Ode to the Internet

This is part of a series on Stones of Remembrance as I remember the hand of God in my life.


Around the turn of the century my family finally went "online." We dialed-up our connection through Juno and had a monthly allotment of minutes. I more than used my share of the family's minutes reading and posting and interacting with "strangers" on a small Christian message board I had found by entering "I love Jesus" into dogpile.com or AskJeeves.com during the pre-Google-centric web.

That little piece of the internet was instrumental in my life and the initiation of a greater domino effect. The posts people wrote challenged me to think outside of my own view of the world and of God. It was the first place I discovered people who lived out their love for God in different ways than me. I met people there who became friends (and that doesn't sound near as weird today as it did in the year 2000 when "friends" and "internet" in the same sentence made you sound like a weirdo). There are a few of those people with whom I still regularly interact and I've met some in person. The message board is still there though I haven't posted in years. I'll forever be grateful for that little piece of the internet.

I was introduced to the idea of blogging, or an online journal/diary as it was called then, through a member of this message board.

I started blogs/diaries at a couple of members-only blog sites. This introvert who loves to process things through writing found a way to pour out my thoughts, the boring details of my day, and all the dramas big and small of my life to a surprisingly supportive audience.

Over ten years of online journaling has allowed me to know a small group of women whom I count among my closest friends and wise spiritual council. I hesitate to name them for a I know I won't name them all, but I do want to be a little specific, for you see, this is one of the only communities in my life that has remained relatively constant. There is my immediate family, my closest friends (that I didn't first know online ) and then these women. They know my story and I know their's. We have cried together over broken relationships, lost babies, and parents gone too soon. We have rejoiced at weddings, births, jobs, homes, and goals achieved. Our lives have criss-crossed across continents and oceans. Many of us wrote through our college years and those scary first steps into the real world. Those of who can, see each other in person when the opportunity arises. (I've been blessed to have a few of these women in my home, and wish I could have us all over at the same time for dinner!) We have been brutally honest about our flaws, rejoiced with abandon about our victories, and have let each other be the first to "hear" those precious things that were easier to write rather than say.

People say you can be fake online, and you can, but you can also be achingly authentic. That is a beautiful gift of this pseudo-anonymity that can become community if you let it. These women are a vital part of my encouragement and my spiritual community.

Way-back-when when the Internet was a new thing and scary to many people, I heard a Christian leader say, "If you're on the Internet at 1 a.m. then you're doing something you shouldn't be." My face flushed with embarrassment and shame, I became momentarily sad and questioned the places of community I had found. I soon realized that while the speaker had good intentions warning people away from the potential evil found in the anonymity and secrecy of the world wide web, he had no idea the type of beauty, knowledge, grace, and community that could be found on the screens that connected the world.

This stone of remembrance is for the Internet and its profoundly positive effect on my Christian faith.


Other Stones of Remembrance:
Scripture in My Childhood
The Church That Built Me
Friendship
Meeting Together
When You Return: Faith Refined

The Church That Built Me

(Taking a break from Feminine Fridays this week to share a series on Stones of Remembrance as I remember the hand of God in my life.


While I've grown to have a somewhat progressive theology/political side in comparison to my conservative upbringing, the church in which I spent most of my first 25 years gave me feet and gave me wings. Between normal church things and showing up at the building for everything from helping out the secretaries to hiding from tornadoes during southern storms, I spent more hours in that building than any other building of my life with the exception of my homes.

I can't begin to count the number of positive things that church did for me: from teaching me to love the word of God to giving me opportunities to be a part of the church, a part of a community, in various ways. I could probably spend an entire year giving weekly posts on just how much I was blessed, taught, and grew through the ministries and people of that church. Today, though, I'm just picking two areas that are on my heart.

Children's Choir is my first remembrance of learning about missions and serving others. The choir director took the time to teach us about music and notes as well as about people who served the Lord in different ways. My love for serving others started there as she told us the story of a young girl who longed for blue eyes like her family, but found one day that her brown eyes gave her a valuable tool in ministering to girls sold into slavery in India. To this day, that brown eyed girl - Amy Carmichael - is an influential person in my life.

