I would have called it a ‘pet peeve’, but that term does not seem strong enough.  And my friends ‘across the pond’ use the term ‘pet hate’, and I just like the way it sounds.

There are a number of things one could hate about Facebook.  I could probably write a book about the things I hate about Facebook.  I tolerate Facebook, if only for its marginal usefulness to me.

I prefer Twitter for my social networking needs, if not for anything but the 140 character post limit.  Yes, I like the limit, because it forces the poster to consider their words more carefully, and not to add superfluous information.  Sure, many of the posts on Twitter are not any more useful than the posts on Facebook.  But there is something that happens in Facebook posts that I have never seen happen on Twitter.  The dreaded ‘I love you tag’.

The ‘I love you tag’ is when a poster follows their seemingly normal Facebook update with a shout-out to their boyfriend, girlfriend, significant other, et. al. The horror of the ‘I love you tag’ is that they not only add it once to one post, but they add it to every single Facebook status update, regardless of the context. It is so ridiculous in its application that status updates like the following are entirely probable:

“Rest in peace, Grandma Moses. I love my adorable boyfriend!”

“Snowed in with nowhere to go. So bored. I love you sugarbritches!”

“I just took the biggest dump of my life. Seriously, do not go into the bathroom. I love my honeybear!”

Now, I could un-friend the repeat offenders of this practice, but considering their emo-centric leanings and propensity to co-dependent relationships, I’m sure they would take it personally. And since I know many of my Facebook friends in real life, I can’t hide their updates for fear that I miss something important and they ask me about it.

So, I will do the only thing I know to do. Talk bad about them on my blog. You know who you are. Just stop.

But deep down, I desperately want to be found.

Dave Ramsey tweeted the following this morning:

People yearn for acceptance.  Inside of all of us is the 13 year old who wants to sit at the lunch table with the cool kids.

I have never been cool.  Never been close to cool.  I have no hope of ever being cool, unless being extremely nerdy and socially awkward come into fashion.   Like I said, no hope.

Most of my life, I have been afraid to let my real personality show. Afraid to let anyone know anything personal about me. Afraid to let anyone get too close. I have always been the person that I thought other people wanted me to be to be accepted by them.

I’ve spent most of my life hiding behind this facade. I was an actor, playing the role of the person I thought I wanted to be.  I was so afraid of being rejected that I would do nearly anything to avoid that possibility.

It’s very difficult to come to terms with who you really are when you are hiding it from everyone else.

Learning this has been a very arduous process. Overcoming it will probably be more difficult, and I know it is impossible to do this alone.

If I am truly going to connect with others:

• I need to come to terms with and accept myself for who I really am.
• I am going to have to be more vulnerable than I’ve ever been.
• I must accept the fact that some people may reject me, misunderstand me and disappoint me.
• I must not allow what others think of me determine how I view myself.

I’m looking forward to the freedom that I will experience when I’ve finally come out of hiding for good.

Do you feel you can always be yourself?

Like many of my Twitter friends I am not making a New Year’s resolution this year, I am opting to adopt one word that will help me focus my efforts on becoming better this year.

After much consideration, I have determined that my word this year is…

Connect

Here’s how I intend to apply this word to my life, and why it’s important. (I intend to further develop these ideas in some later posts coming soon.)

My strongest instinct is to withdraw.  It is a defense mechanism I have developed over the years, but it is something that is preventing me from being the person I want to be.

I am extremely guarded in relating to people, to the point that it is difficult to develop meaningful relationships with others.  I want to truly connect with others. I want to be a real friend to people who need them, in a time where very few have them.

I don’t do well facing difficult situations.  I don’t like to deal with problems, I would rather keep a low profile and let things blow over.  Instead of disengaging, I need to stay connected to these situations and work through the issues instead of avoiding them.

I’ve put a lot of distance between myself and my past, mostly because most of it did not work out the way I wanted. I think I’ve lost a lot of learning opportunities in doing this.  I want to connect with my past experiences and see what lessons they hold for my life today.

I also want to connect to my creativity.  The past year has been very hectic in my work and family life, and has not left much time for exercising my creative muscles.  I want to write more, and I want to get back to making music again.  I want to write and record new music and rework songs that I have written before.  I want this year to be the most creative year I’ve had in a while.

Finally, I want to connect with God in a deeper way.  I’ve always known how to do things for God.  But, I’ve been considering the Biblical account of God and Abraham, and how Abraham was called a ‘friend of God’.  I’ve wondered what it means to be a ‘friend of God’, and what it means to connect with God in that way.

This by no means is an exhaustive list, but it is a good beginning.  As this year progresses, I hope to find more ways to connect.

