There is a saying: when the rubber meets the road. Today that experience was very painful. It was something like William “Braveheart” Wallace with Longshanks’ torture tools. However, I know this was what God wanted me to do.

I am more than positive that God wanted me to act in this person’s behalf—a person who deserved ZERO. When I laid out specifics, I was promptly stabbed in the back. The whole thing is painful, but my reward will be in heaven (because it sure isn’t happening here!).

We must be obedient to surrender ourselves to extending grace. I say that with all honesty…at the end of a train-wreck of a day. The people you’re extending it to might be a real pain and they might spit in your face. It happened to Jesus.

At the suggestion of my brother and his family, I made another YouTube video about why the book was written. Check it out: http://www.YouTube.com/cherylmosstyler.

Get the word out about the book…read it…THANKS!

We’ve heard this search thing is going to be big some day.

Google or Yahoo are great for finding general stuff on the web at large, but sometimes you want to find real posts from real people, and blogs are great for that. There are blog search engines, but when you search for “kittens” you’re as likely to see an offer to enlarge your mortgage while working at home.

WordPress.com is fast approaching 3 million blogs, with hundreds of thousands of posts and pages being created by our brilliant and attractive users every day. Tags and categories help group the content, but finding exactly what you are looking for can still be tricky. We also feel like you guys are creating some of the best stuff on the web, there’s a natural selection of people tasteful enough to end up on WordPress in the first place. That’s where our new search feature comes in.

Search results can be ordered by relevancy, our magic secret sauce algorithm that’s the default, or by most recent, so you can see the latest and greatest on any given subject. International communities are very important to us, so from day uno we have language-specific engines for every language we support. For example, Spanish search is at es.search.wordpress.com.

To assist in your exploration we analyze related tags based on your search terms, with the most popular related tag at the top.

For those who want to keep up to date with changes to the search results, just subscribe to the RSS feed of the results (at the bottom of the related tags section).

If you are like me, the first question you have is how long it will take for your new posts to show up in search results. I won’t keep you in suspense, the system is designed to have new posts in the index in under 30 minutes, often much faster. The search is powered by a new open source project called Hounder from a company we worked with called Flaptor.

Check out the new search here.

I’ve had inquiries about sin. What about sin and gay people?

As I lick the fried chicken grease off my fingers so it won’t get on the prayer list…maybe I need to tell the pastor that his sermon was great, even though I was making a list of how I want the remodel my house the whole time he was preaching.

Instead of looking outside at others—let’s take a look inside our own house: gluttony, gossip, lying and coveting. And the horses are out of the stalls and down the track…

I’m being a lot sarcastic here, but honestly think about what goes on in most American churches. Lots of judgment about people…eating big meals…talking about people (also see judgment)…wanting that big old gold Cadillac to show how great our faith is…and little white lies (by the way a “little lie” is like being a “little pregnant”).

Then there are situational sins. For example the girl who goes from guy to guy is called a harlot, whore, or fast. The teenage boy who screws around is just “sewing his wild oats”. Sex outside of marriage is sex outside of marriage.

So what about sin? Jesus has enough power to convict a person of sin, and then to change them. It’s all about the heart and what goes on inside. It is between the Lord and me.

I do know that Jesus was concerned about the condition of the heart. All the religious people of his day had the outside issues conquered, but inside they were a mess. And only God knows what is going on inside. Therefore, I spend my day working on my issues and trying to be more like Jesus…

I have a video about the book in YouTube. Take a look and tell others! My video is submitted under: CherylMossTyler and it is called: And You Invited Me In.

Here is more information about the book:

Alex Marshall is dying of AIDS. Over his partner Scott’s objections, he asks his conservative Christian sister, Annie Whitley, to help take care of him. Annie must decide whether to hold to her position of separation, hoping to force Alex to repent of his sins, or go to him without expectations. Close family friend and football legend Jett Taylor insists she will become tainted by the sin of homosexuality if she follows her heart.

I’ve taken my last few thoughts from the last blog and started a new one. Here goes:

Why should a 14-year-old white girl (in 1968) with all the privilege be concerned about people of color? Why should she compromise her safety to stand up for a cause that wasn’t hers? Why should a 46-year-old straight woman (in 2000) who has all the privileges of the straight conservative community stand up for gay people she is barely acquainted with, let alone truly knows—OR risk anything for them? 

After all, my life-long investment had been in my conservative Christian friends and our mutual beliefs. In my local church I had support for my life in every area. I was well respected intellectually because I had gone to Vanderbilt University for my Masters—actually went there on a scholarship and make all A’s during a catastrophic time of our life. When I got the scholarship, my husband had just been diagnosed with a terminal illness, I was 7 months pregnant and taught behavior disordered kids, and had no choice but to push forward and keep going.

