A New Vehicle for a New Season

I had just finished meeting a longtime friend who was in the area for coffee. We had a good connection and I was grateful for the time together. I charted the route home on my phone and got on my way. I turned onto the main road and made my way towards the 202 to head home. I had left the coffee shop less than five minutes before when a Yukon on a road to my right started pulling across the three lanes of traffic to take a left turn. It was absolutely unmissable. I yelled, swerved, and crunch - I knew my car was totalled in that moment. Fortunately I saw it coming and was able to slow the car enough that the impact was probably at 25 miles an hour or less. I pulled my car into the inlet on the right side of the road and hopped out of the car to check in on the other driver. It was a mom with two younger kids in the car. They were crying, but uninjured. She was emotional & apologetic, “I’m so sorry, that was totally my fault. I’ve never been in an accident before!” I assured her that what mattered was that everyone was okay and that I wasn’t going to cause problems for them. We got it totalled, assessed (yep, totaled), and had to find another vehicle.

When the accident happened, I was annoyed, but not at all surprised. Over the last months we’ve gotten used to the enemy going after our property. It started almost right away: our microwave went out within a month of moving in. We had to replace it twice before we got it working. We had to place our fridge. Our pool pump broke in a bizarre way no one had ever seen before and cost about a thousand dollars to get fixed. The saguaro cactus in our front yard got sick and died over the record-breaking heat this past summer (taking down a cactus is a job that’s no fun it turns out). We had a scare with one of the AC units that cools our house over the summer (just a fuse to replace thankfully). The minisplit air conditioner in our external shed had a refrigerant leak and had to be repaired. Our new dishwasher stopped working and had to be replaced. The RV gate to my property broke, and possibly broke our fence along with it. All of this in a home that was renovated right before we moved in! Most of it strange & bizarre situations that people haven’t seen before. It’s all part of the warfare that comes with church pioneering & church planting. Prayers are appreciated!

So anyways, with all of this happening to our property, we’ve kind of settled into a “don’t feel surprised and laugh-it-off-so-you-don’t-cry” approach to our stuff breaking or causing problems. If I take it too seriously and think about the time and money sunk into all of this, it can feel pretty discouraging. Gotta just keep trusting God’s got it all and we’ll figure it out. All of this to say that when my car got totaled it didn’t shock me.

But it wasn’t just this feeling like the latest in a string of attacks, I also had something else strange happen. As soon as we got to Phoenix, I immediately could sense that my car didn’t have grace to be here. I don’t know exactly how I knew it, but I sensed it didn’t fit here in Arizona and wouldn’t be around for long. Truth be told, I drove it around for months with the sense it would be totalled. Not that anything awful would happen, just that it wasn’t right for where we were now. It was strange, and I hoped that I was wrong. When the car got it, my first thought was, “Yeah, I thought this was coming.” Maybe I should have tried to sell it or something I guess! I never had something quite like that happen before, I didn’t know what to do with it.

Even though I wasn’t shocked, I really grieved the loss of my car. I really loved my Mustang; it was the first fun car I had ever owned. In fact, I have never really expected to own a fun car. My values on a car were more practical: something that was affordable was probably my highest priority. So I had cars that got me around but weren’t anything fun. I drove a two different Saturns basically into the ground. Then the Lord brought me the Mustang in a way that was undeniably him. I had wanted a nicer vehicle, but I didn’t want to pick up a car payment. I wound up being able to buy the Mustang for a fraction of what it should have sold for (probably ¼ give-or-take), so God gave me a car that was fun and I was able to not pick up a loan.

God really used that car to challenge me. First it was an identity challenge: I immediately felt self-conscious. Like this was too nice a car for me to drive. I felt insecure about what others would think. Should a pastor even be driving a Mustang? But I knew it was a gift from the Lord and when I talked with him about it, I heard him tell me how much a joy it was for him to give it to me. God used that car to challenge some self-worth layers I wasn’t aware I had. It was challenging and profound for me.

In dream interpretation, it is common for cars to represent ministries. (They are the vehicle that brings you places). The Mustang also represented a season of ministry for me. I bought it in June 2016, and over the years I can see how it embodied a lot of the ministry I did over the last years. Mustangs are a symbol of speed and power. Little did I know at the time how much ministry would open up globally and that I would be racing to places all across the world, primarily equipping people in power ministry. I’ve never thought of myself exactly as a muscle-car guy, but turn up the power in the church? I love that!!

