car

When you live in the city, it demands a slightly different skill set when it comes to driving, and more specifically, parking. Over the past few years I've had friends suggest that I have parallel parking skills that defy physics. Well, last night, I had the parallel job of a life time. The two pictures below are the front and back of our car taken moments apart ... and yeah, that's about a combined 8" of room.

Back:

Front:

I've been known to be rather hard on Christians for a wide variety of reasons and, while I hold to many of those reasons and think there's many lessons for us to learn if we going to be able to connect with people who aren't just like us, the past few months serving at Christ Lutheran here in Denver have been a wonderful reminder of just how wonderful God's people can be.

There have been cards that show up in my mailbox or on the pastor's desk from a wide range of people, continual words of encouragement and thanks, offers to bring dinners up when Anita had her accident, babysitting, tickets to DU hockey games, and then, this week, the gift of a scooter that a family didn't need anymore, but thought would be perfect for us to use getting around downtown.

But it's not the stuff side of all this that's blowing me away, it the thought that goes into it. Seeing the scooter in the garage and thinking, "Hey, the Burnham's only have one car, they could use this!" or people going out of their way to drop off a card or a meal. It just leaves me in awe of how wonderful God's people can be, and I can't help but think that, if those outside the Church saw this side of the Church, it would go far in changing people's perceptions.

Well, the great car debate that I posted about last week is over ... actually, it's been over for almost a week but I just didn't get around to taking pictures until this morning.

We went with the Fit. It's the perfect urban car in that it's small and mobile which is great for parallel parking, it's environmentally friendly with the low emissions and the 30+ miles a gallon it gets in the city, and works well for the family because it's very roomy inside, has a great safety rating, and is a Honda so, in about 17 years, we'll be able to hand the keys over to Robbie so he can take it to college.