Revelation comes at the darnedest times.

I was sitting in one of my early meetings yesterday, and we were discussing how our ward is growing (which is good), but the people who are coming in, do not have transportation (which is bad), and the church handbook specifically forbids a ward to acquire a vehicle, such as a bus, to transport people to church like our good cousins the Baptists do (which calls for ingenuity).

We had a move on Saturday, and this is the first elders quorum I’ve known in a long time in which at least two members of the elders quorum presidency do not own pickup trucks. We are an inner-city ward, and there might be three pickup trucks in the entire congregation, or in the part which comes to church.

So I was sitting there, listening to the brethren discuss how to pick up several families who truly want to come to church, but don’t have a car or live on the bus line, and what came into my head was, “I think my next car is supposed to be a mini-van.”

I’ll wait for my children to pick themselves up off the floor. Obviously, this will have to wait until Lorelai is paid for, and it presumes that she would still be running. I have no wish to run all over greater Dallas/FW in a mini-van.

That car would sit in the driveway six days a week, unless I were ferrying singles to activities. Perhaps the reason I have been given this promotion and raise is not so much to take care of myself, but so I will have the means to lengthen my stride (as President Kimball used to exhort us) and help out people who are as stuck and helpless as I used to feel.

I pulled up Carmax and priced mini-vans that are 2005 and newer. [I felt somewhat better after I arranged them by price, and not by year of manufacture.] Then I went to my Excel spreadsheet and calculated that Lorelai should be paid off in late February. At my current rate, the line of credit should be paid off in late September, and all that money can start flowing into savings for the first time in nine years.

I went to Firstborn’s for part of the evening and had a lovely time watching Jack Sparrow and Will and Elizabeth. Took the scenic route, by way of the old, bad apartment and yes indeed, there is a 6’ chain link fence all the way around it. There is also a security guard who came up to inquire what I was doing there. I told him I used to live there and asked if it had been condemned; he said it hadn’t. I said that it should be, and he said that it wasn’t his decision, that it is all up in the air. Some people want to buy it, and some people want to tear it down.

This may be the only time you catch me agreeing with Gaston: kill the beast!

@ Murr: the abbreviated version of my M-day rant is this. [In modern English: your dad was right.]