Check out the post that started it all here.  Find others on Twitter for #OneWord2011

I love words. More specifically, I love it when words are written into sentences and paragraphs, that are so well crafted that they create pictures in your mind. I love to read a congregation of words that have been carefully shaped to perfectly express an idea, a feeling, an experience or an expression. Something inside of me celebrates the discovery of such a finding, for it is hope of a victory in a battle with words that has often eluded me.

As much as I love those words, I have a love/hate relationship with the craft of writing. My head and my heart are full of complicated and messy piles of fragments of thoughts and ideas that I haven’t the skill to express in written form.  Yet, those same thoughts and ideas pound on the back of my skull at times, as if trying to escape from the prison of my mind.

I get frustrated with myself for not actually writing anything. But, I’ve come to the conclusion that the writing process doesn’t start when the words begin to appear on the computer screen. At least not for me, anyway. I have to wrestle with these thoughts and feelings. I have to enter the dark recesses of my mind and piece together the fragmented ideas. I have to ‘see’ them to describe them. Once I catch a glimpse, I can begin to put it all in words.

…..

Any self-respecting blogger would have started this post with a profuse apology about not posting. I, however, do not apologize, as this is MY blog, and I will use it how I please; and also, there has been no outcry in my absence, so really, there is no one to which to apologize.  It could also be said that what is written above is a thinly-veiled attempt at justifying my apparent laziness as it pertains to posting. That it may be, but I’m not going to cop to that just yet.

For the blog this week….

Especially after the busy week of posting.

But, my body had other plans. Tuesday morning, was hit with a kidney stone/urinary tract infection that put me pretty much out of commission. I was in bed from Tuesday through Sunday afternoon.

Thankfully, I had finished and scheduled last weeks posts. I was able to reply to a few of the comments, when I felt up to it (from my bed, with a laptop). I did read them all, and I appreciate the support.

Being out of commission for nearly a week will put you behind on a lot of things, so I am in catch-up mode both at work and at home, and in many ways, I’m still recovering. My energy level and general well-being are still below normal.

Hopefully, my plans will go forward, but just slightly delayed.

I spend a great deal of my life troubleshooting technology problems. It is, in fact, my job (or at least a big part of it), and because of my abilities, it is also part of my life outside of work as well (being the family/neighborhood help desk is tough….).

I work with critical systems, where an outage has the potential to cost my company a lot of money. The ability to quickly recover from an issue that keeps those systems from operating is an absolute requirement.

For the software systems I support, there are types of problems that reoccur enough that it is worthwhile to document how to spot the errors and the process to fix them. So, I spend part of my time writing troubleshooting guides, which is extremely useful in the case I am not available to fix the problem and someone else is trying to work through it without me (and also keeps me from having to do phone support at all hours of the night). A well documented guide can save a whole lot of time and effort.

If only life were so simple. In years past, I was around the sort of church people who were almost addicted to what I call ‘fad-formulas’. Somewhere they had stumbled across some piece of spiritual revelation that provided them a set of well-defined steps to reach a particular expectation. The source of that revelation varied, but usually came from a TV ‘evangelist’, a traveling preacher or a book (by a TV ‘evangelist’ or a traveling preacher). If you had problem ‘X’, then formula ‘Y’ would be able to get you past that problem. In my experience, however, this approach rarely worked for me. The more I think about it now, the more it seems like a multi-level-marketing scheme; the only person who really benefits, is the one who invented it.

The best computer troubleshooters have learned from their experience, but also are not afraid to draw from the experience and knowledge of others to solve a problem. Not all problems are exactly the same, but some are similar enough to give you a clue as to how to solve it. I can’t tell you how many times I found a solution for my system’s problem from an error resolution for a totally different system. It was not an exact formula, but it was enough to get me looking in the right direction.

Life is infinitely more complex than any computer system. We all face problems small and large and in varying degrees of difficulty. No one’s problem is exactly like another’s problem, even if they are generally the same issue. I don’t think you can create a formula that will work for everyone, every time. I do, however, see enormous value in learning from the experiences of others who have come through difficult times.

Twitter friend and fellow blogger Lindsey Nobles left a comment on this post that really resonated with me.  She said “Don’t tell me how to do it, tell me how you did it”. It got me thinking about the value of our stories as individuals: our testimonies, the difficult things we made it through, our mistakes, our poor decisions and the lessons we learned from them. These things are much more valuable if we are willing to share them with others. The Bible is full of the same kinds of examples.

We may not be able to develop a step-by-step troubleshooting guide for life, but as we share our stories, others can see that some of us have walked through those dark places that they are facing now and have made it past them. At the least, they can find hope in the fact that you made it through, and believe that maybe, they can too.

Forgiving someone who wronged us is one of hardest things we will ever have to do. It has to be done, not only as a biblical requirement, but practically to maintain our own sanity.