On the spiritual side. I got saved the Thursday before Palm Sunday in 1963. God was a significant part of my life from an extremely young age. I went through many many years of being radically conservative. For a period of time I was oppressive to others and to myself. If I prayed and didn’t get my prayers answered then I worried about my level of faith. I’ve been to camp meetings, tent meetings, large revivals and even stood in an Ernest Angely prayer line. But that visit to the gay conservative church in 2000–Church of the Living Water in Nashville, TN–did something profound to my heart.

What did it do? Well, I was expecting straight-bashing. I was expecting a liberal, New Age church that had nothing to do with Jesus. I expected all kinds of strange things, but instead I saw men, women, and even a few kids. So what really made my mouth drop?

First, one person after another praised their partner…I can’t remember the last time I heard such praise about a significant other in my church. Actually in my hometown church the pastor is always “joking” about his wife burning his toast or her knowing every inch of the local consignment shop. (My thought as I sat there was: wow, if only my church would have people praise their spouse like this!).

One woman had gotten saved and was fasting the two weeks before her baptism so she would get everything out of it that God had for her. (My thought was: wow, if only we straight Christians took our baptism so seriously.)

The pastor actually spoke to me for at least ten minutes after the service with many guests in attendance. I can’t tell you the number of churches I go to and the pastor is looking just over my head to find the next person they want to talk with. As well the members took time with my kids for a nice buffet of food. They have never looked on them as children but as people who were valuable to their church even at a young age. A few years ago on the spur of the moment the girls and I dropped by on a Wednesday night. They were discussing a chapter from The Purpose Driven Life, my eight-year-old’s comments and ideas were allowed during that class (all the congregation was there). My thought right now…this same daughter has desired for over a year to participate in the worship team at our regular church. However, in this church to be part of the team you have to be 18 and she is 11. Hum……

And finally at Church of the Living Water they loved Jesus. They wanted ALL of Him. They didn’t want boundaries, and everyone pushed to embrace all of Jesus they could get. I never was taught that a group of gay people would want more of Jesus. It seemed like an oxymoron, and after a planned short visit, I had an unquenchable thirst to find out why because this went against all I’d been taught.

It was at one of these Bible studies…you know the Bible study where my church friends were warning me that I was listening to the devil and being deceived…that I found out many things we straight Christians need to know. There are people out there in the gay community who think they are going to hell because that’s all they hear from us. It doesn’t matter if you don’t say it or don’t exactly mean it like that, but that is what they hear.

As I struggled with what I’d been taught vs. what I was seeing and hearing at Church of the Living Water, the Lord began to reveal things to me about people who were highly esteemed in my regular church. Gossip, for one, is a very common problem in all our churches. I wrestled for weeks about all the things that any conservative would think, but I keep coming back to two things: When Samuel was going to anoint the new king of Israel, God told him not to look on the outside, because He looked on the heart. The first thing I learned was that we cannot judge a man’s heart—that is God’s job. Number two: When the day is over and we’re taking account of our day, the one thing that matters most to Jesus is that we forgive and extend grace. It is what he did for us.

These people at Church of the Living Water were “inside the house”. I wanted to be with them. They had a hunger for Jesus that I wanted to recapture for my life. I had begun to feel that my faith was more routine than experiential. Once inside the house, I knew it was where God had taken me, and then I learned what it was like to live as a gay person in a straight, conservative Christian community. Not that I was gay, but because I was now in their house. If someone game in with gun to “kill all the fags” I would have been shot, but it wouldn’t have mattered because God was showing me things. And I began to learn about grace.

Grace…..Our faith isn’t in the number of Cadillacs in our yard or in the number of people who have been healed by a huge ministry. The devil can mimic all of that. One thing old Satan can’t do—the one thing that only people saved by grace can do is love unconditionally. And that’s what being inside the house is all about for me.

Today is the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s death. I can remember where I was standing when I heard about it. I can also remember the reaction of those in the Deeper South a few weeks later. We lived in the South, but were in the Deeper for a visit with friends. I helped the girls babysit, and we were miles away from the grown-ups. You see, LBJ had declared four Sundays after his death as a time of mourning. Well, in the Deeper South they didn’t like it when that preacher honored the President’s request. And we were babysitting for the preacher on a Saturday night.

Have you ever been terrorized by the KKK? We were. And because it was a tiny community, the terrorists (aka KKK) had to know the preacher wasn’t at home. It didn’t matter to them, they just had an agenda of harassment. I did feel threatened, but looking back I didn’t feel like waving a white flag for my safety. I think I knew we had to go on…protecting the children and standing up for what is right in our simple teen way.

Well, digressing a bit, but along this same plane I just saw Now I Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. I can see how this movie would upset my conservative fellows. But they don’t know what it feels like to be ”inside the house”.  

