My Church, Maranatha Baptist

This week over at Kelly's Korner everyone is sharing information about their churches. I have about ten blog posts that are just waiting for me to publish them, but I really felt this was something I needed to do first.

I think one of the best things I can tell you about my church, Maranatha Baptist, is that they accept and love me, they love and accept Spencer, and as a single mom that means the world to me. Instead of judgment I was met with outstretched arms.  Maranatha is a young church, but we are a close-knit group of Christ Followers. 

After five years of meeting in a small school, three weeks ago we celebrated our first service in our own new building.  We are eagerly waiting to welcome ALL new guests and visitors!    

 

Pastor Woodburn and his wife, Mary.  I am very close to with them- they are also the parents of my best friend, Sara, and I sometimes forget that we're not actually family members.

 

Scenes from our first Sunday in the new building

Our services are a combination of both contemporary praise and worship music as well as some  traditional hymn favorites

Two members of the Praise Team, and yes, they are identical twins.

If you are in the Richmond/Chesterfield/Tri-Cities, Virginia area, we would love to have you stop by and visit.  If you have kids, great!  There are a lot of children and we have some really great programs for them- Spencer loves going there so much, she'd go every day if she could. But she doesn't call it church, she calls it "Happy." (she came up with that all on her own)  One of my favorite things is our Moms and Mentor's group, which meets monthly for dinner, games, prizes, crafts, and devotionals.  To find out more information about our statement of faith, core beliefs, and mission statement please visit our new website HERE.

Maranatha Baptist's New Location:

9604 Newby's Bridge Rd.

Chesterfield, VA 23832

Telephone: 804-743-1274

E-mail: info@maranathabaptistchurch.net

Where Do You Come From

One day last week my mom's cousin found me on facebook wanting to know if I was the Katie related to my mom.  To turn a long story short, she's been working on the family's genealogy and had some questions for my mom about a few things.  Well, this peaked my curiosity and I had to know what she'd found already.  So I signed up for ancestry's free two week membership (which I have to cancel in the next 7 days or I get charged a boatload of money) and started looking around.

It was actually really easy- you start a family tree by entering what you know and then they send you hints about who might be related to the people you entered.  I already had a fair amount of information due to a family tree I'd done in the 4th grade and for most my of family I knew all of the Greats and some of the Great-Greats. The cousin who contacted my mom is from my Mema's side of the family and she had traced things back to the early 1800's.  I thought that was pretty impressive. But as it would turn out, many people had already done the entire genealogy of my name sake Great-Grandmother- Katie, which was my Papa's mother. The majority of the family on his could be traced back to the 1700's, but the line through Katie's family was a completely different story- it goes back to the 1200's in England!

And it's not just any old line- it's a fairly aristocratic one.  Katie's 5th great-grandfather was also Martha Washington's father.  Her 6th Great-Grandmother was the daughter of Virginia's Governor Spotswood. They were all important members of the Williamsburg elite back in the Revolutionary and Pre-Revolutionary days.  Before those days, her family in England were all lords and ladies.  So, how then did my Great-Grandmother Katie end up a poor farmer's wife in the mountains of Southwest Virginia with 11 kids?

I have all these names and no stories and I want to know how it all happened.  Her family from 100 years before were all educated, landed, upper class members of society with money.  What transpired in those later years that altered everything?  I'm glad that everything worked the way it did, or else I wouldn't be here, but it still makes me sad for the original Katie.  She had a hard life- giving birth to my Papa at the age of 42, the baby of her 11 children, in a one bedroom house. 

It's weird to see this extremely long line of people that are the reason I am who I am and know nothing about them.  I need more details, more stories, more information, more everything.  It's not enough for me to know where I come from- I also need to know the why.

Six Rules for Censoring Your Blog

When I first started blogging I had no intention of anyone reading it that I knew personally.  I didn't put a link on my facebook page or tell anyone except my best friend that even I had a blog. I just wanted to write my real feelings on things, free from any worry that someone I knew was reading my thoughts.  I didn't really think anyone would ever read it, so I didn't use fake names or omit any information that might potentially allow my my blog to be found.  And then one day, about six months into this venture, someone I knew found it.

I remember getting that email- which was very nice and had nothing negative to say- and completely freaking out!  When I started writing, Spencer had just turned one and I was still caught between who I used to be, who I was becoming and who I wanted to be.  I couldn't make decisions about anything because I honestly didn't know who I was anymore.  I thought that by starting a blog and writing about everything, that it would give me some clarity and help me find my way again.  And I did this by writing pretty much whatever came into my head, ie., without any censoring.

