People say I'm too skeptical, but I find that hard to believe.

A beetle I don't want to mess with.

However, I did spend much of the day working on Gerta - bumper brackets and supports front and rear. Yes, I installed rear supports a month ago but they were cheap Brazilian made reproductions that never fit well and didn't hold up. So I got new American made supports to replace those and a new pair for the front, where they were missing. I also learned recently that the bumper brackets and supports should be a silver/gray color, so while I had them all off I spray painted them the correct factory color.
Like most projects, this one didn't go as smoothly as I hoped. Each corner of the front and rear bumpers has a horizontal bracket with two bolts at each end. Each corner also has a brace, running at a 45 degree angle. That makes for five bolts in three planes, and that, in turn, makes for headaches, especially when the bumpers have been bumped out of shape. Oh yeah, add in a DOOFUS who, at some point in the distant past, used SAE (American) bolts in a metric hole, thus ruining the threads. By the time I figured out that was the problem and ran to the store for the appropriate tap to clean out the threads I'd wasted an hour on one hole.
I have the left side of the front bumper left for tomorrow morning.

Senator Dodd , Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, says he allowed the bonuses to be put back into the bailout bill because of the pressure he got from admittedly low-level Treasury Dept. employees.
I'm buyin' that.

I'm in 8th place (10 total) in our March Madness Pick 'em group. I started the day in 10th place, so I'm making some progress. Anything above the cellar counts as a moral victory.

I've been counseled to stay away from Hawaiian shirts, especially if they come from Costco. Now what am I supposed to do with the ukelele I got?

The highlight of my day wasn't working on Gerta, although I enjoy that even when it doesn't go smoothly.
I had lunch with Matt & Esme (short for Esmerelda). Matt is an elder at Pathway and the VP at Arrowhead Advertising. Esme does the mailing part of their direct mail campaigns.
I'm pumped!
Because of the faithfullness of the people at Pathway we're able to do a 3-prong outreach effort. The first part is upgrading our web site. There's still work to be done, but if you click on the link in the panel to the right, (or here) you'll go to Pathway's home page. There you'll see a link in the lower left corner that will take you to a page where the most recent four sermons can be downloaded as an mp3 file or listened to directly from that page through an embedded player. We're going to tweak the site a bit, changing the look of the link on the home page to make it more obvious. And Matt put a new picture of the pastor on the "More Info" page, but we're talking about upgrades, so that's off topic.
Putting those mp3's is part of a larger effort focused on our website. Matt has hooked us up with a firm that will be doing an SEO for us. That stands for Search Engine Optimization. (I'm on a fast-tracked learning curve here.) We gave this firm 10 search terms - things like "Bible church Phoenix" and "west valley church." They helped us choose which ten we wanted so we get maximum effectiveness. Then they go to work doing mystical things known only to the initiated with the result that, 90 days from now, anyone using one of those terms to search for a church will see Pathway Bible Church on the first page of their results. Cool, huh? I don't know how it works, and I think if I did they'd have to kill me. I do know that most people looking for a church use a search engine, and soon they'll see Pathway front and center! Unless, of course, they're searching for a church that has a bingo game on Thursday nights.
Once they go to our site they can sample a Sunday's sermon or four and get a feel for what we believe the church is supposed to do with God's Word.

The web site development is the first of the three prongs. I'll save the other two for tomorrow night's post.

But the paragraph above that starts, "The highlight of my day..." needs to be ammended. It needs to cover something besides my lunch meeting. Because as excited as I am about what we'll be doing in the next few weeks to get the word out about Pathway, I've just returned from something that rivals that lunch meeting.
I'm just home from spending time with a family that recently started attending Pathway. I think they've been there two or three weeks. I normally try to meet with new attenders to get to know them better and answer any questions they have about our church. I always enjoy that experience; it's one of my favorite things about being a pastor. The people are the best part!
But this one was a special blessing. This is the internet and I don't want to put things in cyberspace that violate anybody's privacy, so I won't go into details here. But I'm in awe of the grace and compassion God puts in some people. They play a special role, extending that grace to "the least of these."
I'm humbled.
Thanks, guys.