So I’ve mentioned that I’m doing a lot of writing at work and that maybe I should use that writing to, like, do something with my own personal blog. I also have a couple of for-realsies blog posts simmering, so, hey, building momentum.

One of the coolest things about where I work is the mission. We’re talking truly life-transforming and belief-shaping. Pornography is the easiest example. Before I started at my job, I found it morally objectionable but was personally ambivalent for non-Christians. (This is my default stance on many issues: I may find a behavior objectionable, but I’m not going to force someone who doesn’t share the basic tenants of my faith to live under my moral code.) Now, almost two years later, my opinions on porn are much more closely aligned with my opinions on drugs. In short: “NOOO DON’T DO IT YOU’RE RUINING YOUR BRAIN YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO HAVE A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP STOP WATCHING IT NAOW!” Seriously. There’s a ton of science behind why it’s just about one of the worst things you can do to yourself sexually. Read more…

personal, religion, society editing, linkedin, personal stories, rhetoric, social commentary, work, writing

…for the Covenant Eyes blog. For anyone wondering, this blog post subtly summarizes 2011 for me.

I’ve actually done quite a bit of writing over the last year, mostly for work. Since this website was at one point supposed to be a portfolio, I figure I’ll cross-post some of the pieces I’ve written for anyone who’s interested.

So! Since it went live on Monday, here are my thoughts on singleness via my workplace.

4 Reasons Accountability is Critical for Singles

“It is not good for man to be alone.”

If you’re at all familiar with this verse, you’re probably used to hearing it in the context of marriage. Perhaps you’ve heard it in a sermon or during a wedding ceremony.

And if you’re living in prolonged singleness, perhaps every time you hear it, you feel somewhat less-than-sufficient for not having somebody. Or maybe the opposite is true, and you have a sense of smug superiority, and you think to yourself, “Relationships are for other people. Me? I can do it all on my own.”

But this verse is about more than marriage. Nobody, not even those who choose singleness, is ever called to do life alone. Jesus always sent the disciples out in pairs, and Paul always traveled with companions. Or consider James 5:16, which says, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed.”

In reality, we singles need to stick together. Those of us who live alone are especially vulnerable to temptation simply because there’s nobody there to walk in on us. So whether our temptations are to watch pornography or to waste our lives on TV or video games or to wallow in bitterness over our lack of relationships, accountability is critical for us to continue growing in Christ.

Read the rest…

personal, religion, singleness, site christianity, linkedin, personal stories, religion, weight, work, writing

This is my local grocery store. More to the point, this is the construction blocking my usual parking spot at my local grocery store.

I was…less than thrilled when I saw this, mostly because this work required a change in the flow of traffic, and also because there was no advanced warning. Most construction areas have some sort of sign, advertising the future site of some building or other. Nothing here, though, just signs telling you that all of a sudden the drive is one-way, and lots of fences and confusion. All this on a busy Sunday afternoon when the students are back in town. Needless to say, it was not the most enjoyable shopping trip I’ve ever had.

A friend called just after I finished unloading groceries. She’d had a bad week and, understandably, needed to decompress. (Among other, more personal things, she was forced to switch offices because hers had black mold.) And she asked me how a rather large personal project was going. (The answer? Stressful.)

And after she hung up the phone, I thought about the grocery shopping experience in conjunction with my friend’s and my stress, and thought: “Construction is irritating and inconvenient. But this means improvement follows. Sometimes the outcome is visible; sometimes it’s not. But it often means good things are coming.” Read more…

personal, religion health, linkedin, personal stories, weight

So. First blog post in over a year. Better make it a good one, eh?

One of my workplace’s traditions is a Christmas decorating contest. We’re encouraged to go all out on decorations, and one day at lunch the executive team will wander through the office, freely accepting bribes. The winners receive things like free bagels for the department.

Here’s the thing about our Marketing department. We are a busy, jaded bunch who manage to squeeze in more stuff than we can probably technically handle. We’ve had a surprising number of bonding experiences and enjoy each other a lot, but we also don’t really know how to justify “fun” (e.g. “decorating”) when we really have about 20 things to do within the next 5 hours. Last year we pulled together a last-second haphazard Star Wars Christmas theme (complete with a tree topped with a cutout of the Death Star), but our judges being the wrong kind of nerds, we (deservedly) did not even remotely place. Last year’s winners were our Customer Service Representatives (they completely wrapped their desks or something); our User Experience department for creating an interactive event focused on the execs’ experience; and the Developers, for going with a “We’re Developers” theme and doing things like a Christmas tree made out of Mountain Dew cans.