Suffice all of this to say, my Mustang wasn’t just a cool car to me; it was something meaningful God had done in my life. It was an embodiment to me that God loves me and wants to challenge and grow me. A symbol of the ministry of power and my assignment to help churches open up the throttle and let the power of the Spirit rip. Losing that car wasn’t just a matter of losing a fun car, it struck at all of that.

So as I grieved, I also prayed. What should I do here? What do you do when something meaningful that God has done in your life gets attacked by the enemy? How do I respond to that? As I chewed on it, I realized that I had a very practical layer here (I need a car to get around), but it didn’t sit right to steer through this situation based on the need to replace the vehicle. What I eventually identified was a conviction that it wouldn’t be right for me to abandon an area of my life where I had walked with God in a meaningful way. Sure, the enemy can strike and take a car, but he shouldn’t be able to take away a part of my walk with God! That couldn’t be right. No, I decided that was mine to give up or not. Would I surrender the area of a vehicle as a part of my life where God has created meaning, or would I allow God to bring this segment of my journey into a new chapter? I decided this was the way I needed to process this, and that I wasn’t going to be dictated my pragmatics here. I was going to give God an opportunity to create more and new meaning in this part of my life.

Something about recently turning 40 has really locked me in on the importance of meaning in my life. I’ve lived a handful of decades now; I’ve done a fair bit of activity. Doing stuff doesn’t seem to have a lot of weight to it anymore. What’s become more and more important to me is the story my life tells as I live it. So far as I can tell, that’s the only thing we really keep after we cross the great threshold. All of the heavens is witness to our life now, and the way we walk with God tells a story of who God is and what he is like. That story is mine and mine alone to tell. Only in my life is this specific story of God borne out, and that story joins the myriad of other stories across the nations and ages. It is this story that becomes our eternal legacy; a story that all of eternity can know because of our lives and that continues to bear witness to God for all time to come.

For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire. 1 Corinthians 3:11-15

A reflection here (I’ll put a few of these in along the way): I wonder how many parts of our lives are places where we could be experiencing a meaningful part of our life by journeying with God, but we just choose not to. It seems to me that there are lots of areas of my life that I can choose to journey with God or not. My guess is that I could have just shrugged my shoulders and bought another car and that would have been perfectly okay! It wouldn’t have been sinful; it just would have been an area of my life that wouldn’t have been filled with the meaning of being a part of the eternal story God is telling through my life. And without that meaning, that sense of loss of the car I liked would have like life was subjective or cruel. I wonder how much meaning we leave on the table because we’re not intentional with parts of our life-journey with God.

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Holding the Space

Once I had determined the way I was going to approach getting another vehicle, I quickly ran into a question: how do I walk forward? I mean I can’t make God do anything meaningful in my life, what am I supposed to do? Just wait? Go try and find something? Something else? It didn’t take me long to realize I really didn’t know! I hadn’t walked something like this before and I didn’t know anyone else who had. I had no idea what it would even look like!

As I thought about that, I realized that the first thing I needed to do was open space for God’s activity. If I wasn’t intentional, it would be easy to have practical realities force me to conclude the process before I was confident I had journeyed it through with God. One of the first practical ways this came up was in deciding what I was going to do with my interim. The insurance company offered me a rental vehicle for a week or two, but as I thought about it, I decided that route was setting me up to feel pressure to get this figured out on a specific timeframe. I also had two different families in our church offer to loan me vehicles to use while I didn’t have my own. I decided to go that route because I knew it didn’t create felt pressures on whatever God was doing.

It wasn’t more than a couple of days since the Mustang was gone that I started feeling pressure to have a replacement car. I’ve got lots of stuff to do! People to be meeting with and so on. Having another unresolved part of my life at this point didn’t feel good at all. I could tell I felt anxious and I was tempted to just try and figure something out. But I didn’t want that; getting a vehicle by responding to anxiety is not the way to allow God to do something in your life! I decided that I wasn’t even going to work on the process until I was confidently past it. I set the whole thing down and tried to let it be in God’s hands. After a week or two I was able to consider the whole issue without feeling drivenness kick in. Every time I considered whether I was being negligent or not, I had a clear sense: the first step of this journey is a test as to whether you’ll really let God do something here.