Chuck and Larry is a very real look at what happens to people. For those who haven’t seen it, it is about straight men who “marry” to get insurance benefits. Their friends start shunning them. I’m not LGBTQ in any way. However, back in 2000 when I began associating with the gay Christians—well, there are not enough adjectives to describe the pain, shock and feelings of betrayal that surfaced because of my Christian fellows who thought I was “listening to the devil” or “being deceived” or even in sin. And I started being shunned.

I discussed this in some of my original blogs. I just went to meet someone I had been dialoguing with on the Internet, and I wanted him to associate a face with the e-mails. I tried to find him at the local gay bookstore, but I couldn’t find the bookstore. Now I know it was God that kept me from finding the bookstore. It was my destiny to go to that gay conservative Christian church. On the other hand, it was their destiny, too. The LGBT church members were abuzz with “why does a straight woman and her children visit the church?” They decided they needed to accept anyone who came through the door. I felt like I needed to make a return visit through that door. In the meantime I started geting ultimatums…

Those ultimatums felt like the night I was babysitting at the preacher’s house. I decided that I wouldn’t let people harrass me. In fact one of the things I asked the Lord to let me feel the same rejection that my gay friends felt from our (i.e. straight, conservative Christians) crowd. God answered immediately and I felt totally rejected. I felt like Larry (in the movie) being asked to not come on a camp out or Chuck not having anyone to play basketball with anymore. I couldn’t believe that same people who had sought my advice for years were suddenly giving me ultimatims to “return” to the church and get my life right. And in the midst of all of that I knew I needed to stay in the house…take the bullet and identify with these new friends who did nothing but accept me for who I was with no conditions. I wanted to learn…

Unfortunately I learned more than I bargained for when I drove to that church on May 21, 2000. I just wanted to talk with a man for a moment—God gave me the opportunity of a lifetime. He opened doors of understanding of where the straight community needs to wake up. The first awakening issue is this: gay people are people. They bleed blood and cry tears. Their hearts break when they can’t spend holidays with their families or they are asked to leave home because of their orientation. And God is very sad when we can’t see the pain for the rules—church rules, neighbor rules, whatever rules.

God has heard the cry of their heart…why can’t we? Why are we conservatives on the outside of their heart saying hurtful things in the name of Jesus. Don’t you know that He is right there with them? And Jesus wonders why when he died for our sins that we can’t remember to extend grace…period…extend grace. Live by grace, eat by grace, walk by grace.

Why should a 14-year-old white girl with all the privilege be concerned about people of color? Why should she compromise her safety to stand up for a cause that wasn’t hers? Why should a 46-year-old straight woman who has all the privileges of the straight conservative community stand up for gay people she barely knows? Grace….or, as Dr. King said, the connectedness of our lives. If I don’t love you with the love of Jesus, then what does this say to people inside the house?

Today we’re pretty excited to launch a new dashboard design to everyone here on WordPress.com.

If you have a few minutes, try clicking around and exploring the new layout and features. It’ll be unfamiliar at first, but like riding a bike you’ll find yourself picking up new habits and cruising down the road in no time.

Those of you who follow the wordpress.org side of things probably saw the sneak peak that included several screenshots, the screencast of the new gallery feature, and the exhaustive list of features from the 2.5 release announcement. Now those improvements are available to you, including a few cool bonuses like a blog switcher menu on top.

Here’s a brief rundown of the features that are relevant to WordPress.com users:

Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard — we’ve worked hard to take your feedback about what’s most important in the dashboard and organize things to allow you to focus on what’s important — your blog — and get out of your way. In collaboration with Happy Cog and the community we’ve taken the first major step forward in the WordPress interface since WordPress.com was created.

Dashboard Widgets — the dashboard home page is now a series of widgets, including ones to show you fun stats about your posting, latest comments, stats, people linking to you, and we’ll allow more customization here soon.

Multi-file upload with progress bar — before when you would upload a large file you’d wait forever, never knowing how far along it was. And uploading more than one photo was an exercise in patience, as you could only do one at a time. Now you can select a whole of folder images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.

Now you can put that 3gb of free space to good use!

Search posts and pages — search used to cover just posts, now it includes pages too, a great boon for those using WordPress.com as a CMS.

Tag management — you can now add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress.

Concurrent editing protection — for those of you on multi-author blogs, have you ever opened a post while someone was already editing it, and your auto-saves kept overwriting each other, irrecoverably losing hours of work? I bet that added a few words to your vocabulary. Now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done. You’ll see a message like below.

Friendlier visual post editor — I’m not sure how to articulate this improvement except to say “it doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” We’re now using version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular attention this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML. It also now has a “no-distractions” mode which is like Writeroom for your browser.