So how would a marketing department compete with that? Read more…

fun, shenanigans humor, personal stories, work

Should I apologize for my utter failure to update this blog? I should probably apologize. The truth is, since I spend all day writing for websites, I have little desire to continue doing so in my free time.

In fact, the main reason I finally broke down to write this post is because it’s 4:00 AM, I have the kind of insomnia that’s curable only by sleeping aids or by solving my problems, and I don’t have my work laptop here to work on the new website.

(“Problem solving” insomnia is my most frequent form. I’ll wake up after 3-4 hours with a problem cycling through my head and be unable to sleep until it is solved. Given that we launch our new website on Monday, I don’t expect to sleep much between then and now.)

So: blogging. Read more…

personal memories, personal stories

I should probably mention that even though the Last Rose was dead, there were new buds already growing. I failed to get a picture, but I think there were four. So already the Last Rose was actually the first, though I persisted in the misnomer.

The Last Rose faded to oblivion on a Wednesday. On Thursday, I read Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye? while waiting for the technician to arrive. On Sunday my car died. Long story short, but I did not like the dealer where I took it, so I only had them fix one of the two things that went seriously wrong with it. (It since died again and I got the real problem fixed…another saga for another day, perhaps.)

These things are not why it took me so long to write this post. Read more…

religion personal stories

One of the side effects of having a lit degree is that I see symbolism in everything. Much of my jewelry has taken on a symbolic nature. Or there’s the fact that I literally did not see a rainbow for four years until just after starting my new job. I could rattle off a ton of examples; instead, the best way to explain it is that a friend of mine once described me as the most superstitious person she knows, “but not in a bad way.” It’s one of those side effects of believing in a divine creator who takes supreme interest in the minutiae.

The story of my last few weeks can be illustrated through my roses. I have a few rose bushes growing right next to my apartment door. Note that I had nothing to do with their existence; in fact, as they weren’t in bloom when I looked at the apartment, I didn’t even realize they existed. Over the last month, they’ve become one of my favorite things about this apartment. At least part of that is because of what I’ve learned from them. Since there’s a surprisingly long list, I plan to write several entries.

Today’s story is tied up with my fridge. I started my lease a week before I was due to move in. The first day of the lease, I did three things. The first was to unpack a very small number of items I had brought with me. The second was to start the inspection process (during which I discovered a major leak in the downstairs bathroom sink). The third was to buy groceries, since I was coming from renting a basement and had very few refrigerated or frozen supplies. With these things done, I left and didn’t return again until Thursday.

My friend Ellen came with me that time. “Ooh, you have roses!” she said. I still hadn’t noticed, though they were probably starting to bud at this point. I gave her a quick tour and, in the process of this, opened the fridge door to reveal that the fridge (which, I could tell, was brand new) had stopped running, ruining everything that was in there. A call to maintenance had me pressing the reset button on the outlet. Fridge running, I left.

I stopped by on Friday again, mostly to drop off sandwich materials for the move the next day. I then discovered that the fridge was no longer working and I couldn’t reset the outlet.

There was a rumble of thunder as I called maintenance. (His solution, for the record, was to run an extension cord to the living room.)

Saturday was the move, followed by the discovery that the pilot light on my gas had burned out, meaning no hot water. Monday I lost water pressure in the kitchen sink. The fridge saga lasted until the following Thursday, when they finally brought me a new fridge. A month and a half later, this one still works, but there are a ton of other minor maintenance issues that I’m just avoiding for the time being.

What does this have to do with my roses?

On Saturday, as I escorted my parents out of the apartment, I happened to look at my rose bushes and discovered a little toad, hiding from the heat among the thorns. I think I sat and watched him do absolutely nothing for a good five minutes. It may have been just a brief pause for him; I haven’t seen him since.