Reflection #2 here: Holding the space is hard! It requires us to move against what feels natural and often puts us in the place where people will misunderstand what you’re doing. You’ll feel silly or stupid because what you’re doing doesn’t fit the normal pattern of things at all. It’s probably the first step in a lot of our journeys though. For God to be reigning as king fundamentally means we’re not; which means that in that given area of our lives, we need to cede control from ourselves to God. This is nearly always a vulnerable and even frightening act. It is, nevertheless, the only road forward into our lives being woven into God’s story. It is the repent and believe of the gospel.

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God Charting the Way Through

After a few weeks of setting the whole issue down, I began to pray intentionally about the whole situation. (I didn’t even pray when I set it down - I knew if I prayed before I felt anxiety leave I would be trying to control or cajole some kind of outcome. Prayer can be a means of manifesting anxiety and I didn’t want to do that). Without anxiety clouding my interactions with God, I began to lift it up to him and ask him to begin to show me how to walk this out with him. Was I just supposed to wait? Was I supposed to go and find something? Finding the handle for God creating meaning in my life wasn’t at all clear what to do!

One of first senses I had was that God wasn’t going to bring me a specific car as he did with the Mustang. This was going to be a more collaborative process and one in which God wanted my input. I felt the Lord say I should write down what I wanted. At the same time though, I knew I wasn’t ready to do that yet! I could tell that was the next step, but once I considered that step, I felt anxiety again. I decided that would be a step in the process when I was ready for it, but I wasn’t going to do that yet.

After the Lord had made that step clear, he brought some provision to us for the vehicle. I had received a payout for the Mustang, but it being a 2009, that wasn’t a tremendous amount of money. Over the next couple of weeks, the Lord moved on two separate families to give towards our new vehicle - without us in any way asking. I don’t want to give out specifics, but lets just say the two gifts together were a significant amount larger that the amount payed out for the totalled Mustang. Brittany and I were humbled and amazed. God was really taking this journey with us! It was so unreal.

Reflection: Taking a journey like this with God often feels like a murky and muddy road. There is a lot that feels fuzzy, or a lot steps that you think you’re following God, but in your worse moments its easy to think you’re just making the whole thing up. But if you’re really journey with the Lord, there will be moments that take your breath away. Lots of moments may feel mundane or ambiguous, but scattered in their midst will be moments when God flexes his God-muscles and you know its Him you’re walking with. It was like that in our journey towards Phoenix and it was like that in this journey too. We have to be content and tracking with both. It’s totally good for not every moment to be dramatic and amazing. Lots of walking with God feels pretty normal, or even hard. But we should also have moments we can hardly believe happened; the ones where God reveals his God-ness in our story. It’s how he reveals his glory in our lives.

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Towards a Specific Vehicle

By this point it’s been a little more than a month since the Mustang was totaled. God has been working in my heart and in my life in dramatic ways! But I still don’t have any handles towards any specific vehicle. God has been at work, but his first steps weren’t in the direction of any specific cars.

The second week in December I had a quick trip to Chicago to speak at The Chapel and connect with the friends I had there. A friend of mine from Champaign decided he wanted to come up and hear me speak. He had just purchased a Jeep Wrangler and was enthusiastically raving about it. When he heard that I didn’t have a vehicle he said he wanted to bring his Jeep up and let me drive it around. He was sure I would love it. I found that pretty unlikely, but I didn’t think it would hurt anything, so I said I’d be up for that.

When we connected in Chicago, he showed me his Jeep and let me drive it around a parking lot. I kind of payed attention in a mostly perfunctory kind of way. I got behind the wheel and started driving it around. I thought it drove just fine, but I’m not really very picky on that kind of thing. At I continued over just a few minutes to my surprise I found myself thinking, “I could do this. A Jeep could be cool!” I was shocked by this thought. I’ve never considered a Jeep in the slightest. What was that thought about? That was weird. I’d have to chew on that.

Later I sat with that thought and asked myself why I found myself interested in the possibility of a Jeep. What was it that I liked? Why did I like it? Was it the Jeep-ness specifically that I liked? If not, what was it?