So when I found out that these thoughts of mine might make it back to people who knew me, knew the old me, I was terrified. When you go through something like I did, I don't think you ever really get over the fear of being judged again.  The idea of all these people, not just faceless strangers, reading my personal thoughts... well, it felt like being naked in front of them.  At first I didn't know what to do- should I just delete my entire blog or go back and remove everything that I wasn't comfortable sharing with anyone in my real life?  I went back and looked at the posts I had written so far and it turned out, I really didn't want to share anyone of it with actual people in my life.  But I also didn't want delete anything.  In the six months I had been writing, I finally started to feel like a real person again- someone who wasn't caught between the past and the present- and I couldn't bring myself to get rid of one single thing that led me to that place. 

While I didn't delete anything I wrote up until that point, I stopped posting a lot of things that I didn't used to think twice about writing before.  Normally I'm not one for censorship, but sometimes, there are things that you just shouldn't write about on your public blog- especially if said blog is in the mommy/daddy genre.  Now that I've been doing this for almost three years, more and more people I know are reading it.  Every time someone new tells me they've found my blog, I still experience the same anxiety I felt that first time.

Even now, I have to resist the urge to go back to those older posts and completely re-edit everything because a large hunk of it are things I would never write today.  But then I think about how far I've come since then, how much I've changed and grown- the person who I was in 2008 helped me to be the person I am in 2011 and I don't want to forget that.  A lot of my fears about people reading the earlier posts is because of my own hangups about having very different ideas and opinions on things than I used to before Spencer.  And I was kinda figuring all of that out back then and those were moments of real questioning for me. But I'm not who I was before, for better or for worse (I think for better, but that's just me), this is who I am now.

One day I want Spencer to read this blog and I want it to be something she loves to read.  It's important to me that I keep everything as close to the truth as possible, but I do have to do a little censoring- especially anything that would be harmful for Spencer to read.  That doesn't mean I paint a  pretty glossy picture instead of the truth- I just don't write about it.  And for the most part, I'm able to forget about who might be reading this and I try really hard to not let that influence what I say and write about.  But I do have a few rules of blogging censorship I try to live by that I think are important for protecting certain aspects of your life without compromising the integrity of your blog.  So here they are:

1.  Don't write anything that you wouldn't say to someone's face.  (This one comes straight from Dooce herself)  Her actual words are "Don't write things about people in your life that you wouldn't say to them face to face."

2.  Never attack someone personally for differences of opinion.  It's perfectly okay to write about controversies and to not agree with other people or bloggers about something- but write about the merits of your opinion, why you disagree with them, and never attack the person.

3. Don't write anything negative about your child's other parent.  This is mostly for those of us who are single parents, but it's still a good rule of thumb for everyone.  Remember, the Internet never forgets and eventually your kid is going to see what you've written.  Do you really want them to read something that might make them think their other parent didn't really love them, about battles to receive child support payments, canceling visits, or any other area where it might make them feel unloved or unwanted?  No, you don't, so protect them from this instead of just offering up the information for them to find out one day.

4.  Don't publish anything you've written when you're angry.  It's perfectly fine to write something when your mad, but you should sleep on that post before hitting the publish button because the morning somehow gives us a new perspective.  Even if you still feel the same way, chances are that you are thinking a little more rationally, so go back and re-read your post to see if it's coherent and make sure you didn't include something you shouldn't have.

5.  Don't write about your friends and family with their real names unless you ask them first.  Don't post pictures of them either unless you ask them first- especially make sure to do this with other people's children.  Not everyone is comfortable with publicly unrestricted pictures of themselves or their children on the Internet, so be respectful of that.

6.  Resist with all your might the temptation to go back and delete or completely revise old posts (unless it's for personal safety issues).  One of the great things about blogging is reading someone's journey from to start to finish as it was happening- the good times, the bad times, and where they are now.  What you wrote while actually going through something holds much more power and weight than if you'd written about it after the fact. 

What about you all?  Do you have any rules that you like to stick to about censoring on your blog?  Is there anything you've written that you wish you didn't?

The Gap Between Believing and Knowing

Studying human physiology is both fascinating and mind boggling; everything in our body is interdependent on each other. You can have the healthiest heart imaginable, but that means nothing if your lungs don't work. Strong and capable legs won't let you walk if your spinal cord is severed. You can be the picture of perfect health and wellness, but if your brain doesn't have any electric activity, your body will cease to function. The beauty of the system doesn't shine through in these absolute absences of somethings working; it's best seen in the times of preservation and survival.