There are hundreds of overused ‘proverbs’ with regard to forgiveness or the lack thereof; I’m sure you’ve heard most of them, so I’ll spare you. What I will say, is that it is true that unforgiveness is more harmful to the person holding on to the offense than to the offender.

Sometimes, it is beyond our capability to forgive. Sometimes the hurt is too deep, the wound is too fresh, the offender too familiar, the circumstances too tragic. People respond in different ways. One feels justified in their anger, and withholding forgiveness satisfies their sense of justice. Others feel guilty because they hate to hold on to it, but can’t find it in themselves to forgive.

In my experience, part of the difficulty in forgiving lies in confusing the act of forgiveness with the feeling of forgiveness. We say we can’t forgive because we don’t feel forgiveness; we can’t emotionally disconnect the person from the offense. And while we may have said that we have forgiven, our minds and hearts don’t agree with the sentiment. Internally, we lack the capability to repair the trauma, and really, the wounds are what we are clinging to.

Sometimes forgiveness is a process. A process that begins with a decision. Making a decision to forgive, apart from the emotions involved, is the beginning of the act of forgiveness. That decision opens the door for healing to take place. Forgiveness is an act of humility; humility prepares you to receive grace. Grace includes the ability and strength to do things that you cannot do on your own; the ability to release the hurt that keeps the feeling of forgiveness at bay.  But, beyond that, grace provides healing for the wounds.

At times, for me it has required a daily decision to forgive. There are still things I have problems letting go of. But I have decided to forgive, and I anticipate the day that my heart will catch up.

Speak the truth boldly; speak your opinions humbly.

I wonder:

If Jesus were living on the earth today, would he live in a million dollar home, travel in a private jet, and drive a Bentley?

Would he wear finely tailored Italian suits, and hand-crafted shoes that cost more than the average family’s weekly grocery budget?

Would he only share his wisdom from stages in stadium venues at major conferences, and rarely have personal interaction with the people who are seeking hope through his messages?

Would he write “Christian Living” books that hit number one on the New York Times bestsellers list?

Would he have a syndicated television show?

Would the only advice he gave to his financially struggling followers be to give their money to support his ministry and promise them that they would be blessed?

My apologies if this seems cynical, but I do think about these things sometimes. What questions do you ask yourself?

This post from Lindsey Nobles about managing others impressions of ourselves reminded me of a topic that I have thought about and talked about before.

If you’ve spent any amount of time in a church, especially one where you know most of the people in attendance, you’ve probably witnessed a particular phenomenon at least once. A person who seems to be a model Christian ends up out of church (the reason is really not important) and immediately their life and behavior takes a 180 degree turn.  I’m not talking about the marginal, struggling type who always seems to messing up but is trying to hang in there. I’m talking about the type that has the walk, talk and look; they attend every service, volunteer, always seem to be in prayer or discussing spiritual things. But once they have separated themselves from the church, all of that completely changes.

It’s always confused me when someone who seemed to have a desire to conduct themselves according to a set of standards would lose that desire entirely almost overnight.

But thinking back in my own life, I realized something about myself. I was at times conducting myself a certain way mostly because it was expected of me by others in the church. Presenting myself in that way seemed to gain their respect and acceptance, and was meant to give them the impression that I was close to God. I was, in effect, reacting to the social pressure of the environment and molding my actions to fit in as best I could.

I can see how, once outside of the source of the social pressure, the motivation to do good would be far less, because the acceptance of those people was no longer the reward. The proper motivation is crucial, and that motivation must come from our hearts.

The motivation to do good and to live righteously should come from our love for God, and our gratitude for the salvation that he has given us. If you truly love God as Jesus said you should, with your heart, soul, mind and strength, then naturally your actions would reflect that love.

Living to receive the praise, respect and acceptance of others only benefits our own pride. Jesus chided the religious of the day for making spectacles of themselves with their loud pretentious public prayers, the rituals demanded by their precepts, and religious garb. Jesus made it very clear that the only reward in such things was that they received recognition from others. Jesus taught that if you do your good deeds in secret, God will reward you openly.

Our pride forces us to try to hide the fact that we are all broken, faulty people. Burying our faults and issues won’t make them go away. When we live to receive the acceptance of others, we are not able to honest about the things that we struggle with, and we won’t deal with those issues. Refusing to deal with our issues because we are pretending they don’t exist only sets us up to fail, and fail miserably.

The ability to do good and live righteously comes as we are empowered by the Spirit. The fear of what others think of us can be a powerful motivator, but seeking to impress others leaves us to operate out of our own strength. Truly living for God allows us to recognize our dependence on him, and gives Him the opportunity to provide the strength that we need by his grace.

If our pride is our motivator, we put ourselves at odds with God. God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble, and that grace is critical for us to have the strength to carry on in spite of our weaknesses.

We should all be certain that we have the right motivations.