As I reflected on it, I realized that some of what I really loved about the Mustang was that it was a car that has a well defined-identity to it. There are lots of cars that in my opinion don’t register with much of a specific identity. Without being very specific (lest I pick on someone’s favorite car unnecessarily), the majority of cars don’t come with much of an identity beyond a set of wheels that can get you from point A to point B. They don’t mean anything (there’s that word again). But you can’t say that about a Mustang. A Mustang is a car that totally has an identity. It’s a car that is an icon. I realized it wasn’t even so much the specific Mustang identity that I loved (I’m not really a muscle car guy), but it was having a car that stood for something at all that I was drawn towards. And a Jeep is absolutely a vehicle that has an identity too. As I processed this I realized that’s what I found interesting: a car that has an identity.

This was an interested and unexpected learning! Finally I had a handle for what I wanted in a car: I wanted a car that meant what the next season was about. One that embodied the life and ministry that God was setting up next. I wanted a vehicle that was all-in on what God was doing.

It was this observation that clicked into place how to know what to ask God for. This was the handle I was looking for to be able to write out my list for the Lord. I wrote this document with the specific things I wanted in a vehicle. Here are a few of the highlights:

1. A vehicle that stands for something (has an identity to it)
2. A vehicle that feels like Arizona. I sensed this was an important part of receiving the new season in life God had brought me to.
3. A vehicle that embodies the ministry God was bringing me to.
4. A set of practical desires (not having to pick up a loan, dependability, a color that has some energy to it, a vehicle I can use with Apple Carplay)

With a handle begin to be explore with, I began to research the most iconic vehicles. I found this article particularly interesting (pardon the lack of pictures. I had to grab an old copy because the newer one cuts off in 2005 for some reason). Looking at a list like this was really helpful: taking the list here and adding a few constraints:

• I can’t afford (nor do I want) a upper-class priced car.
• I’ve never liked trucks, nor do I want a minivan (we already have one of those anyways)
• I’m also not interested in cars that are iconically “normal” or “suburban” (think the Toyota Corolla). I’m sure it’s a fine car, just not the iconic I’m drawn to.
• I don't want something old enough to be unreliable mechanically.

Put together, this leaves a pretty small list. Which of these vehicles stands for the exploratory & innovative work we’re trying to do in this season? Here is what is left to work with (2000s onward):

• Ford Mustang (ah, confirmation that was part of what was meaningful before!)
• Jeep Wrangler
• Telsa model S
• Ford Bronco

Interestingly, the Jeep Wrangler is smack in the middle of that short list list. What does the Jeep stand for? It’s basically the iconic off-reading vehicle. I mean, I guess “going off-road” is exactly what we’re trying to do with our church pioneering experimentation. Of these options, it may also be the one that is the most "Arizona" (one of the points of my list). Maybe I should look into what Jeeps are about a little more.

As I do that, I come across the Jeep History page. I’m blown away! This is the kind of thing meaning that is exactly what I'm looking for. This is a vehicle that stands for something. What does it stand for? Go Anywhere, Do Anything. This is the tagline they use for the Jeep brand. Isn't that exactly the kind of motto that captures the spirit we need in our church pioneering work? Isn't the iconic off-roading vehicle prototypically Arizona? At this point I'm getting really intrigued. I didn't drive my friend's Jeep thinking I was going to see alignment in what mattered to me, but I really did notice alignment as I reflected on it.

I sat with this option for a few weeks to try and gauge whether I was just excited because I drove my friend's vehicle or if there was something more meaningful to me here. As I came through the end of the year, I felt really good about the option. I had found a direction to head; momentum was building through the process.

Never having owned a Jeep before, I thought it was probably important to try and see how it worked with the family. If the kids or Brittany hated a Jeep, that would be a snag. One of the families in our church plant owned a Wrangler and happened to have three vehicles in a two-driver family. They graciously let me borrow it for a week and I drove the kids around it, asking them what they thought. They expressed positivity and enthusiasm. Looks like we found a real option here!

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Where Do I Get One?

At this point I was feeling really good about a Jeep Wrangler. Now the next important question: where do I find one? I began looking into different options. I searched around at dealers websites, but I just didn't feel at all excited about that option. I considered Carvana, but that just didn't feel right. I found myself browsing Facebook Marketplace as well, but I felt kind of uncertain about that idea as well. Buy a car on Facebook Marketplace? How on earth could you determine whether or not you were getting a car that had lots of issues? Or had been totally neglected?

