for the love

I found this website through Jonathan Hickman's blog. It gives your blog a rating (like movies) based on a quick scan for key words and how many times you've used them. Guess what mine is rate?? Duh. The best part was the explanation it gave for my rating: This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words: shoot (1x) Yah, I'm really bad about using that word...

Several years ago I spent seven weeks during two summers working at my childhood Bible camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Sometimes on my days off, I would borrow my friend's car and explore the dirt roads that snaked between the mountain, cutting memories into my mind and leading me to breathtaking overlooks, private residences, and the all too frequent dead-end. I credit this car-loaning friend with introducing me to the Indigo Girls. This duo writes songs more closely resembling poetry than any other songwriters I've ever heard. As I traveled the endless options of left and rights and forks-in-the-road, these women would provide a soundtrack that, for me, became synonymous with those two years of my life. Today my iPod played for me Love's Recovery. Though this was probably the 500th time I had heard this song, I admit this is the first time I've ever bothered to listen to the words. I think I have a new favorite IG song: During the time of which I spea

It's my blogaversary...or something. One year ago today I wrote my first post here. I didn't even have my blog open to the public. I was afraid for people to read me. A couple of weeks later, I made my blog public. I thought it would be ok if someone 'happened' upon this. But I didn't want anyone I knew to know. A couple of months later I left a comment on my sister's blog, outing myself not only to the blogosphere, but to my world. To people I knew. To people I knew would read this. It was a little scary, but I wanted to do it. A couple of hours later, people were reading. People I knew, and people I didn't know. People were leaving comments. People were enjoying. A couple of months later I found NiT . A couple of months later NiT found me . A couple of months after that I met people from NiT. A couple of days later we became friends. Ten months after I started blogging, I accepted a city-writer spot at 451 Press . Around that time I also bought my firs

Ivy sits alone in corner at the back of a bar (yah, like that happens a lot). Enter Kerry Woo. Kerry and Ivy contemplate the larger universe which envelopes them. They are satisfied with their findings. Ivy spies her chance to sit next to Justin on the couch. See ya! Kerry, struggling to hide the pain, gives us a brave smile. Life moves on. It's that fast.

When I was little, I remember sitting in church and watching the contribution plate being passed and wondering what it all meant. Even at a very young age, I understood that all things belonged to God because He made them. So it was, of course, a mystery to me why we were giving Him our money. In my mind, God didn't need money. He already owned everything. How could our currency have any value to an all-possessing God? So, as a child, I thought this passing of the money-plate was a strange ritual indeed. Even stranger to me was contemplating how the money got from the collection plate to Heaven. I imagined everyone leaving the auditorium after services, and the lights being cut, and the doors being locked. I imagined the communion table at the front of the room, sitting there all alone in dark, waiting for every soul to vacate. And then, somewhere in the middle of the night, the money would begin to magically float up out of the golden plates and into heaven - a transition complet

I just got tagged. By a cheater, no less. Well, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, and say that he is merely putting a spin on this whole tagging game. You see, my tagger was tagged by someone who said "list 8 random things about you". Then he tagged 6 people (and he was supposed to tag 8 people - see? Eight facts, 8 people.) So John is all like, Joe wants me to list 7 random facts about myself....uh, ok. And then tags 6 people. So the way I see it, I only have to list 6 random facts about myself, and then tag 6 people. Right? And the people I tag would just list 5 random things about themselves and then tag 6 people (because the only constant here is that everyone is tagging 6 people, regardless of the number of random facts they list), and so on and so forth, until the final victim tagee actually does not have to list anything (or perhaps they list a negative number of facts, in which case their would be no final tagee, but an infinite potential for this meme to c

...and some other dude on the left.