Built-in galleries — when you take advantage of multi-file upload to upload a bunch of photos, we have a new shortcode that lets you to easily embed galleries by just putting [ gallery] (without the space) in your post. It’ll display all your thumbnails and captions and each will link each to a page where people can comment on the individual photos. I’ve been using this feature on my blog and have already uploaded over 1,200 pictures into 23 galleries. The shortcode has some hidden options too, check out this documentation.

In light of the launch, we’re also going to be keeping support open this weekend so you can let us know of any issues that pop up as a result of the new design. This new dashboard being out also allows us to roll out some other improvements we’ve been holding off for a bit as they didn’t make sense before. Keep an eye on this blog next week.

March Wrap-up

• 298,194 blogs were created.
• 381,855 new users joined.
• 2,242,997 file uploads.
• 3,225,059 posts and 1,420,975 new pages.
• 5,622,696 comments.
• 4,418,407 logins.
• 636,024,114 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 347,679,330 on self-hosted blogs. (983,703,444 pageviews total across blogs we know about.)
• 863,470 active blogs, where “active” means they got a human visitor.

Stuff White People Like and I Can Has Cheezburger have been topping our Blogs of the Day charts for some time. Now the New York Times reports that both of those blogs have received book deals. “Stuff” apparently got a $300k advance. The books based on their blogs are due out this Fall. Congratulations to both of them!

(PS: This is not an April Fools joke)

I still say be radical in love. Love beyond reason. If you have reason to doubt this, then read I John. Let me quote the last two verses—this is from the New King James Version…

I John 4:20 If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? 21 And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also.

…I know that this was a common phrase used when I was a teen to inspire us to do more for Jesus. I generally interpreted it as being more radical about proclaiming Jesus at school. Going to the mall and witnessing. Standing up for Jesus…

If you get real still and truly consider what Jesus did before the crucifixion: he ate with the tax collector, he mingled with the women and all others who were the outcasts. He generally befriended anyone who wasn’t considered religious.

In our culture we promote ”staying with believers to remain strong”. Therefore, if I spend my time with Sissy-Sue and she is a regular bar hopper, and we go out, then there’d be strong questions about my commitment to the Lord. Right? Of course, because bar-hopping isn’t considered a religious task. 

Therefore let me throw out some questions…

1. Look around at your friends…how many of them challenge your beliefs and make you dig for answers? Honestly, faith doesn’t come while warming a pew…it comes when you’re in the middle of a crisis and have no where else to turn.
2. When was the last time you considered laying down your life for someone who doesn’t deserve it? (Now is a good time to reference what Jesus did for us.)
3. When was the last time you got a friend (or was a friend to a family member) who was a non-believer or a believer in “sin” and just loved them because you love them–no strings attached?

Jesus gives us all the choice to choose him. He doesn’t reject us in the process when we stray. He doesn’t stop loving us or hearing our prayers because we are upset with him. He gave his life so we could have eternal life.

Therefore to be radical for Jesus is to be like Jesus, and be radical in love. Love beyond reason. Love without a reason. Love without getting anything in return. Love like Jesus loved us.

Grace is undeserved love. It is love without conditions. It is a difficult love. It is a love that will bring criticism….it is a love that will free the heart of people and make you radical for Jesus and radical LIKE Jesus was radical.

Here is a link to an Internet article about And You Invited Me In: http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/2008/s08030136.htm . Hope you enjoy!

Spring is here finally after a long winter of mending a broken leg and various flu-like ailments associated with sick children in school.  I am looking forward to the warmer days. Thanks for reading the blog. Feel free to contact me anytime: [email protected]

I just read that a certain actress-singer said that she was “not a woman, but a force”. It made me laugh because I don’t connect to her “force” through intellect, culture or significant traditions in my life.

There are all kinds of forces: global and local. Most of understand the force of the bully—the people who force you to do something you don’t want to do. These aforementioned “forces” have a certain amount of power within themselves, but they aren’t the force that can change the universe. And atomic bomb can altar things, but it truly isn’t the most powerful force on Earth.

The force I am talking about in the title goes beyond tolerance. It goes beyond all the criminal acts thrust upon mankind. It is called grace. Remember what the Amish people did for the shooter’s family, and that is a picture of what Jesus did for us. It is His footsteps that we are to walk in through our daily lives. The pastor in Colorado did it when he called in the family of the shooter to meet the victims’ family. When you heard what these people did, weren’t you in complete awe of their actions and moved deep within your soul?

This is Easter. Remember your loved ones both family and friend, and become a powerful force in their lives. It is very easy to run off to a mission in Africa or India or China to show love, but what about your daughter you kicked out because she was sleeping around? What about your son who is gay? What about your crabby old neighbor (can you bake her a pie)? As well, maybe you’re the GLBTQ offspring who has been treated without mercy by your fundamental parents. Extend to them the love of Jesus.