Nevertheless, as I'm browsing Marketplace one day I see a blue Wrangler come across at a pretty decent price, and I felt a nudge: I wonder if that's my car. I dismissed it because I still felt kind of uncomfortable with the thought of buying a vehicle that way. Nevertheless I took note of it and added it to a few of them I was considering. I sat down and gathered a list of four Wranglers I had some interest in. Two from private sellers, two from a dealership. I asked my friend who owned a Wrangler if he'd be willing to take an afternoon and come look at them with me (I received and enthusiastic yes - Jeep owners tend to be excited about their cars). The day of, we both fasted and asked the Lord to make clear what he was doing. We met up, prayed the Lord would open the right doors and close other ones, and we headed off!

The next few hours played out very differently than I expected they would! We set off with a plan to see four Jeeps with confirmed plans, and 3 of the 4 were complete no-shows! The dealer turned out to be an incredibly shady place (maybe a drug-running operation? No cars there of any kind...). One person we had agreed on a place and time just totally ghosted us. In any case, we wound up seeing the Jeep I had spotted on Facebook Marketplace earlier that year. We drove it around and there were a few key things that really set my mind at ease. He was an airplane mechanic for the Air Force (probably didn't neglect the vehicle), he actually had a warranty with the vehicle that carried over for another 18 months (wow, that would make me feel a lot better). There was even a bonus I hadn't thought to ask for: it was a manual transmission (I love driving stick: it had been a while). My friend looked it over and said it looked great as far as he could tell. I talked with the seller and he mentioned that he wasn't in a hurry to sell it quickly - was still in the process of getting the title sent through even though it was already paid off. It seemed like a solid option.

I left that day surprised. It did seem like this could be something God was doing. But I also didn't want to be impulsive. Getting every bit of what God was doing in this process was important to me and I didn't want to head through it too quickly. This looked like it could well be God, but I didn't think the process was completed yet. I decided to ask God for a little more confirmation if this was what he was doing. I decided to reach out to some prophetic friends of mine.

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A Few More Prophetic Confirmations

I first reached out to a friend of mine who had told me he had seen my Mustang was going to get totaled (he told me after it happened). Had he seen anything about my next vehicle? He hadn't - bummer. Shortly after that, I asked another prophetic friend who I had told I was considering a Jeep if he had anything he had heard about it. Interestingly, he asked if there was anywhere he could see the Jeep. I sent him some photos, and this was his response:

Before I asked you for pictures I actually found that I wanted to know the color of the car. That was what I wanted more than the pictures, although I asked for the pictures. I feel that this blue is very specifically and intentionally important and it feels it says “innovation” that is “unexpected” and “comes from outside the system, to inside it”.

I feel pretty great about this car choice. It feels like it (your car / ministry) “is going somewhere” in a way that is spoken into your future (destiny). Although others will benefit from this pioneering journey, what is highlighted is an unexpected aspect of you going alone in it. Not that you will literally be alone in the natural, but that much of your voyage here is alone with the Lord. This is his intention. The innovation must come from that private journey with him. The first journey he calls you on is to pioneer territory with him, just you and him. I think it’s crucial to continue to not only give yourself permission to do all sorts of things that are just you and appeal only to you, but that you actually must do this, it seems it would even be disobedient to the Lord to turn aside from “only Putty” things. There’s a huge space of solitude here which I’m sure will at times in the future be a paradoxical or conflict point with your natural circumstances when chaos comes.

Definitely feel unction here, can feel the pull/word/destiny beyond the natural object of the car. It starts to remind me of some “stellar” things, because the spiritual stuff beyond the car is not from the natural world.

Whoa! That was interesting. Way more than I expected to get. I felt more enthusiasm about it. I decided to make an offer on the Jeep. As I prayed about it, I felt the Lord said to offer the full price the seller had asked for and not try and bargain. I knew that wasn't typical for this kind of purchase on Marketplace, but the sense was rather strong. It seemed like it was important as an act of saying that the new ministry the Lord has for us isn't something we had trying to shortcut the process in any way. The full price had been payed for what we were walking into.

