When we were at Animazement, there was this guy who was talking up the Anime Weekend Atlanta art show to one of the people in our studio. He talked up the Artist's Alley at AWA. He told her how much they'd like to have her.
So, we decided to go. We registered for the con, we got our hotel room lined up, we did everything. Except the actual Artist's Alley, which wasn't ready. So I sent in email to them asking questions about the size of tables, and how much it would cost for two (because we have four people and a LOT of art to sell). And asking about the registration process, and whether we needed to fill out one form for the studio or one per artist.
And...
Nothing Happened.
Until they announced that registration is closed and they've filled all their tables.
They didn't write back. They didn't contact us. They didn't bother to respond, at all. Not to answer our questions, not to say "well, if you're going to register, hurry up". Nothing. We just heard nothing.
So, now we're screwed. We have $80 in con registration, and hotel reservations we may or may not be able to cancel without penalties, and we only found this out with about three weeks to go before we were supposed to be on the road. And we have no way to go to the con. Of course, we could just show up. After all, by halfway through the second day of con, they'd be selling tables if there were any no-shows. Which there might be... But halfway through the second day of con is too late to get started if you actually want to recoup your costs.
I've sent email asking for help or clarification, but it's sort of a joke. We already know they don't answer email.
(Update, on September 9th: We get to go anyway, and it wasn't really their fault..)
Well, one of them wasn't exactly overheard. A bit over ten years ago, I was walking outside the movie theater at HarMar mall. (Yes, the same one where I saw the funny sign.) There were a couple of people up ahead, talking and laughing. And the guy said something to the girl, and then he walked up to me, and said "You know what? I love this girl. I really love her." And she giggled and blushed, and they walked on their way.
I doubt I've gone so much as a week in the last decade without thinking about that day. I tell that story to people, and I guess in a way, it doesn't even matter that I don't know what happened, or anything like that; in my heart, they are always in love, and they are always reminding me how rarely people share their love with strangers.
A friend of mine told me another story, about people in a relationship, sharing it with strangers. They were stuck at a stoplight, and the strangers couldn't help but overhear them. In this case, the guy was screaming "You bitch! You cunt! You just don't think!" That saying, too, became immortalized - mostly as a phrase to be recited in a monotone in no particular context, where it's actually pretty funny.
But... Someone said that, too. And meant it. And, eternally, that woman is out there being yelled at. Was she even aware of the bystanders hearing this? Did it matter? Did they reconcile, or did they drift apart? We don't know... But it will always be a part of the world that these kinds of things happen, and that people will share their anger, their hatred, with strangers as well.
Now, you have two stories. Your task is this: Tell people one of them. Which one would you rather pass on? When you choose, you are making a small claim about which kind of world you would rather live in. You are reminding people of one kind of life, but not another.
Me... I think the sad story has been told about often enough. It's sort of useful as part of making a point, but it's just a sad story. It doesn't need to be told anymore. But... I dunno. Somewhere out there, there's a guy who told me how much he loved "this girl". I don't even know whether he's still alive, or he still remembers. But I do. And I tell people this story, and I think it reminds them that there are things worth saying.
(This post removed from CF by request of a moderator.)
Wasn't all that long ago that Christianity was "classified as a cult".
If I can talk to someone about what Jesus wants us to do, and we find that we are on common ground, and discuss the importance of the Sermon on the Mount in our personal lives... I'm not gonna call his belief system "a cult". I may think it's weird or strange, but lots of people think the stuff I believe is weird or strange.
Everything I've heard people say about Mormons, I've heard said about Catholics, I've heard said about Nondenominationals... We've got people who go to churches which adhere to the Nicene Creed, but match every legal standard you can think of for being a dangerous cult, with mind-control techniques, vicious enforcement of the whims of their leaders, obscene wealth (and I really do mean obscene), and everything. But, although their church is clearly "a cult", they're "good enough".
Honestly, I don't care whether or not the LDS are "a cult" in some peoples' eyes. The way some of the "real Christians" treat them here is an abomination and a defilement of the board, and is some of the most horrifically bad witnessing we ever do. I'm not arguing with the desire to defend the Creed; I'm arguing with the personal attacks and willful cruelty that have been coming along for the ride in some posts.
Conversations are best taken totally out of context.
Rah: "I can't be on the phone long, it's cold out, and I'm only wearing a sweatshirt."
Seebs: "Well, put some pants on, woman!"
Did you know that, while the Sprint PCS network may be able to transmit the sound of a pin dropping, it cannot accurately reproduce girlish laughter? I know that, now.
So, when I went to Meeting tonight, I noticed a pup tent in the coat closet. Brightly colored tent, maybe three or four feet long. Red and blue. With pastel blankets in it. I asked one of the other Friends about it, and she said "a little girl lives there".
I think I know this girl. A few weeks back, a couple of people came into the meeting, with a little girl in tow. It's not every day someone brings a kid who's probably six or seven years old into a meeting where she will be expected to sit in respectful silence for the best part of an hour. It's probably even rarer that the expectation is met. She sat down in the chair next to her dad. He reached over to pat her, and she held his harm. After a bit, she wrapped her arms around his arm, rested her head on it... and didn't fall asleep. She was just content, not tired.