Show these people the power of the Resurrection in your life! That’s the most powerful force on Earth.

As I’ve been pondering this blog for the last week, I’ve encountered some job-related issues that make me sad. In fact most people where I work are sad. In the middle of this sadness all kinds of emotions have started popping like firecrackers. Maybe it is a heart exploding because of the stress.

Have you ever seen the movie Billy Elliot? It is a movie similar to October Sky where someone has a dream, and as the result the whole town becomes inspired to help this person accomplish their dream. People come alive and embrace the dream as if it was their own. No one is cranky, no one is sad, and no one is out to make someone’s life miserable because everyone’s heart is too full of excitement about what is going to happen.

When we’re in step with God we’re excited. We aren’t trying to make life miserable for others, but instead we’re basking in His presence. I like those special spiritual moments. I don’t like those antagonized times.

Our view of the world is askew. It may be because of a broken heart or depression and we just don’t feel we have anything to offer. Or it might be because of a person in our life. I had a terrible boss once at a school in another state. She made everyone tremble when she entered the building. If I only knew her as a boss then I’d think all bosses were like her. If a bully or mean girl has made your life impossible, that girl or guy will always represent abuse. 

Today I’m going to address the various fathers my book And You Invited Me In. There are the good fathers like Wayne Whitley and Tom Hamilton (and presumably Truman Johnson). We know the community sees them as an example of Christ: loving, forgiving, a giver of grace and mercy.

On the other hand there is the bad father, Bill Marshall. He is an example of rigid legalism. Instead of drawing their family into their heart through unconditional love, the rigid holds their child captive through fear and intimidation. The “choice” to love is more from the fear of what will happen if we don’t love them. (Samuel Phillips is the transitional father who is moving from legalism into grace).

God doesn’t demand that we love him. Many conservatives paint him as the God of high demands and unyielding rules. My question before my next blog is what kind of father makes your heart joyful? Are you looking at God through the donut hole of past experiences of a bad father or rigid family member? Has a religious person put demands on you that make your heart sad?

God wants us to delight in him. He draws us with grace. He loves us beyond comprehension. As we become givers of his grace (and at times it is very difficult) to those who are different from us we’ll begin to feel the total joy of serving him.

So why the title? If we look through the donut hole our view of life might be marred by our bad experiences. According to my belief, God is my father. If our father was legalistic we view God as a judge who is always ready to smack our hand. If our father loved us no matter what, then we are better able to understand grace. Grace is what Christianity is all about.

….and that will be my next blog….

 (Here I am being interviewed by GCN-TV)

I’ve just finished a very busy week. At times it has felt like I’ve crossed the US on a non-stop trip in a VW Beetle. We started with the National Religious Broadcasters Convention at the first of the week. I was interviewed on a couple of television programs. On one I followed someone who does interviews all the time and was quite animated. Oh well, at least I wasn’t like “The Culhanes” (the people on the sofa) on Hee Haw. It was fun being there again.

School days were full with many meetings. We’ve jumped into testing already. Thanksfully this week is Spring Break.

Hope you have a good week. This is Holy Week and next Sunday is Easter or Resurrection Sunday in my religious tradition. I’ll be blogging throughout the week. Blessings!

 (my oldest tonight in the snow)

For the first time in years we have significant snow coming through. We’ve had a lot of “hope so” on snow, but this is the first big one since 2003. The only regret is that this isn’t happening on a Sunday night so we can stay home from school on Monday. Other than that we’ve had a great time getting ready for the long night of snow fall.

Just like waiting for snow, there are times when we’re waiting for an answer from God, and it seems like it will never come. Remember that God never gives you more than you can handle. Eventually things to swing back in your favor, and there is a time of sweet relief.

One thing my father conveyed to me is that there’s no problem too large to solve. Sometimes it takes a while to figure it out, but nothing is hopeless. Or, as a friend once told me: the Bible says that it “came to pass”. And all these problems will one day pass away. The answers to long-prayed prayers will be here….just hang on!

As for the fun…let’s get out the sled the snow has finally arrived.

One of my favorite plays is Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. What I love about it is that I’m reminded of how significant the small things are in life.

If any of us were to look at our life from God’s perspective we’d probably see that we’ve veered off the course that he set for us as we pursued the big ministry or the big money opportunities rather than the truly important things in life. When we pursue the BIG things we recklessly abandon the real treasure that God has given us.

I have numerous things I can think of from my life, and most would be totally boring to you. These exceptional moments didn’t require money, but time and being with the people who mean the most to me. Here is one: three years ago we were had on vacation in Florida. The girls opted to do one thing, but later truly wished they had gone to Disney World. Our money budgeted for this event was spent so my husband and I went to three—yes, 3—time share presentations to get tickets and money to send the girls to Disney World. We dropped them off at Disney World at four and we had a quiet dinner with a million funny stories to share with friends about our time share experience. Everyone has moments that bring a smile (even though the original experience may have been exasperating such as the old maid aunt who insists on sharing 500 slides of her recent vacation).

