Dodge Dakota -- Nothing to do with church or the lectionary...

In order to tie this post in (however loosely) with church, I'll tell this story to introduce the topic of our new truck. Yesterday while we were sitting around waiting for Sunday School to start, someone looked out the window at all the cars in the parking lot and made a comment about needing to add parking spaces. I reminded them that once the snow was gone, the cemetery association has always been gracious to us, allowing us to park on the roadway through the cemetery, and that in a few weeks I would probably start putting one of my vehicles in the cemetery. Bruce said, "Just don't put your truck there, it might really think it was going to the graveyard!"

Our new truck is just over 2 months old, with 2200 miles on it. It is a 2006 Dodge Dakota with a club cab. We bought it to replace our 15-yr-old Ford Ranger, but also to become our primary vehicle, allowing our 8-yr-old Honda Civic to become our secondary vehicle. We like our truck very much, but I'm not so sure that it likes us!

Episode One: Chipped Paint There's nothing more frustrating than getting a brand new vehicle, taking it to do some errands, and coming out of the store to see that someone with a bright red car opened their door into yours, chipping your silver paint and leaving some of their paint behind. I know that nothing is new forever, but it sure would be nice to get it through a couple of weeks before it gets dinged up.

Episode Two: Chipped Windshields Our first major road trip with the new truck was to Boston for a Christian Conference called Congress 2006. Apparently we got hit by a small rock somewhere along the way, because when I came out of church the next day, there was a three inch crack on the passenger side of the windshield, running all the way to the edge. At first I thought it might be a warranty issue, so we took it to the nearest dealer. He explained to me that he was going to run a ball-point pen in the crack, and that it if there were any divots, it would hit them. A smooth run of the pen would mean a warranty issue, a divot would mean a road-hazard. Fair enough.... Unfortunately, it was a divot, so we had to file an insurance claim and go visit Portland Glass for a brand new windshield.

Episode Three: Turn it off!!!Melody and I went out to eat one Friday night at a new Mexican restaurant in town. When we came out, she got in the driver's seat and moved the key toward the ignition. WAAAAAAHHHH The horn turned on, the wipers turned on, the washers sprayed, the cabin lights turned on, the cargo light turned on, and the instrument panel went haywire. (The little light showing the open liftgate on the minivan turned even turned on--even though we don't have a minivan!) She started the truck, and the horn turned off, but the headlights wouldn't turn on, and none of the other things would turn off.

We were parked right up against a big plate glass window into the restaurant, and so twenty people turned away from their yummy Mexican food to see what was making that awful noise. We tried this a couple of times before calling Chrysler's emergency tow service to come and get the truck. We got towed to a Chrysler dealer whose mechanic didn't return my call Monday morning, didn't look at the truck until the middle of the afternoon, and took 30 hours to decide that the battery must have been low. They recharged the battery and gave it back to me.

Episode Four: Not Again! Yup! Again. This time, we were in Augusta for District Sunday School Convention. After lunch, the same thing happened. (I was pretty sure that the mechanic who recharged the battery on my brand new truck didn't have a clue what he was talking about....) This time, we were stranded in Augusta, and so we had to get a rental car to get home (which Chrysler is supposed to reimburse me for).

Anyway, after two tows, two dealer visits, and three rental cars, Chrysler decided to issue a recall on 68,000 Dodge Dakotas and Dodge Durangos to have their computers reprogrammed. Apparently a static electric spark between the key and the ignition was causing the problems. I don't really understand how reprogramming the computer will fix that, but we haven't had problems since. (You can visit www.safercar.gov to see if your truck is affected by the recall).

I have this image of technicians standing around our truck trying to get it to have the same problem again--being totally frustrated because they can't figure out what caused our problems. And as their all looking at the list of symptoms and trying to start the truck, the fax machine turns on and the recall notice comes through. I think someone probably went out to get pizza for the whole gang, since they didn't have to try to figure out the problem anymore, but just had to download some software from Chrysler's website to install on my truck's computer.