I sat down with Brittany and told her that sense, expecting her to not be thrilled about that path. She listened in an open minded way and told me that she had just read that passage in the end of 2 Samuel where David insists on paying full price for the threshing floor. Whoa! I connected with the seller and made the offer. He accepted and we started working out details of when & where to meet and all of that. The specifics took a few weeks to work out because I had to juggle some bank stuff (which for whatever reason banks make it much harder to spend your money than I expected) but it all worked out great because the seller had to work to get the title stuff worked out on his side. In hindsight, I'm so grateful for that! I would imaging most of these purchases go do whoever has cash-in-hand first, but the Lord connected me with a seller who would have some delays on his side too so neither of us would be tempted to leave the other behind.

As those two weeks progressed and proved a little more complicated than I expected, I started to feel a bit nervous. Had I missed the Lord? I thought this was him. Did I need to stick it out, or was I forcing something through that wasn't God? I wrestled with that a bit. Right in the middle of that, Brittany had a dear friend come and visit for the weekend. As we chatted about the whole vehicle journey and trying to buy this Jeep, she just casually says, "Hey, do you remember I had a picture of you in a Jeep?" She reminded me of a few details of a time she had prophesied to me almost six years earlier. I thought to myself, I wonder if I have that recorded...

I pulled out my phone and scrolled back through my voice memos (of which I have 85 - most of them prophetic words recorded at one point or another). I picked the one that might have been it. It was labeled just as a prophetic encouragement session, not with her name. It was a five minute file - I jumped about a minute and a half in and pushed play. The first words to come over the speaker were in her voice: "I see you driving a Jeep..." What!??! That's crazy. The three of us all kind of freaked out for a few minutes. Later that evening I rewinded it and listened to more of the word:

There's new territory you're going to stomp on...new territory...I see along with that this Jeep. It's a massive Jeep. You're sitting at the wheel and you're looking at this huge mountain. You're like, "Okay, but my tank is empty, and I have no keys." And I see Jesus sitting next to you, and he's dangling these keys for you. You're just like "Cool!" and you just decide you're gonna go with it.

Goodness. Getting into new territory and needing a new vehicle to tackle the next mountain. And that was from nearly six years earlier! Long before I ever imagined any of what the last three years have been. What a gift.

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A New Vehicle

So I bought a Jeep!

And you know what? I love it. Every time I get in it, it loads up so much meaning of what God is doing in my life and what I need to be orienting my life towards. At some point along the way I realized, this is an off-roading vehicle the color of the heavens. That's the call! To do some heavenly-led off-roading. I can't drive anywhere and not be reminded of that and encouraged in it. It feels so right on so many levels. It feels so Arizona; It is just fun to drive. It feels like it perfectly embodies the assignment and I just dig driving it. I could not be happier. So far, every day with it has felt like a total gift. I can't see it and not smile for all God did in this process. My life has been tremendously enriched. Much more than I expected it would be a few months ago when I decided to ask God to do something new in this part of my life.

Did I have to walk this out this way? Probably not. It wouldn't have been wrong to just buy a vehicle and keep moving forward with life. But I think it's probably true that a fair bit of our lives is made up of areas that we can journey with God if we want to. And if we do our life takes on a richness and a meaning it doesn't have otherwise. You don't have to have a God-story behind what you drive. But you can. And if you can, don't you want to? Sure, it may take more time, it may be less convenient for a while (following God usually is), but it will also make your life more full in ways you can't get any other way. I'm unbelievably grateful for this journey with the Lord, and I commend you to the same kind of journey in your life. Is there a place in your life that you can invite God to come and make meaning in your journey? Sure, maybe you can solve the practicals on your own, but a full and satisfying life isn't made up of practicals first. It's made of a rich walk with God that brings meaning to your story.

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Special thanks to everyone who helped navigate various aspects of this entire journey. It could not have been done alone! I have deep gratitude to express to everyone who gave financially towards this Jeep. May you be richly blessed by what the Lord brings forth in this next season. I'm blown away by your generosity! Thanks immensely to the Peters family for letting me borrow their extra car for months while the Lord walked me through this. It would not have been possible without you. Thanks to Jake Hickenbottom for forcing me to drive his Jeep before I had any idea that I would like one. Thanks to the Petries for loaning me your Jeep for a week and for helping me know this one is in good shape. Thank you to loads of people who prayed and/or gave prophetic input into the process. Each and every one of you contributed rich meaning to this whole journey and it wouldn't have happened without you!