If I went back to my 12th birthday—like Emily Gibbs did in Our  Town, I would be living in Tuscaloosa while my parents finished coursework at the University of Alabama. Within three months we would move to our new town—the town I would forever call my hometown. My parents would be young; my dad would still be alive and in good health. Life would still be simple because it was 1966. That summer my brother and I went to see “Shower of Stars” (a concert) in Birmingham and a very young Jerry Lee Lewis went crazy on the piano.

What’s truly important is the same in all our lives: family and friends. Remember these moments with them are our treasures and God put us together in a relationship for a purpose. To allow a temporal situation such as hurt feelings or anger to interfere with that purpose can cause us to de-rail from our destiny with them. And when we stand before God, we don’t want to be reminded of how we recklessly abandoned our treasure.

 (Dad in Japan around 1947)

In our part of the world it seems that people are worried about the neighbor’s opinion. I’ve mentioned my next door neighbor who didn’t take care of his dog. Well, he moved and abandoned the dog on the deck of his house. Therefore, it never mattered to this neighbor what I thought or did.

On the other hand, we all have our close relations with whom we are intimately tied. It might be our family, pastor, or best buddies. As well we might be doubly connected by traditions such as membership in a certain church or organization. Sometimes instead of going with God, we’ll yield to peer pressure just to keep things copasetic. It takes a lot of strength to swim against the the tide of common belief or practices.

Let me share something that happened to me in 1976. My father was almost a “yellow dog Democrat”; however, he repeatedly said voting was our right and to vote for the person of our choice. That year I decided to vote for Gerald Ford. Over dinner I told him how I voted, and he was furious. As we dined on catfish and hush puppies I learned there were conditions on my “voting privilege”.

This issue of a neighbor’s influence is much bigger than voting, and it’s all about doing what is right. Your potential actions may appear radical to your neighbors. As with any radical decision, you can expect questions and looks of disapproval. For example, you tell your church fellows you’re taking the local porn king to lunch—not much will be said. However, if you begin having a regular lunch with Mr. Porn King, then you might hear something like this: Not that we don’t trust you, Bubba, but are you leading him to the Lord or are you there because you…

What happens when you feel God’s tug at your heart with family and friends who are gay (or whatever is happening within your world that needs attention)? Can you enjoy lunch, a ball game, a home decorating show with them and do nothing but love them like Jesus would love them? Remember when he went home with Zacheus? This was an example of perfect love. Perfect mercy. It is like the Amish with the family of the shooter. It is what God would have us do. Our “neighbors” might get a stern look on their face or let out a sound of exasperation. But does it really matter what they think? Remember the words of Jesus in Matthew 22:37-38:

“You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with all your mind, (and) you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 

Consider your gay son who is living in a distant land, and there comes a day when you know it’s time for you to reconcile your rocky relationship. It could be your childhood friend who has asked you to come to her union ceremony with another woman. Remember these people know how much you love God, but do they know how much you love them?

February is the hardest month for me to spell, and also the shortest of the year, but it seemed like as good as any to start our wrap-ups back up with:

• 245,329 blogs were created.
• 432,478 new users joined.
• 1,920,593 file uploads.
• 2,814,893 posts and 996 thousand new pages.
• 4,961,330 comments.
• 3,813,432 logins.
• 540,799,534 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 304,499,648 on self-hosted blogs. (845,299,182 pageviews total across blogs we know about.)
• 726,789 active blogs in February, where “active” means they got a human visitor.

On a less exciting note, last month was the first in a long time where we had unplanned downtime caused by a criminal directing a DOS attack at us. We get these quite frequently and it’s usually no problem, but this was larger and we had to work closely with our upstream providers (Peer1/Server Beach and Layered Technologies) to get things back on track. We learned a lot in the process and should be able to better deal with attacks of this magnitude (estimates around 6 gigabits per second) in the future.

My daughters are beyond wonderful. My heart sings just by thinking about them. There is rarely a moment when we’re out of sorts with each other.

Right now as I write I can smell the turnip greens and black-eyed peas cooking in our two crock pots for tomorrow. We’re having a Southern meal as my oldest is bringing home her friend from Russia. It gives me joy to get ready and make her day (or her sister’s) the best it can be. Consider how much more God loves us…(more to come with this one–give me a couple of hours I’ve got to entertain)…

The meal was good and our guest loved the Southern cooking. However, he asked about grits: “I don’t even know what they are,” he said.

How do you explain grits? I almost told him they were hominey, but unless you know about hominey then that doesn’t make any sense either. Just like grits, there is no way to explain or understand grace even though we talk about it all the time—even though it is the foundation of our faith.

