Please don't cloud the issue with facts.

George, eager to get into the sport of street luge but on a tight budget, had to make do with what he could find around the house.

I have a speaker system that I plug into my laptop when I'm working at my desk. Two 4" speakers, one at each corner of the desk, and a sub at my feet. When I sit here with shorts on (it's pretty warm today) the sub blows air out the hole on the side and onto my legs. I spent way too long brushing some bug off my right calf that kept coming back, and back and back. Funny thing was he seemed to move in time to the music. A bug with rhythm.

I spent three hours this morning on that last corner of the front bumper. I finally gave up on getting the last bolt lined up through the brace, the overrider and the riser. Once that steel has been tweeked there's no way to get it back in place. So now the driver's side front is a 20/20 area. Twenty feet and twenty mph and it looks just fine. It will have to do until I've saved up the bones to buy new bumpers.

Last night I wrote about one of three prongs of our outreach strategy. The other two are what I guess you'd call marketing efforts. We're going to put an ad on the church page of the local give-away paper (throw-away paper?). The West Valley View publishes twice a week but the church page only appears in the Friday edition. We'll run a 1/16th page ad with color for as long as the amount we've budgeted will allow. We don't know for sure how long that will be because we're still waiting to hear what kind of deal they'll give us. It will probably be about 16 weeks.
Few people read the West Valley View. Mostly they pick it up off their driveway and throw it in their trash container when they roll it out on garbage pickup days. But people looking for a church are, at least from the testimonies we've heard, typically going to look at that church page to see their options. For those 16 weeks they'll see our ad, equal in size to the other church with a "large" ad. We could have had a business card-sized ad (two column inches) but we figured that would get lost in a sea of other ads that size. At the end of the run we'll evaluate the effectiveness of this venue and decide how to proceed.

The third strategy is another direct mail piece. We did one last November that went to every home within a 5-mile radius of our meeting place. The goal was getting our name out there, letting people know we exist. This one will be done a little differently. Esme will put together an address list using filters so that only those who identify themselves as Christians - Protestant will get our piece. That should get us more bang for the buck by targeting those most likely to respond.
If I remember the numbers from our lunch discussion yesterday we're going to drop over four weeks, with 1,250 homes getting the piece each Tuesday for a total of 5,000 homes over the month. Since postage is the biggest expense we're going to have more than the 5,000 printed and hold them for another mailing as the budget allows. The thinking there is that if God sees fit to bless this first wave we'll need to relocate to a bigger space. The next wave will go out in the neighborhoods around that location, wherever it may be.
Matt has come up with a really cool concept for this piece. I think it will be engaging and effectively communicate who Pathway Bible Church is, what we're about. I'll tell you more when it's fleshed out some. Just thinking about it makes me smile.

I'm eager for tomorrow. I hope it works like I think it will.
Deo Volente, huh?

I thought about worship this afternoon as I put together the sound files for tomorrow's service. Christians use a lot of nonsense expressions like "ask Jesus into my heart." We also tend to say things we haven't really thought about just because they've become part of the evangelical lexicon. I think "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" is one of those. What do people mean when they say that? As opposed to an impersonal relationship? Is there any other kind of relationship with a Person?
I think what they probably mean is a relationship with a Person instead of the practice of a religion. One is a Christian because they have accepted what the Person of Christ did for them on the cross, not because they conform to a series of rules and rituals. But I also think most people don't think about it all that much.
The point of all that? I thought today that I use the term in a slightly different sense. My relationship with Jesus Christ is personal in the same way my relationship with Pam, or my kids, or my parents is personal. It's so deeply a part of me, so intertwined with who I am at the deepest level, that I can't describe it using words. The rich vocabularies of theology, of evangelical Christianity, or even Scripture don't seem to express what he is to me, at least sufficiently. My Savior has been there with me through everything - through every event, every success and failure, every joy and every sorrow. We have no secrets, he and I. Not because I don't wish there were some things he didn't know!! But because he does, and loves me still, we have a bond that epitomizes the word personal.
Tomorrow at Pathway we'll do what's called corporate worship. We will join together singing songs of praise, we'll pray together and we'll open God's Word together. This afternoon I listened to those same songs as I cued them up in my player and double-checked the lyrics (found a typo). During that process I worshiped personally. It was an entirely different experience from what I'll have tomorrow morning. Just him and me in a relationship unique to the two of us, just as our experiences together have been unique, and me praising him through those songs.
I have a very, very personal relationship with Jesus Christ. But I can't tell you about it. Not because I don't want to; I wish I could. But it's deeper and more powerful than words can express. I can only describe it in general terms that don't do it justice.

I'm really looking forward to seeing him face to face.