I never was involved in the theatre department at my schools, but in Children's choir I got to sing and dance around on stage as we performed an annual musical that told the stories of Jonah, Nehemiah, and Josiah. One year it was the story of some kids camping in the woods with Psalty (a big, blue, anthropomorphic songbook!), and still today, twenty years later, when I am anxious and worried I find myself singing, "I cast all of my cares upon you. I lay all of my burdens down at your feet. And anytime I don't know what to do, I cast all of my cares upon you."

In youth choir I gained confidence as we stood in lines down the side of our long, narrow sanctuary and sang into the center. Our voices drifted above the heads of the congregation creating a harmony, but those seated near me heard my voice stand above the rest. Other times, I learned the different harmonies and melodies of a song as I worked together with the other youth and our choir director to master the notes. The directors loved Jesus, knew music, and had standards of excellence. I was part of a group and I remained an individual - learning my part, singing in my spot. The symbolism moved me even then. My voice is thoroughly average, but being a part of the choirs and having the chance to regularly take the stage and lead in worship gave me confidence and an understanding of my part in the body of believers.

Another influential ministry in my life was the youth ministry. My youth pastor and his wife are both wonderful people who love God and loved us. There were many positive things in my life that started in youth group, but I want to focus on one aspect here today - something called "T.E.A.M.S." It stood for "together everyone accomplishes more serving. The youth pastor had a thing for acronyms! The youth broke into different groups and were responsible for a variety of things in the youth group: organizing events, welcoming people, praise band, etc. Not ground-breaking I'm sure, but I got to be involved in my church community! I joined the prayer team and under the guidance of a college age volunteer, a few teenagers met faithfully each week and we prayed. Oh, how we prayed with such earnestness and passion and belief. I remember kneeling in a circle on the floor of the church prayer room praying for long stretches of time as our knees ached under us and we eventually stretched ourselves out with faces to the ground. In the beginning, we took time at the start of our meeting to talk about requests and such. As time went on, we just prayed from the very start of the meeting

When we took youth trips, the prayer team got a copy of the retreat schedule and scheduled in prayer meetings during the free times. We woke up before the trip and met at Waffle House at 5 a.m. to pray before we left. We were not pretentious, we were not chatting and goofing off and gossiping. We prayed consistently and were in tune to the hand of God and able to see how He was moving in our church. It was an awesome experience and a memory I that I cherish and one that convicts me about the state of my prayer life now. I am thankful for the wisdom and the leadership of my youth leaders who saw fit to tell a bunch of teenagers that they needed be a part of their church and that they needed to pray.

The summer before my senior year of high school I went on a mission trip to London. A number of my fellow prayer-team members were on the trip as well. Once we got to London and met up with a number of other teens there for the week, they divided us into teams as well. Not all, but a large portion of the group from my church joined the prayer team. We walked the streets of North London, talking to shop keepers, letting them know we were praying for them and their town, and asking if they had any requests. That week is only snapshots in my mind now, but I remember a boxing gym and the man who owned it, watching another youth kneel down next to a homeless man and offer him his lunch and then a prayer. I remember men with large turbans wrapped around their head selling us fruit from a cart and us trying to heed the instruction of our leader to contain our eager evangelical selves, respect the culture and the work of the resident missionaries, and to just talk and then later, pray. I learned a lot, in those streets of London, about respecting others and trusting God to work in the hearts and lives of people.

In moments of cynicism, my oh-so-evolved adult self finds it easy to dismiss those moments and many like them as sentimentality and naivety. There are some moments that stand out as glaring examples of what not to do. (A weekend that unleashed a couple thousand teenagers armed with the latest in Gospel Presentations Method upon an unsuspecting town being near the top of the list.) However, I know that my heart and passion was pure. I learned how to pray in my youth group. I was blessed to be witness to the hand of God moving because I was taught and given the opportunity to be still and to ask that I might see Him.

Since that time, there have been seasons of prayer and seasons of lack of prayer in my life. No matter which season though, I know that prayer is powerful and I find myself either reveling in the beauty of the still small voice or longing for it. The songs of my childhood come, often without invitation, into my mind and continue to remind me of truths.

There is a country song about your childhood home and how the singer wants to go back to the house that built her, certain that if she can see it and touch the walls then something will click for her. I have similar feelings when I return to my childhood church when I'm in my hometown for holidays or other events. The walls hold memories and many of the faces are still familiar. While there are things I absolutely love about my sort-of-nomadic life and the ability I get to start fresh and new and as a blank slate to a whole new host of people every few years, there is something special about being greeted and hugged by people, by a community, that nurtured me from childhood.