For the remainder of the meeting, I was amazed at how happy this girl was. Lots of little kids are anxious or nervous or hyper. She was content. She knew where her dad was, and he wasn't going anywhere, and that was enough.
After the meeting, when we did introductions, they explained that they were visitors from Ohio, come looking for work and sanctuary. Apparently, there is some dispute over whether they (who have raised the child for the last six years) or someone else should be keeping this child. In Minnesota, the courts will tend to favor the people raising her. As, I think, they should; it would be unthinkable cruelty to take this little girl away from her daddy. She's old enough to miss him, and young enough to need him.
If I've figured this out correctly, they are staying in the meeting house until they get themselves established in a new state. This is a good thing. It is right that a little girl should have a place to stay. It is right that a church should be a sanctuary, not just in some vague and general sense, but in the specific sense that there are people who need a place to stay and have found one.
But now I'll always think of her as a churchmouse. I am considering finding my copy of Margot Austin's wonderful children's stories about a churchmouse, and lending it to her, or possibly giving it to her. Little girls in strange places should receive books from time to time.
So, I got another embedded systems gig. This time, it's actually more a network appliance thing; firewalls, built on Soekris Net4801 boxes. These boxes are great. Three ethernet ports, one serial, power, USB. CF drive for booting from. Pluggies for a standard notebook hard drive, and a second serial port, and a MiniPCI slot for expansion.
Which means nothing to most of you. Let me put it another way:
A computer about half the size of the keyboard you're using (unless you're on a laptop; then maybe 2/3rds), which can sit around being a firewall for a fairly big and loaded network, or do all sorts of other stuff. All-in-one wireless access point and firewall? No sweat. Wanna add a small personal web server to the mix? It can do that too. With room to grow. I wrote about this once, although that was with the older Net4521 box.
This is, in short, a little toy computer, designed for doing all sorts of networky things. It's designed to be a totally reliable box that just does one thing, and does it well, and does it quietly and without further intervention once you've set it up.
Right now, I'm setting up a pair of them for a consulting customer, to work as redundant firewalls. I am sort of bummed, because I thought "hey, this'll take a few hours, I can afford some hardware to work on it with". Then it turned out to take two hours. Oops. So, if anyone wants some consulting done on Soekris 4521 or 4801 hardware, look me up - I have investments to recoup! I am actually collecting these cool little embedded systems. I also dearly love the Technologic TS-5500. It's the same generation of hardware, roughly, as the Soekris 4521, but it's a VERY cool board. More serial ports, and - more interestingly in some cases - one of the optional expansions is a VGA and keyboard/mouse board! Only one built-in ethernet, so it's more aimed at data collection than firewalling, but you can add USB gizmos.
In short... There is a certain elemental delight to having a computer which uses less power than a standard lightbulb (and, in fact, less than most compact flourescents), needs no fan, runs for months at a time without rebooting, does EXACTLY what you want it to, has NO MOVING PARTS AT ALL... It's nice. And it's a lot of fun to play with. I have tons of ideas about what to use these for. Maybe I'll do some of 'em some day.
(Another repost from ChristianForums. The original thread is here.)
A lot of people seem to have the idea that "salvation" is a process where you have no fun in your life, in the hopes of being rewarded with an afterlife which is also no fun, but at least you're not on fire.
This misses the point.
Let me tell you about salvation. No, that'll never work. Let me show it to you. Come, then. Let's set the Way Back Machine for the lovely spring of 2002, and meet our test subject. Is she saved? Is she unsaved? We don't know. We are about to watch the process of salvation. Being saved is not a state, but a process. Trying to pick a moment misses the point.
So, let's start out. Our subject is a non-denominational Christian, who lives in constant fear. Let's look at a few things she's said. Because the Search feature is broken right now, I'll paraphrase.
"I believe that all non-Christians are possessed by demons all of the time, and most Christians are possessed by demons some of the time."
"Certain movies contain demons, which can possess you if you watch them."
"Please stop promoting Satanism." (In reference to a discussion of D&D.)
"I am afraid that I will sin without knowing it and go to Hell."
In short... She is living in constant fear. The world around her has precious few islands of marginal safety, surrounded by raging waters. Demons lurk behind every door. Animation could contain hidden messages. Occult powers are a constant threat. And, most importantly, the entire world is dominated by sin. There is, at this moment, no escape. Any action must be studied carefully, lest it turn out to contain a hidden element of sin.
And yet... She is tired. She is tired of living in fear, tired of hating things, tired of being judgmental and angry. She wants peace. She begins to talk to people who disagree with her. She's angry at first; hostile, judgmental, quick to condemn. Many people react, perhaps justifiably, with hostility or condemnation in return. A few are more patient.
And here, a miracle occurs. She is able to see that the peace these people apparently possess is available, also, to her. She takes her first halting steps. She decides to play a game, not because someone else told her it was okay, but because she personally considered her convictions and concluded that she was not convicted against it. She began to consider the possibility that there was such a thing as legalism -- and that some of her own reactions were a kind of legalism.