We have a glimpse of grace as with our love for our children. No matter how frustrating or maddening they can be at times, there is nothing we wouldn’t do for them. Now with that in mind think about the people around you. Who is the most difficult to love? Next, who is the most difficult to love without condition?

For me—well, yesterday grace was difficult when I went to church to help with an upcoming mission trip. It was silly, but I got exasperated because the materials weren’t sorted like I would have done it.  A bit later it took 3 hours for an eye exam and to order glasses. Today it’s about the guy next door who leaves his dog out in the weather. We think he’s gone and the dog is without food (we took the bow-wow some). Tomorrow it will be another situation presented to test my “grace response”, and I’ll probably fall short of the mark. I just keep on trying to do what Jesus said: Love your neighbor as yourself.

As I worked toward loving myself less and others more, I began to notice a change within my heart. At the church, my daughter and I ended up working at a table with two older ladies and it was a complete joy to talk with them about art, even though it wasn’t where I wanted to sit. Later when I wanted to scream at the optical place, I persevered to get my much-needed glasses orders, and by the end I found out they were hiring and got an application for my oldest…

….I’m totally amazed at how God can change my heart as he teaches me about grace. 

In a few short hours the Academy Awards will be on television. I haven’t seen any of those nominated for best picture. Generally I like the ones that the critics hate such as Night at the Museum. This year, I understand, that an insignificant, independent film is the one that might win the big prize. It came out of no where and….well, we’ll see…

In the spiritual realm, many times the “sleeper”—the one we don’t pay attention to—is the one who is destined for the big prize. I could make a list of the most influential names in Christendom, or the ones who sell the most books, but do they have God’s ear? Who would be your pick for the person who has access to the throne of God? 

For me it would be Lois. She’s my mother’s good friend who, because of circumstances, can’t even be a Christmas and Easter church attender. Nonetheless, I can see God looking around when he hears her voice in prayer, because he is eager to talk with her. Why? Because she has nothing else to trust in but him. He gets her through terrible situations and sustains her through the most violent of storms. Her heart is totally fixed on him—and I know that he is equally fixed on her.

God wants our willing and committed heart. He wants us to be examining ourselves so that each day we’re willing to refine ourselves to be totally surrendered to him. It isn’t the big prizes here on Earth that are important. It is all about knowing him….knowing him like we know our best friend, our child, our husband…and loving him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.

If you’re interested in reading And You Invited Me In, check with your local bookstore such as Barnes & Noble or Borders. As well you can purchase the book from Amazon.com. Thanks for dropping by—read my posts about how the book came about, and how the Lord moved in my life during the time it was being written. Happy reading!

This is a picture of my youngest daughter and of course I’d take a bullet for her. But that wasn’t what God asked me. I was sitting in a church with a group of gay people, where if a gunman had come in and asked for all the straight people to leave I could have left. BUT as I sat there thinking about being vulnerable to outside irrational people (and this was in 2000, before so many of the recent, senseless shootings) I realized that this was my epiphany–my moment about what unconditional love truly means. Then I thought: Would I refuse to leave or would I walk away to be safe?

Back to 1992 when the landlord died and the months thereafter when I pondered the issues of the conservative church when it comes to being more than a talking head, I sent out a questionaire for persons in the gay community to complete. The questionaire was sent to the local AIDS clinic and the Metropolitan Community Church. I asked numerous questions about who Jesus was to them. I expected all kinds of far-out answers. I had been taught that gay people worked outside the realm of truly knowing God. To my utter shock I got back scores of replies of solid salvation experiences, as well as stories of deep hurt from their childhood churches. More than one said that when their former pastor saw them walk down the sidewalk, he crossed the street to avoid them.

After 1993 something would periodically come into my life to teach me more about absolute grace. I can’t say everyone on the face of the earth has my undying love. I can’t honestly say I’d take a bullet for Charles Manson–I haven’t been in that position to even consider it, but who knows I might be some day.

Yet in our individual lives there’s someone that makes them totally unlovable. Maybe it is a child who refused to submit to a family rule and was asked to leave home. Maybe it is that son-in-law who is a violent man with his wife and children. That new boss who is an ogre, or the people next door who leave their dog outside in the middle of an ice storm with no place to go for shelter. You know the type of situation that makes you so angry that you want to grab them by the collar and ram them against the wall.

Then there are other situations where someone has caused deep hurt: A friend who betrayed you, or worse that spouse you left you with nothing but bills and a broken heart. And while they are living the grand life, you’re having to work three jobs just to keep the lights on for you and your children. Those are the tough places. Those are the places that many times the church isn’t there for you and your heart feels more pain.