This stone of remembrance is for the church that built me.


Other Stones of Remembrance:
Scripture in My Childhood
Ode to the Internet
Friendship
Meeting Together
When You Return: Faith Refined

Scripture in my childhood

This is part of a series on Stones of Remembrance as I remember the hand of God in my life.

The memories are piled in my mind like a box of old photographs.

The picture on top of the pile is little brown haired me with awkward bangs leaning close against my mother. It is Sunday morning and we are two pews from the front of the church. "Backrow Baptist" was a foreign concept to my family. I loved to sit next to my mom and flip through the pages of her Bible as the preacher talked. There was an intricate system of colors and symbols filling the pages of her Bible. The page would be covered with triangles and circles, clouds and underlines. Highlighter marks of varying hues made the page a colorful piece of art. Notes and dates in the margins gave testament to the years of growth and learning.

Flipping through the pile of photographs in my head and here's another fond memory. My brothers, my father, and I are seated around a large kitchen table that fills the small eat-in kitchen of our home. Our breakfast plates are pushed away, school lunches sit packed on the counter, and the sun is just peeking through the window of the back door. We each have a Bible opened before us. Dad would lead my brothers and I in reading chapters of the Bible verse-by-verse, each of us taking a turn to read. Our mouths grew confident in pronouncing the King James wording and we'd occasionally have discussions on the verses, but mostly I seem to remember we just read and the words moved from our mouths to our head and our hearts.


And this memory with that same kitchen table - I'm perched with my knees in a chair and elbows on the table peeking at my parents' notebooks full of diagrams of the statue in the dream in the book of Daniel, the tabernacle, or a chart depicting the Kings of Israel. They memorized verses for Master Life and talked about Experiencing God. I feel as I have always known that the statue had clay feet and that the priest entered the tabernacle with a rope tied to them so they could be pulled out in case the presence of the Lord simply overwhelmed their life.


I shuffle through the pictures in my head . . .

I catch a glimpse of my brothers and I singing along to a kids' music video, Beloved, let us love one another . . .he who loveth not (clap! clap! Clap!) knoweth not God for God is love. Beloved, let us love one another. First John four seven and eight!

In this one we are in position for our little family Bible Drill. Palms flat against the covers of our Bibles, poised to race to the exact location my father calls out.

Here, a photo of Strong's Concordance and I fondly remember that time third grade me asked my Dad, "Is such and such ok?" and he pulled that heavy book off the shelf, taught me how to use a concordance, about Hebrew and Greek, and we flipped back and forth between definitions and passages and studied that topic.

The words of God were ever present in my childhood. Bibles lay close by and were often opened. The words became audible as my parents spoke them, often seamlessly, into conversations about daily life.

They laid up the words of God in their heart and in their soul. They taught them to their children, talking of them when we sat in our house, and when were walking, and at night and in the morning. The words of God were written on our walls. (Deut 11:18-20)


This first stone of remembrance is for the blessing of a childhood with parents that sought the word of God and made knowing and understanding that Word a priority.

Other Stones of Remembrance:
Scripture in My Childhood
The Church That Built Me
Ode to the Internet
Friendship
Meeting Together
When You Return: Faith Refined

Nailed It Down

I am a "cradle Christian" as they say. I toddled around church nurseries and have filled a pew most Sundays for almost thirty years. My mother tells the story of my three year old self stopping mid-activity, proclaiming matter-of-factly that I was going to be a missionary, and then continuing on with my day. I asserted my little evangelical self as young as third grade when I marched myself to the library in protest of the magic show my elementary school treated us to (but not before telling my brother's first grade teacher that he was coming with me because We Did Not Celebrate Magic). I don't recall her arguing with me.

I had badges on my Girls-in-Action sash that I earned for completing mission related activities each year. I wrote letters to someone named Mrs. Chocolate who was a missionary (though I can't recall where). I took sermon notes filled with colorful illustrative drawings and was Babbie Mason's biggest elementary school fan-girl. (To this day "Carry On" will pop into my head occassionally and I can sing every single word.)

When I got to the youth group, my friends and I petitioned them to allow 8th graders to go on the mission trip so we could go. I went. That year and every year after.

