I love my new Firefox theme! It’s called, “Red Cats (blue flavor)”, and anyone who loves cats should go download it! It’s also available in green, if you prefer.

So, yes, that’s right, now everything in my browser is a cat! Cat buttons, cat icons..it’s fantastic. Well, it’s fantastic if you like cats, anyways. If you hated cats it’d probably make you throw up…

Today was our last Sunday. Calvin gave a particularly good Sunday School lesson this morning, and the students were exceptionally attentive and engaged. We sang some songs, and then the Pastor preached a good message, as he almost always does. And then…we left. Without even one goodbye. The only family that appears to care that we are leaving didn’t say goodbye, but that is because we have already mutually agreed to continue getting together, and so it’s really not goodbye for us. But…no one else. Not a single student. Not a single adult. So we just…left.

Calvin pointed out to me that he noticed I didn’t give the church the finger as I walked out, as you may remember I once posted I wanted to do. (Although as I mentioned to him, that was in the context of the Church, capital C, not our church specifically.) I thought about that some more, and honestly, I really didn’t feel like it. I didn’t feel anger or bitterness toward the church or anyone in it as we walked out. Just grief. The same, deeply embedded grief for the Church and its state that I have always felt, and which has now touched my life in a very real and personal way. I could only feel sorrow that this was how it turned out. And broken-hearted for the students who were the indirect victims of this situation, who must now ride out yet another wave of changes they didn’t ask for. And I felt sadness - sad that no one cared enough even to say goodbye.

I never thought things like this were supposed to happen to normal people. You know, lay-leaders. Volunteers. And certainly not to us. And though we weren’t “pushed out” of the church, those who believe we (or specifically, Calvin) would have been better suited to other ministries delude themselves; eventually, they would have realized they didn’t want us in those either. They would have never found a place for us they could be satisfied with, because of a basic philosophical belief that no one seemed to want to dialogue about. A philosophical stance that suits Calvin and I and our giftings, and one that doesn’t make us the typical Youth Pastor and wife. Nor the typical anything in a church. And most churches…well…they don’t want atypical. They want the stereotype. They want you to fit into a mold. We would never have fit into a mold that they set forth. And that’s okay. I’m sure they’ll find someone who will.

But meanwhile, we will search for the place that can accept us for who we are and what we’re passionate about. I’m not sure if a place like that exists. Through this, I think Calvin and I have become even more “radical” in our philosophy than we were when we came here. This situation has produced some good: we know even more than before where our place is, what our giftings are, and where our passion lies. We know what we are strong in and what we are weak in. It has certainly been a learning experience (though not quite what I had in mind when we said that’s what this would be!). I know that I, for one, will never again play the Christian game for the sake of the approval of man. There is wisdom, and there is deception. There is shrewdness, and there is insincerity. I am more than willing to be gracious and understanding of those who have not reached the point I am at in my faith and understanding of the Bible, and I will not be a stumbling block to those people, but at the same time, I will not be fake to do so. I am me, and no one else.

If we can find a group of people who can accept that, we will be golden. Once again, I’m not sure a place exists in this area, and that is my fear. But we will try. And what happens if there is none…? I don’t know. Calvin and I, with God, will cross that bridge if we come to it. I am, and fear always will be, a loner in American Christian culture, which is merely a sanitized copycat of secular culture. I am after something deeper than most people want to go. I am not after perfection, I am after genuineness. The star is always just out of reach…like grasping for the wind, in the words of Qohelet.

I pray that it will not always be so.

Wow, that was pretty good.

You Are 23 Years Old

Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe. 13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world. 20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what’s to come… love, work, and new experiences. 30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You’ve had a taste of success and true love, but you want more! 40+: You are a mature adult. You’ve been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.

I started a new category, because the post I wrote yesterday didn’t fit into any other category. And “Uncategorized” is just boring. So I dubbed it, “Sortofgeeky,” because I am not really a geek, but sometimes I do geeky things, like play RPG’s and read fantasy and write in HTML. And I like Star Wars and Star Trek.

And I really, really, really like Firefox!

I remember, a long time ago, it was at least 8th grade, maybe even 7th, when I first set up my website. I remember getting the brilliant idea that I, yes, even I, could have a website too! And in my Internet travels I happened upon Geocities. Ah, yes, Geocities. I remember surfing through the little neighborhoods, trying to decide which theme would fit my site best. I really liked the concept of separating the websites into little communities based on themes. They even had community pages highlighting websites, etc. It was kinda fun. And so I set up “On Wings of Love”, my very own personal website, at the location of Paris/Parc/8940. Paris was the romance district, I believe, because back then I was a hopeless romantic. I like to think I’m not hopeless anymore, but still a romantic, I think, just in a different way. At any rate…

I remember the first horrid site I built with Geocities’ simple page builder, with a bright red background and stark white lettering. Oh, it was awful. That didn’t last long. I knew it was horrible, so I purchased The Idiot’s Guide to HTML (now, it’s The Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Webpage and Blog). And with that book, I taught myself all I know about HTML, which isn’t extraordinary, but it was enough to get that blinding site off the Internet and at least get some decent graphics. I remember my second try: a pastel background with light roses brushed across it; I found some free graphics that kind of matched and sprinkled them liberally across the site. And there, On Wings of Love 2nd Edition was born. It stayed there for awhile in that form, with some of my love poetry, a page with links, and some cute lovey dovey quotes, and then, one day, I discovered a plethera of free Christian themes.

The hardest part about all those bordered themes was that I couldn’t decide which one I liked the most. So, if you visit my site now, you will see that every section has a different theme. I think the main page has a different theme than it had at first, but I can’t remember what it looked like at the present. Anyways, somewhere in there it made the transition from “On Wings of Love” to “On Wings of the Morning,” a site less about love and more about God. I wrote some random essays of my thoughts on different subjects, more poems, and began a section with lots of prooftexts (though I didn’t know that then). Then I went to college, and the site has been sadly neglected ever since. The biggest change during college was a new section on the Psalms that I began for my Counseling Youth class, but have never gotten around to finishing. I discovered borders a little too late, my husband tells me, but all the same, I am proud that I was even able to get them to work.

And so, somewhere in my college years, the site began to become a little more scholarly. Now, it’s a mish-mash of what it used to be and some bright prospects for the future, if I ever get around to re-thinking and (the hardest) re-doing it again.

What got me started on all this was that I randomly decided to visit my website, and got extremely annoyed at Yahoo! for putting those confounded ads that take up half my page on my site. I can handle a little banner at the top, but these things are just too much. Yahoo! really messed up Geocities when it bought them out. Geocities was a neat idea, an interesting concept - now it’s just another free webhoster with gargantuin (sp?) ads. So I’m sitting here thinking dark thoughts about Yahoo! and hoping that one day someone will revive the Geocities concept. And wondering if there’s somewhere else I could host my site…