It is at this place of deep pain that Jesus is waiting for us. He’s there and is doing all he can, but where are those people in shoe leather who have the arms, hands, legs and feet to accomplish the task? Many times they are absent. And this is the place where my story begins…a cry for those people to wake up and attend to the pain around them. Pain that is present within their group of friends. It’s easy to run to Africa to have a ministry, but what about the gay couple across the street? Can you be a plain friend without any sort of conditions?

I sat in that church that evening, and thought about how vulnerable I was. I was in a conservative city with a group of gay people. Would there be a rogue village idiot who wanted to make a name for himself and “kill all of those people”?

Frankly, I’m a majority member of most classifications like white, female, etc. I don’t have to worry about crazy people who want to “pick off” a certain sect. I can travel quietly, and really lead a simple, unseen life if I wanted. But on that day, I realize that the question in my heart wasn’t a question of my own making but a question that God had placed there for me to consider.

The gay pastor of this church had never had custody of his son because the judge wasn’t going to “take this child from a legal home and put him in an illegal home.” The judge never appointed a guardian ad litem for this 16-year-old (yes, at 16 he was never given a choice as to where he wanted to live). And in his “legal” home he was seriously abused. Here is the kicker: a fellow conservative said to me “Are you sure he isn’t better in his home with two real parents?” WHAT? How can someone even suggest this? I was appalled. That reaction was a mild in comparison to my disgust when a pastor friend said that he couldn’t talk with a mutual friend because he was gay and his “sin was too great.”

There are many other stories. However, God used this and other situations to show me what it looked like “from the other side.” I don’t mean from a non-Christian standpoint, but what it looks like from the gay world when conservatives mount a political attack. (Hint: they don’t see Jesus in us, because we’re being political and not spiritual). As well, what does it look like to the woman who is being abused and you look the other way because church doctrine calls for “no divorce except in the case of adultery.” What does it look like to your child who knows you’re dedicated Christians and you’ve told her she can’t come home until she changes? Are you taking the bullet for these people?

So, yes, I knew I had no choice but to take the bullet for them. I (the one who wouldn’t have dinner with a gay guy because it went against all I believed) decided that day I would sit along side of them if a shooter came in. My love wasn’t conditional on acceptance by anyone other than God. 

“A bullet” might not be the one from a revolver, but instead a social bullet that will isolate you from your friends who really don’t agree with your decision. Several quotes come to mind at this point….Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail: “I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustic anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Mother Teresa said: We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwated, unloved and uncoared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.”

And You Invited Me In is a novel about how to heal the impoverished soul that has been deeply hurt, and “take that bullet” to let them know just how much we care. 

Here is a link to my website with information about the book: www.AndYouInvitedMeIn.com

There are absolutes in this world. The sun does rise and set. And as well gravity plays an important part in our daily lives.

In my early days as the “conservative of Conservatives” I believed there were all kinds of absolutes for people who crossed spiritual boundaries into sin. Most of my conservative friends believed the same way. I can’t remember a whole lot of sermons preached on “absolute grace” or “absolute forgiveness.” Since I had asked Jesus into my heart when I was eight, and I didn’t have a long rap sheet of sin. Therefore, the idea of “grace” was more intellectual than experiential.  

One recent event that comes to mind when you speak of grace: the shooting at the Amish school. The Amish community embraced the family of the shooter and grieved with them. There was no reason for the Amish to do that except that Jesus has done it for them. He did it for all of us, and how can we do anything less? 

Loving my daughters is easy because they love me back and grace isn’t difficult. But what if someone took their life…I’d have no choice but to forgive and extend to him/her the same grace that Jesus has given me. Sometimes the offense isn’t as high profile as a murder. It may be someone who has hurt your feelings, or someone who has rejected you. Maybe you are the rejecter and need to go to that person and ‘come clean.”

The final example in my life about grace and forgiveness came about almost 20 years ago. A close friend—”Jill”—and I had been at odds. I had stood firm in a situation where Jill wanted me to help her. If I had, I’d have stabbed another friend in the back so I didn’t do it, and as the result, Jill had a great deal of hurt.  

I was barely a month pregnant with my oldest and we were on our way to my hometown. A friend was riding with us and he mentioned Jill’s anger toward me. He said “the Bible says if you have ‘an ought’ against someone, you’re to reconcile…” and he continued with “the Bible never said whether you’re right or wrong, it just said that you need to go to them.” 

I stewed about it, but the next week I wrote her a note. Eight months later, on the day my baby was due, Jill called me to apologize. She said she had torn up my letter in anger, but over the course of the months she realized she needed to call.  

Writing to her was the right thing because of my commitment to Christ. Just like the Amish did the right thing with the shooter’s family—because of what Jesus has done for us, we can do no less. Truly there are absolutes in our walk with Jesus: grace and forgiveness.