I rocked babies in the nursery and herded four year olds during Vacation Bible School. I joined the Student Leadership Team.

I wasn't faking anything or checking off boxes or going through the motions. I was sincere and honest about my faith. I truly did believe. I tried to live it out in my heart, in my private life, and in my public life.

Despite all that, sometimes, late at night while I was trying to fall asleep I wondered if I was really a Christian. I was fearful that I missed a step.

I remembered sitting on my bed in my childhood bedroom talking to my mom about becoming a Christian. I remember talking with the pastor before my baptism and answering all his questions correctly and getting dunked and coming out of the water with dripping hair. Yet, the fear that I was not a Christian plagued me. I sat through every single invitation, in which the pastor asked those who would like to become a Christian to come forward, with a rapid heartbeat and sweaty palms.

One summer on the first night of camp when I was 16 years old it became too much. I got up and talked with a friend from the youth group and she read me a few verses while my mind frantically tried to figure out what I was feeling and thinking. Eventually I said something like, "I need to surrender my life to Jesus," and she said, "You know what to do." I fumbled through a prayer that included the words to the praise song that was being played in the auditorium. The day was July 18, 1999. Thirteen years ago today.

Looking back, I no longer say that is the day I became a Christian. I believe I was one all those years before when I was "afraid I missed a step." God in his mercy allowed that night to be one that brought me peace. It was a moment that was supernatural with the literal relief I felt filling my body and easing my nerves. Maybe I just needed to say it aloud and to someone else. Maybe I needed to understand something about the anxiety. Whatever the reason, it's part of my story and remains a significant day in my life. As such, I like to take the time each year to honor it and remember it in some way.

I don't want to get into the theology of a salvation timeline here, but I use "cradle Christian" for a reason. I am one of the blessed people in this world who was introduced to Christ as a young child. My faith grew and was nurtured as I grew. I don't know if I have a "day of salvation" when I was suddenly safe when I wasn't before. If I did, it was well before that day in 99. Maybe it was the day when I sat talking to my mom as a child. Maybe it was some day now lost to memory when my young soul knew the truth in a way that children know it. Suffice to say, Christ dwells in my heart through faith. I am rooted and grounded in love and I pray for the strength to comprehend with all the saints the breadth and length and height and depth of that love. I know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge and I am filled with the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:17-19)

Over the next week I'll be posting some "stones of remembrance" pertaining to my spiritual life. Moments that are prominent in my memory for the way they shaped my life. The idea for these "stones" comes from the book of Joshua where the people of Israel are crossing the Jordan River. The waters of the Jordan River were stopped as men stood with the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord in the middle of the river bed and the Israelites passed through. Afterwards, God commands that twelve stones be taken from the midst of the river and set up as a memorial. When the children ask what the stones mean, they are to tell the story of the crossing of the Jordan "so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty, that you may fear the Lord your God forever." (Joshua 4:24)


So, I will tell the stories of stones of remembrance in hopes that "all peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty" and so that I can remember God's hand in my life.

The Stones of Remembrance:
Scripture in My Childhood
The Church That Built Me
Ode to the Internet
Friendship
Meeting Together
When You Return: Faith Refined

Heavy and Full: a love letter to my body

Linking up with a synchroblog at She Loves.


Dear Body,

Your fifth grade classmate pointed out that you were the first to look like a woman. It was not a compliment. You turned your face down in shame. But chin up, dear one. You have always been heavy and full, defying fashion's cute little insistence that a halter top is not actually a neck-breaking torture device. Bursting the seams of life with your wideness and waves that defy the stringent rules of straight lines.

Body, this I promise you: I will not squeeze you, strain you, or compress you to meet an unattainable ideal. I will not wish for another body simply because the world has not yet learned how to embrace your greatness sufficiently.

You have been knit together. Strong and Sturdy. Delicate and Fragile. You will break and heal. You have scars and beauty marks.

I will remind you of what exactly the design of the Creator God has made you heavy and full of. You are full of promise, passion, forgivness, intelligence, and stubbornness. You are heavy with possibility, strength, humanity, courage, love, and, yes, even (especially) beauty.

Embrace the momentum of the passionate Creator and find your heaviness to be a force.


Love,
Me


P.S. And there is nothing, not even a little part, of you that is empty because you have not grown life inside of you and given it birth and nourishment.