How can the future be so hard to predict when all of my worst fears keep coming true?

What do you notice on this page?

I think I forgot to mention when I posted a pic of our ad a couple of nights ago that the paper chooses the color, and it will be a different color each week. This week it's purple. IMHO our ad jumps off the page and is the thing a reader's eye will be drawn to.
NOW we pray the Holy Spirit will draw the reader's body to Pathway Bible Church.
Yes, I am excited about what God has and, I believe, will continue to do at Pathway. I feel good about our newspaper ad and our direct mail piece that will go out soon and our web site upgrades, because I think they represent clearly and accurately who we are and what we're doing. Our community needs a Bible church and I believe we're filling that need. So this is genuinely truth in advertising.

Some evenings I sit down to write my blog post and don't have anything burning in my brain. Other nights my mind is an ADD buzz of thoughts yearning to be free. Tonight is one of those nights. No way I can get them all out in one post, at least not without raising serious questions about the wisdom of my continued freedom. So in no particular order, and with some saved for tomorrow night....

I've had a couple of conversations lately with various people about the differences between Midwestern culture and the culture of a place like Phoenix which is, in that regard, a west coast city.
I also met someone today who said, "I hear you can do all sorts of things." This person has heard that I'm a pastor but that I also do home handyman stuff, and his comment was in the context of fixing things around a house. Afterward I thought, "That's one of the differences."
In a city, especially a west coast city like Phoenix, people have a more narrow set of skills, and when something comes up outside of that skill set they call an "expert" to take care of the problem. Contrast that with a dairy farmer in Wisconsin. If something breaks he'll fix it, whether it's in the barn, on the tractor or around the house. That prairie mentality is independent and self-sufficient. He wouldn't think of calling a plumber to fix a toilet or an electrician to figure out why an outlet doesn't work. Part of that is probably because he can't; his profit margin as a farmer is too narrow to call in a plumber at $65 an hour.
To be sure, it's different for someone living in a mid-western city - say Cincinnati or even Des Moines. Those residents are much more likely to call the tradesman. But with absolutely no data to back me up I think there are more do-it-yourselfers in the midwest than on the coasts. The coasts pay better and that makes it easier to call the professional. And because the speed of life is faster on the coasts it's easier to call that professional than find time to DIY.
I am NOT saying one is better than the other. NOT saying that. It's just a difference I thought about when that guy commented, with some admiration in his voice, that I could fix stuff.
I was raised in Seattle, a west coast city. But I was a pastor, with a pastor's income. That gave me a lot in common with Wisconsin dairy farmers. Necessity is the mother of DIY.

In proofing this curriculum I've noticed one of my many bad writing habits. I have the tendency to start sentences with conjuctions when there's no good reason to do so. And I sometimes do that several times in the same paragraph. But I'm not aware I'm doing it. So I'm going to work on eliminating that bad habit.

That said, you should understand that these blog posts are just this side of stream-of-consciousness outpourings. I don't go back and proof what I've typed. I will sometimes go back and read a sentence, maybe a paragraph and change serious mistakes. But I don't proof. I will also make errors, know that it's an error and leave it be...like three different forms of "mid-west" up above. I know that I did that, knew it as I was doing it, but don't really care. I figure you know what I meant, probably don't care that at least two of the forms are wrong and also understand that these posts are something slightly less weighty than Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archepilago." So if my errors bother you, my apologies. But you should probably go read Gulag and/or take a pill. This is, after all, a pretty inane blog.

That said, I blog because it's good for me. Some have expressed surprise that I post almost every night. I decided a long time ago that nightly posts is a discipline that does me good, whether anyone reads it or not. The act of writing every night increases my ability to express my thoughts in words. Not always coherent words, but words nonetheless. I don't go back and read very early posts but I know my writing is better now than it was when I started - that I write more fluidly and easily than I used to. I type these things pretty quickly. So if you're here reading, thanks! But I'm really here for me and the benefit I derive from the effort.

I got a wonderful surprise a coupld of days ago. A letter from someone thousands of miles away I had no idea was one of those readers, and who sensed my enthusiasm for the ministry at Pathway. A note is in the mail, ML, but thank you for your graciousness.

This post has gone on long enough. The rest will wait. I'm going to watch some news, eat brownies from the pan and surf the internet to discover what happened while I was out and abut all day.