(The following was written circa 1999, which is ancient history on the Internet.  References to a devoted wife are no longer accurate, but the remainder is presented verbatim.)

A common question is, "Where did you find your Jeep?"  I found it in the classified section of my local paper.  I looked at several for sale in the area over some time before finding one in fairly original condition.

A not-so-common question is, "Why did you buy your Jeep?"  I bought it as a project to keep myself busy.  It was my wife's suggestion, although I don't think this was exactly what she meant.  If you have some coffee, here is some background.

When my daughter was four, she started acting a little sluggish one day.  It didn't seem like anything serious, just normal kid stuff.  She still had a good appetite, so we didn't think much of it.  After a couple of days when it didn't clear up, we took her to the doctor.  Within the space of an hour, she was rushed to the hospital.  Part of her pancreas had failed and she was close to a diabetic coma.  Until that time, nothing major had seemed amiss.

The fun was only starting when she came home a few days later.  She required a special diet on a strict schedule, multiple finger pokes for monitoring and several shots of insulin throughout the day.  Looking back, those days are a blur.  It took three of us to restrain her for her shots.  After several months, just when we thought things were getting easier, she had a violent reaction in the middle of the night.  She woke up screaming but unable to see, and was convulsing as if some evil, unseen hand was shaking a rag doll.  An emergency injection took care of it, but that still sticks in our mind after all this time.

My wife and I claim absolutely no special credit for her continuing care.  Any parent can and would do whatever is necessary for a child's care.  But I will say I did not take it very well.  I found myself very angry at God.  To put it bluntly, I could not understand why my daughter was being picked on.  While thankful my daughter was still alive and more or less her usual self, I was still not handling it very well.  My ever-patient wife noticed how much it was affecting me.  She will claim she never said so, but she suggested I take on some sort of project to keep my mind occupied.  Maybe she was thinking of new linoleum for the front hall or remodeling the kitchen, I don't know.  But I took the suggestion and ran with it.  Only I brought home an old Jeep instead.

The Jeep project had the desired effect.  I threw myself into it, rebuilding and cleaning and welding and painting, etc.  Time flew by and I had a lot of fun working on the Jeep, getting it back into shape.  I joined the Willystech Mailing List.  I received a lot of help and made many new friends.  One of the most helpful members was Pastor Dave Hatch from Green Bay.  He helped me find many needed parts and most importantly, laughed at all of my jokes.  I thought it was ironic how a Pastor was helping me but didn't give it too much thought.

One morning, my daughter had a pretty rough time.  When her insulin dosages are off, it can make her very sick.  I was feeling pretty helpless as she vomited repeatedly and all I could do was rub her back and hold her hair out of the way.  After she felt better and left for school, I hit the garage to work out some anger.  And it was a pretty good bout, too.

I set to working on the damaged windshield frame.  When mad, working on thin sheetmetal is not a good idea, but that is another story.  Where the inner windshield swings out, the hold-open brackets were missing.  Unless I wanted to buy an entire reproduction windshield, these brackets were not available.   I sent a message to Pastor Dave, asking if he could take some close-up pictures of these brackets for me.  I figured it wouldn't be hard to make my own.  When I saw the close-ups, I knew I was hosed.  It would be beyond my abilities to make them and have them look good.  It just added to my general anger towards God about my daughter's medical condition.

Without knowing any of this background whatsoever, Dave told me to put away my welding torch and wait by the mailbox.  He wouldn't tell me what it was and wouldn't even give me any clues.  A few days later a package arrived and I was flabbergasted.  Sometime during the past fifty-odd years, somebody had cut these same brackets (with a small portion of the frame) from a scrapped CJ-2A.  These extra brackets came with Dave's Jeep and had been sitting since who knows when in a bucket of spare parts.

I sent an enthusiastic thank you to Dave, saying what a fantastic coincidence it was.  Dave's humble reply was that it was instead Providence.  I knew he wasn't talking about the capital of Rhode Island.  Have you ever asked God to show himself to you?  Well, I wasn't even talking to him I had been so mad.  But there in my hand I knew I was holding a  clear and unmistakable sign that everything was under control even when I didn't understand why or particularly like the circumstances.  Two pieces of old rusted metal may not seem like much to you, but there was no doubt in my mind it was how God chose to send reassurance to a gearhead.

I almost didn't know what to do with these brackets.  They sort of scared me at first.  But by next Sunday, my pasty white buttocks were warming a church pew for the first time in many years and I have never looked back.  My only contribution to this fabulous story was to act like an upset, venom-filled idiot.

Here is a close-up of these brackets welded on my windshield frame.  Keep in mind I'm not the world's greatest at welding.  Some days I do okay and other days I should just hang up my welding set and slap myself.  But on that day, beautiful well-formed beads issued forth: