Blog bugs

For those of you who use Internet Explorer to view this blog, I apologize that the title is cut off. I'm not sure why the silver blogger nav bar above it is on two lines instead of one. If anyone has any ideas I'm open for suggestions. Hopefully I will be able to fix it soon. It all shows fine in Mozilla. :) And if anything else looks weird, please let me know! Thanks. :)

Have courage for the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones. When you have laboriously accomplished your daily tasks, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

Victor Hugo

at the bottom looking up

the day's been long. parts of it have been hard. it's hard to grasp that you can experience highs and good things one minute and suddenly be brought low the next. without warning. how one little thing, or word, or look, or thought can start a snowball down a hill that grows and grows and crushes your soul. it's been a long day.

Thinking = sin?

Wow. I was reading some past posts on another blog today. The author was asking hard questions about God, wondering, thinking, trying to get a handle on her beliefs. I don't know that I agreed with everything she said, but I believe she had the right to wonder, to think, to ask questions. For years I have been afraid to do that; mainly because of my strong evangelical background. Not that I didn't want to - in fact I questioned silently - never expressing the things that bothered me. Never talking about the things I didn't agree with, the things I had serious questions about. Why the fear, you may ask? Because of precisely the attitude I saw in this comment responding to her seeking.

"I think you people need to get prodigal, return to the fold, and allow God's Word to be your guide. You guys think too much - just trust your local preacher at a Bible-based church.

Please understand this was written in love, the love of Jesus Christ, so you can repent of your selective unbelief. My prayer group and I will be praying for you!"

I don't know this gentleman, but he followed this comment with a couple more. I am not shocked - as I said, this is why I never talked about my musings. But I am saddened that there are still people out there that don't allow others to wonder, and learn and grow. That don't understand that we are free to wrestle with the hard things - not trying to break free of God, but to understand that he give us room to push the boundaries while still holding us safe in him arms.

To blindly follow a local preacher is to not use the intellect God gave me. To blindly follow is passive, comfortable and stupid. I will never own my faith that way. I will never internalize and make it my own. It will never truly be mine. I will never understand why I believe what I believe. People like this man are the reason we are finding such a crisis with our churched youth today. This is why we are losing the young demographic at an alarming rate. Rather than teaching them to blindly trust us and the rules and regulations that may or may not be right, we need to give them the basics, the underlying principles, and then encourage them to think, and make their faith their own. To make their own decisions about why things are right or wrong. To understand the reasons for the directives God gave and then apply them to their lives. Without the struggle they will never be a truly developed child of God. Do we want them to be a caterpillar, chrysalis or a butterfly?

OK - off my soapbox. Sorry, this person just hit me way wrong this morning.....

Reliant K(aren)

So, my internet went down again this weekend. Unbelievable. This is the third major outage in a week and a half. I know it's gotta be intermittent at other times too. Why it chooses the weekend to crash is beyond me. Now, today I am at work and can finally check my email and blogger is having problems. Aargh. Wow, I guess I depend way too much on what I get from the internet. I'm gonna try and post this - cross your fingers that it worked. And that the cable guy got the cable fixed at my house also. If so- I'll be back up and running with e-mail soon. I hope.

Update: well, they "fixed" the internet (Cable) and it worked great - for about 4 hours. Now it is down again. And I pay for this torture. So, for the 4th time in a week and a half someone will have to take off work to wait for the cable guy.....
So, again I say, if I don't respond to an important e-mail - call me!

It happens all the time...it's just easier for me to pretend it doesn't....

Wow – I was really frustrated today. OK, I was mad today. And sad. My daughter and I were out in the community picking up bags of food from porches for our food drive to help the local food pantry. Last week we passed out bags, and this week we went back to pick up the food that was left for us. Last week as we walked around the neighborhood we saw several police cars patrolling. We saw them again today. We wondered if they were watching us. We were driving slowly, taking things off porches, doing u-turns and not wearing seatbelts. Pretty suspicious I guess… We drove by the police several times and every time I was uneasy – but apparently we must have passed some test. They left us alone.
Not so with G and M. They were picking up in the same neighborhood as we were. The difference? They were African American. It made all the difference. They were stopped by the police and questioned. They were not doing anything different than my daughter and I. We had as much exposure to the same police officers as they did. Yet apparently some profiling was going on, and they were stopped and questioned and checked up on. It made me sad. I felt bad, and even embarrassed, both for them, and for the police. Not sure where I’m really going with this. I just know that I hurt deep inside for G and M and it made me really angry……

interesting......

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 51 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

the 36th most popular female name? Huh? Maybe years ago.....
As for my family - there are 79 Christopher Gerbers, 2 Kelsey Gerbers and just my one little ole Carissa Gerber. I always knew God broke the mold after he made her....LOL.
Christopher is the 13th most popular guys name.
There are 16 Kim Gerbers. Of course, statistically, most of them are female....

"I got the music in me..."

So, tonight I went to the high school orchestra/choir concert. Listening to the students sing it really hit me just how much I miss choir. I think I have been ignoring that fact, repressing it, but last night there it was, and I couldn't deny it. Unless you've been part of something like that you really can't understand all the facets, all the nuances of making this kind of music. I miss the music: the melody, the harmony. I miss listening to each other, the working together, the blending of voices. I miss being part of a larger being that creates together; taking all those individual voices and becoming one integrated voice with shading and depth and dimension. I miss all the feelings and emotions it elicits. The joy, the freedom, the places it takes you. I miss the rhythm getting inside you, becoming part of your heartbeat. I miss the beauty. I miss the pain. I miss it all. Just sitting there soaking it in, I realize just how much music is part of me. And I miss that form of expression. I miss making music.

Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.

David Lloyd George

Can you hear me now?

There is nothing more frustrating than your internet being down for a couple days. Well, maybe there is, but not to me. I feel like my lifeline is cut off. Is that addiction or what? Anyway, they came out yesterday to fix it, and then last night it went right back down. Which sucks - cuz I use email more than the phone to communicate with people. So, finally a smart trouble shooter pulled up our modem records and found out that indeed we are having an extraordinarily high amount of intermittent outages. Duh..... So, they are supposed to come out again today and "fix" it. With notes that it is intermittent - so spend some time with it, and that the "homeowner" is getting frustrated. LOL. Hope they fix it, cuz I won't have the availability to check on stuff from work over the weekend. So - if you really need me, and I don't respond to your email - call :)
Bright side? Imposed rest from blogs and email. Down side? Imposed rest from blogs and email. ;)

Where do I begin?

My head is full of things rattling and crashing around. Thoughts tumbling over and over irritating the edges of my sanity. It's difficult to try to bring order to the chaos. Or even attempt to be linear in my thought process. It's all tangents and rabbit trails. And nothing ever gets resolved, or even managed. Each small, seemingly inconsequential thought gathers speed and snowballs. The thing that sucks is, there is no time to just be alone and think; to deal with the thoughts, ideas, questions and theories. And so they all collide in one great jumbled mess until I can't find the beginning or end of any of them. Exhausted, I stagger under the weight. Giving in, I throw my hands up in frustration.
Where does one find silence and solitude when one has a family and a job? A quiet place where one can just hang out with God and rest and listen? A place where one can just BE?

This makes me Smile! :)

I don't know who Matt is - but this guy sure makes me smile! :) Apparently - according to a blurb I saw on him, in 2003, he quit his job making videogames in Brisbane, Australia to go walk the Earth, like Caine from Kung Fu. He made this site so he could keep his family and friends updated about where he was. Matt realizes that Caine from Kung Fu probably wouldn't make a web site about walking the Earth, but he accepts that there are certain ways in which he and Caine differ. Any way his first video can be found here.
Enjoy!

Some Things to think about.......

Rich Young Ruler
Derek Webb






poverty is so hard to see
when it’s only on your tv
and twenty miles across town
where we’re all living so good
that we moved out of Jesus’ neighborhood
where he’s hungry and not feeling so good
from going through our trash

he says, more than just your cash and coin
i want your time, i want your voice
i want the things you just can’t give me

so what must we do
here in the west we want to follow you
we speak the language and we keep all the rules
even a few we made up
come on and follow me
but sell your house, sell your suv
sell your stocks, sell your security
and give it to the poor

well what is this, hey what’s the deal
i don’t sleep around and i don’t steal
but i want the things you just can’t give me
i want the things you just can’t give me

because what you do to the least of these
my brother’s, you have done it to me

‘cause i want the things you just can’t give me
i want the things you just can’t give me

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *



A King & A Kingdom
Derek Webb



(vs. 1)
who's your brother, who's your sister
you just walked passed him
i think you missed her
as we're all migrating to the place where our father lives
'cause we married in to a family of immigrants
(chorus)
my first allegiance is not to a flag, a country, or a man
my first allegiance is not to democracy or blood
it's to a king & a kingdom

(vs. 2)
there are two great lies that i’ve heard:
“the day you eat of the fruit of that tree, you will not surely die”
and that Jesus Christ was a white, middle-class republican
and if you wanna be saved you have to learn to be like Him

(chorus)

(bridge)
but nothing unifies like a common enemy
and we’ve got one, sure as hell
but he may be living in your house
he may be raising up your kids
he may be sleeping with your wife
oh no, he may not look like you think