When the heart is weak, the brain picks up some of the slack and tries to reroute things in order to give the heart the rest it needs.  The body may not function the way it should and other systems are being over worked, but it's doing what it must in order to keep surviving.  Think of it like your laptop: you can work off the battery for one hour with the screen at full brightness or you can work off of it for three hours with the screen at it's dimmest.   The heart and the brain are symbiotic- they need each other to survive; the heart can't pump blood if the brain doesn't tell it to do so and the brain can't tell the heart what to do if it's not receiving the blood pumped from the heart.

There are two types of people in this world- the brain people and the heart. I'm a brain person.  I'm sure it has something to do with my dad being a neurologist, but to me, the power of the brain is both equally fascinating and terrifying.  Is there anything as, or more, devastating than seeing a perfectly healthy young person die from a fatal brain injury when the rest of their body is in perfect working condition? Actually, there is.  It's watching someone who's trapped inside of their body from a disease like ALS-  they know everything that's going on, can feel an itch, but can't scratch it and can't even speak to let anyone know.  It's a painful, terrifying awareness of their own helpless condition.  As much as I'm a brain person, I know it means nothing without a heart.  The heart and the brain make up the very essence of belief and knowledge.

Living a life based on faith comes very naturally to some people- it's easy for them to see divine purpose in everything, to believe in Something and Someone they can't actually see with their own two eyes, and they've never even seriously thought, or wanted, to question any of it.  I am not that person.

My faith, having faith, has always been a constant struggle- it's an uphill battle that I fight on a daily basis.  It's not easy for me believe something I can't see with my own two eyes, it's even more difficult to try and believe something that I sometimes disagree with, and it's next to impossible for me to just accept it and not to question it.  When bad things are happening in my life, my first tendency is to be angry with God instead of praying to Him.  And when I am praying, my brain is often asking my why I'm talking to myself.  That's when my heart starts to doubt and I begin to question everything and it's a vicious cycle. 

 I don't really like this about myself and it's something I work at on daily.  But the fact is, there are many things that I know, which I don't always believe, and there are even more things which I believe that I don't in fact know.  And here's what I've come to realize- in matters of faith, it doesn't matter what you know if you don't believe it. My brain can tell me til I'm blue in the face that when I'm praying I'm actually just talking to myself; but my heart doesn't really believe that.  And how do I know this, you ask?  Because if my heart really believed that then I would stop praying.  But I don't- because deep down, despite what my brain can sometimes tell me, I don't believe that when I'm praying I'm just having a conversation with myself.  In another, more tricky, area, my heart can often believe there's no way God could, or would, ever still love a person like me- someone who doubts and questions everything, gets lost in the minutiae instead of looking at the bigger picture, and makes more mistakes than 10 people combined.  But my brain doesn't believe that- it knows what the Bible says and therefore it knows my heart is wrong.

While my heart and my brain are often times at war with each, they recognize the others' inherent weaknesses- because ultimately, they need each other to survive.  When I rely too much on my brain, putting too much emphasis on what I know to be true, my heart tries to step in and equal things out.  When my heart starts believing things that my brain knows aren't true, it tries to step in and equal things out.  You need knowledge to have belief and belief to have knowledge.  The only reason I know that oxygen has eight electrons is because I believe what I've been told is true.  I don't try and poke holes in or prove that it's incorrect- I just believe it. The only reason I believe there is such a thing as wind is because I see it's effect on things and even though I can't actually see it, I know it's there. 

Before I had Spencer, I never believed I was capable of loving someone so much. It's not that I didn't think I wouldn't love my future child with everything I had in me- I did.  But at that time in my life, I didn't have the knowledge of what it meant to be a mother.  I didn't believe I was capable of such love because I didn't know a person could love anyone that much.  When Spencer was born, I thought I knew I loved her as much as humanly possible, but when I think about how my love for her has grown every day since then, I know I was wrong.  By themselves, neither belief or knowledge are infallible- you have have to bridge the gap between the two.  You have to listen to both or you're going to miss out on the full picture.

I don't think it will ever be easy for me to listen to my heart over my brain; I don't think it will ever be easy for me to have faith that doesn't question or doubt.  But I don't stop trying and I keep on working at it. And I hope, I really hope, it will get easier and that one day having faith in Him the size of a mustard seed won't seem like it might as well be Mount Everest.