece suit or a college kid scraping together money for an oil change. If you sit in his waiting room long enough, you're going to hear how twenty-two years ago he was sleeping under an overpass on Central Avenue, and how the gospel of Jesus Christ pulled him out.

His daughter once asked him, "Dad, doesn't it embarrass you? Some of those people don't want to hear it." Carlos just shook his head. "Mija, if someone handed you medicine that cured a disease killing everyone around you, would you be embarrassed to share it? Or would you hand it to every person you met?"

That's the thing about real power. When you've felt it work — when you've watched it take a man from a concrete pillow to a paid-off mortgage, from despair to a living hope — shame becomes absurd. You don't apologize for the thing that saved your life.

Paul told the Romans he was not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. Not a theory. Not a philosophy. Power. The kind that resurrects dead lives and makes broken people whole. Carlos Gutierrez understands that. Every customer who walks through his door understands it too, whether they wanted to or not.