But object lesson 1 is this: There is shelter, even among the thorns.

religion personal stories, roses, symbolism

It was the second verse that caught my attention.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

I’ve sung this song dozens of times over the last decade or so. In all honesty, I’ve never been a huge fan. Repetitive, very little theological depth – but then, I was raised on a steady diet of hymns and Rich Mullins and Degarmo and Key. So I don’t actually know why it made me choke up a little today. Maybe it’s because I’m feeling blessed, surrounded by friends, working at a job I love. And every apartment hurdle has been overcome slowly but surely.

This joy lasted until I walked out to my car and discovered it wouldn’t start.

My immediate thought was that it was the battery, since it had died once a few months before. Mercifully, two friends (Alan and Tina) walked out of the church only a few moments after I did, and with their help and the assistance of one of the facilities managers at church, we spent the next 45 minutes determining that, actually, the battery was fine and it was probably the starter.

“Do you have a remote starter?” asked Alan. Well, yes, though I never use it; I had actually taken it off my keychain several months ago.

I called a tow truck and had them take me to Sears Auto, which is mercifully open on Sundays. “It’s probably the starter,” they said. All signs pointed to being able to drive home.

After about half an hour, they came back. “Do you have a remote starter?”

It turns out that something in the remote starter had gone bad and burned something or other out. And because of how the remote starter was wired in, they didn’t feel comfortable doing the maintenance themselves.

Well, then.

If you ever want to hit me where it hurts, take away my car. You’d think I’d be used to it by now; this car is car #3, the first car having died a sudden, painful death, and the second having died an extended, possibly more painful death. I got to be on a first-name basis with my mechanics back in suburban Detroit. This car, remarkably, had largely escaped major problems; it’s needed maintenance, of course (including one memorable repair that spent all but six pennies of my federal tax return), but I don’t think it’s ever left me functionally stranded before.

It hurts. It hurts to have to rely on friends, however willing they may be. It hurts to not have the flexibility to go where I want to go whenever I want to go. Being without Internet was frustrating, but I could still go to work or Panera to go online. But with the exception of Panera, pretty much anywhere else I’d like to go is outside of walking range, and my job is out in the boonies, far beyond the range that I could reasonably ask anyone to drive me.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

I cleaned my car while I waited for the tow truck to arrive. Basically, this involved throwing random bits of rubbish into bags to throw in the trash later. On the floor under the steering wheel I found a single penny.

The story of the pennies is a long one. In brief, it involves me working through some of my debt issues and prayerfully trusting God with my finances. Within a week of making some very important decisions (including the decision to start tithing again) I took my car to the repair shop. I had been planning on using my income tax return for these repairs; though the repairs wound up being much larger than I was expecting, the refund covered it almost exactly. With six cents to spare, in fact. These six pennies got returned to God in that I sent one each to various people who were either involved (directly or indirectly) or needed the encouragement. I think I had planned on keeping one myself – taping it to the steering wheel or something.

It’s doubtful that the penny I found today was one of THE pennies, insomuch as they were ever tangible objects, but still.

God hasn’t let me down yet.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

religion christianity, memories, personal stories, religion

There was, it turned out, at least one advantage to being without Internet. On Thursday I had to leave work early, as my Internet provider was finally going to send a technician out between 4:00 and 8:00 P.M. In my mailbox when I got home was a package from Amazon; I tore into it eagerly and spent the next two hours buried in one of my new books.

The book in question is Carolyn McCulley’s Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye? Noel had mentioned it in church this weekend – had actually asked single people to go out and read it and let him know if it was worth recommending.

The short answer is that it absolutely is. I expect this book to be a treasured resource for me in the years to come, and one that I pass along to all my single female friends.

Read more…

religion, reviews books, christianity, personal stories, religion

I have to admit, I kind of feel bad for akoimeexx. He’s had a rough week. Like, seriously rough. Like, caught himself on fire and got chased by killer bees rough. Like, that wasn’t a hyperbolic statement rough. These things literally happened to him.

And having coworkers like me and Alaina, whose souls have been revealed to be the color of “dark, dark evil,” is never easy.

Alaina has, of course, written up a full report of our shenanigans. In brief, it involves erasing his penguin artwork and stabbing things with a vampire spork.

Again, I kind of feel bad for him. I know what it’s like to be the office scapegoat. (I’m actually surprised I haven’t fallen into that role…yet). And really, I should probably try to minimize the torment of the guy who’s doing much of the coding for the new website at work.

If only he wouldn’t make himself such a darn easy target…

fun humor, personal stories, work