Looking back, now, trying to sort out the order of events, is difficult. It is easy to see the overall shape of things. It's like watching time-lapse photography of a flower blooming.
I remember, once, when she lashed out at the Catholics, condemning them, attacking them. She was briefly banned. During this time, she sent me a note, asking me to please apologize. She'd done it to try to impress a guy. She understood, now, that it was wrong.
There's something important here, though. She didn't expect forgiveness. She wasn't apologizing to make people like her again, or to make people treat her differently. She was apologizing in the desperate, sincere, hope that, if people knew she didn't mean it, that she was sorry, that they would be less hurt by what she had said. There was no concern for the consequences to her.
This is true repentance.
People talk a lot about repentance as a part of salvation. Repentance doesn't mean being afraid you'll go to Hell. It means not caring what happens to you, accepting the consequences of your action, but wanting the harm you did to others to be undone, to be made up for.
When she came back, there were changes. You could see them. When someone started a thread on interactions between divorce and abuse, she stood up and said that an abused woman should leave, and take her kids with her. When people tried to shout her down with prooftexts, she didn't yield. You could still shout her into submission on her own account, but she would not be dissuaded from defending others. She wrote a simple post explaining that the dogmatic adherence to an abstract principle, when it harmed people, was simple legalism, not Christian morals.
When I read that post, I nearly wept for joy. I saw, then, that she had started being healed. You could hear the angels singing, exalting.
As time went on, she became braver, and stronger, and wiser. Much, much, wiser. Someone who was once an object of ridicule for her beliefs about demons and occultism was becoming a serious and respected poster. But, ultimately, the process was not an intellectual one; it was a spiritual one. She who had been held captive was now free. Psalms 68:18 comes to mind; "Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast led captivity captive:"
One day, she became a moderator. A user who, a year earlier, would have been widely feared for abusing her powers became one of the most fair-minded and conscientious moderators. She didn't just hand out warnings; she talked to people. She explained the board policies, and worked with users to help them express points without violating rules. She worked ceaselessly on proposals for improvements to the board, and was a major participant in discussions about the health of the board.
As time went on, she found herself more free to pursue interests that she had once been afraid of. Television and books that had once been sources of terror became hobbies, things to pursue quietly, and in moderation.
It would be easy to assume that she simply stopped thinking things were wrong. It would be foolish, too. Her conscience, freed from the endless task of worrying whether a book might be possessed by demons, found strong convictions on many topics. She came to find herself in opposition to war as a basic mechanism of social policy. She ran afoul of many people who called her names and attacked her, but she stuck with her convictions. She did not condemn those who disagreed; she merely disagreed, politely, and showed the reasons for her positions.
In short... She replaced fear with love, and judgment with careful consideration.
Looking at her today, we see a woman who knows who and what she is, makes moral decisions with confidence and grace, and who is more patient, more kind, than the majority of members at this site. While once her life revolved around sin, and attempts to avoid any possibility of accidentally sinning, and fear that God hated her, today her life revolves around her love for God and neighbor.
This is salvation. This is freedom. This is finding joy in life. This is loving God, not in the sense of slavish devotion to whatever some guy preaches on Sundays, but simple and direct joy in both Creator and Creation.
She's taking a break from this board for a while now. It turns out that the environment here is pretty hostile to a woman who is unafraid to admit that she is bisexual, whether or not she's celibate. She eventually tired of being called a pedophile, and called, well, lots of other things, many of which I can't write without the censor filter going off on me. She tired of people saying that same-gender attraction is a sign of damnation, or a barrier to faith.
But... They cannot take her faith, because she knows who she is, and she knows how God feels about her.
Anyway, just a shout out to my friend Susan, whose salvation happened, right here, on ChristianForums, over the last couple of years. It's still happening. She's still out there, somewhere, loving something a little more today than she did yesterday. Where once she was angry and defensive, now she is humble. She helped me fact-check this article, aware simultaneously that it would make her look bad, and make her look good. But, ultimately, if talking about her life will help people understand her faith, she will share what she can.
That's salvation. It happens here, not just in the afterlife. It happens to real people, not just to guys on TV wearing expensive suits. It doesn't always mean being delivered from drugs and sex. It doesn't mean becoming a strict literalist. It just means exactly what Christ promised.
John 8:32
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
A postscript for readers who don't know any of these people: Susan was, indeed, a moderator at ChristianForums. A day or so before I wrote this, she wrote her coming-out post, admitting that she was a bisexual woman. Not a woman who sleeps with other women; a woman who acknowledged that she had these desires, although she had chosen not to act on them. The reactions were many and varied, but... Knowing how many people would be quick to retroactively condemn her because of this, I wanted to share the joy, the wonder, of knowing her. To let people know that, of CF staff, she was one of the best, the brightest. She was better than the people who gossip about her sexuality, she was better than the people who joke about her and attack her behind her back. And to explain this, to show this... I had to explain how it happened.
So I did.