Episode Five: "Sweetie...look at the back tire" Yup. You guessed it. We got a flat tire this past weekend. I was going to take the Honda to Augusta for a meeting with teens going to Festival of Life at ENC next week. I had backed the truck out into the driveway because one of Melody's piano students was going to borrow it to pick up a bedframe. As I was getting our EZPass and my sunglasses out of the truck to take with me, Melody stuck her head out the door and said, "Sweetie...look at the back tire." Sure enough, it was flat. Not just a little slack...it was flat.

So I grabbed the compressor and started filling the tire, just to see if I could figure out where the leak was. Once it was partway full, I could actually hear the air rushing out of it. I looked, and there was a screw embedded in our tire. So, instead of going to Augusta, I called my Festival of Life director, and then proceeded to learn how to change the tires on our new truck. Fortunately, we have a full-size spare, but it took a while to figure out how to get the tire down from under the truck. Then, we spent the rest of the day walking around and waiting for VIP to mount a new tire and change it back again.

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Anyway, that's the ongoing saga of our new truck. We like it alot, but we're not so sure it likes us. And, I think I will take Bruce's advice and not park it in the cemetery this spring...it might get the wrong idea.

Grace and Peace,

PastorJon

Is he still alive?

I'm not one to deceive myself into thinking that I have a huge viewing audience just sitting on pins and needles waiting for a new post from me...

However, I imagine that there might be one or two regular readers who have started to simply wonder if I've dropped off the face of the earth... No, I am still alive and well!

I won't bother list off all of the lame excuses for why this blog hasn't seen any updates in the last two-and-a-half months. Nobody probably cares anyway! :) However, I would like to tell you a bit of what I've been up to.

Our Christmas celebration as a church was wonderful--I'm very glad that we didn't consider cancellation or major changes to our Sunday schedule just because it landed on Christmas day. We had one of our largest attendances for a Sunday service that we'd had in a long time--with a number of visitors coming to join us for the first time.

Shortly after New Years Day, I had to be in San Diego for a two day meeting--I spent as much time travelling as I spent at the meeting. On the way home from the airport, I found myself in my 15-yr-old 2WD Ford Ranger in the middle of a blinding blizzard at midnight. Common sense should have prevailed and I should have gotten a hotel room for the night, but the desire to get home and be done travelling was overwhelming and I pressed on. I made it home safely--although I did land in the ditch once during the journey.

(We have since replaced our 15-yr-old Ranger with a 2006 Dodge Dakota--but at the moment that's having recurring electrical problems, and has already made two visits to a Dodge dealer to try to diagnose the problem. That's a whole blog entry in itself...so no more on the truck here!)

I did get an iRiver MP3 player for Christmas, with a line-in jack, and I've been investing quite a bit of time and energy to recording sermons, offering CDs to church folk, and making those sermons available online for download, streaming, and podcasting. It's been quite a learning curve, but things are just about finished. I still want to develop some "bookends" for the podcasts, but that will come soon enough.

You can find the underlying sermon blog here. However, the blog is also syndicated at feedburner, so if you have a podcatcher (iTunes, iPodder, or your favorite aggregator) you can subscribe to the sermon feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/JonTwitchellSermons. Each week you'll get the latest sermon automatically delivered to your computer. If you try this, let me know how it works for you--just in case I didn't set it up quite right!

In other news, our church has launched out on "The Quest," which is a 40 day journey of discovery about the Holy Spirit. Between sermons, daily readings, and small groups, the congregation is being brought together for a common purpose as hasn't happened in some time. It's exciting to see people come to Sunday School who haven't been for some time, and others committing to daily readings of The Power to Be Free: Discovering Life in the Spirit of Christ.

We will continue this journey through the Lenten Season, finishing up with a celebration Sunday on Palm Sunday. After Easter, I intend to return to the lectionary, at least through Pentecost.

Also remember that if you're ever up between Midnight and 5:00AM (ET) on weekdays, you can catch me on the radio--mostly introducing music and sharing snapshots of life. You can stream Positive 89.3 online at www.positive.fm. Also, Joe Polek and I bring you "The Zone: Music that Rocks" on Saturday nights from 8:00 - Midnight (ET). If you tune in, be sure to send me an email.

So, that's a bit of what's been going on in my life. I'll get back to lectionary blogging soon!

May God bless you as you serve Him today,

PastorJon