Megalodonald Trump

Last night Joey tried to call Donald Trump a megalomaniac, and as I was very sleepy, I assumed he was going to say megalodon. We're weird, I know.

But the mental image was so funny that I had to turn it into a meme!

Introducing..... Megalodonald Trump!

I'm With the Banned

2015 Banned Books display at MCPLS.

It's Sunday, September 27, and that means something important to library nerds like me... it means that it's the first day of Banned Books Week 2015!

I was telling Joey last week that Banned Books Week is my favorite week of the year, to which he sarcastically replied something to the effect of "Oh yea, we LOOOOVE banning books." Yep, I married a smart aleck. For those of you not familiar with Banned Books Week, it's an iniative begun by the American Library Association (ALA for short) to raise awareness about challenges on intellectual freedom.

I'll never forget the first time I heard about books being banned. My parents were fantastic about letting me read just about anything I wanted (within reason), so I had no concept of what it meant to be kept from reading a book because of its' content. Mom, Billy & I were visiting the Marion County Public Library one day when I was either in junior high or early high school, and in the teen/large print fiction room they had this huge poster of banned books. Of course, like any teenager who loved reading, my first response was, "I need to read these books!!" I checked out The Catcher in the Rye that very day, and went on to read a number of the books on the list. Some, like A Clockwork Orange didn't really appeal to me, but my horizons were broadened.

For more infographics on Banned Books, check out this link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/22/
banned-books-week-infographic_n_5852234.html

(Not so) Fun fact. The most challenged author in 2014 was Dav Pilkey, author of the Captain Underpants series. Captain Underpants. Seriously people, what damage can a baby-faced, tighty-whitey wearing superhero cause? Here's a link to a 2013 article about some of the reasons the series has been challenged. Decide for yourself how awful the book sounds.

One of the most exciting things about my new(ish) job doing public relations for the Marion County Public Library System is the opportunity to make displays to bring the same type of awareness about Banned Books Week to teens that I received there as a kid.

Thankfully West Virginia is a state with few (reported) challenges to books. Chris Peterson of the National Coalition Against Censorship and Alita Edelman of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression prepared a map of the United States entitled "Mapping Censorship" (below, right). This map covers the span of 2007-2011 and shows that WV is one of the states with the least amount of challenges. I found a map that showed WV as only having 1 or 2 challenges from 2013 to now, but haven't been able to verify where the books are challenged or when.

View the larger map at http://tinyurl.com/njxxlcu

Long story short, celebrating fREADom should be something that everyone does. Whether or not we agree with the views represented in books, it's up to all citizens to uphold intellectual freedom.

As a fun sidenote, I got to do an interview with WBOY today about Banned Books Week. So fun (and terrifying)!

Go out and read a banned or challenged book today! Here's a list from the ALA of the top 10 most challenged books of 2014 to get you started!

Thoughts on Transparency and Waiting

Authors warning: this is kind of long, and possibly nonsensical at times. It's a result of the conglomeration of ideas floating around in my head these past few weeks. Shout out to Joey Batten & Adam Johnson for letting me talk through some of it today.

As another sidenote, I can't say thank you enough to the people who came out of the woodwork with support after the last post. Thank you so much for your encouragment and making me feel less alone.

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9 months ago, I wrote about infertility with a heavy and hurting heart. Kind of ironic that it’s taken that amount of time to come to fuller healing. Sometimes, when we’ve fallen away from the Lord, it’s hard to see the light and see what we’ve been missing.

My friend Kathleen reposted a beautiful article on Thursday about women who have thought they were pregnant but turned out to not be (click here to read the article). Interestingly, that’s how this journey began for us. Towards the end of our first month of marriage, I thought for SURE I was pregnant. All the signs were there, and I was terrified to tell Joey because we had planned to wait for awhile. But when it turned out that I wasn’t actually pregnant, we found that we were disappointed about it.

It can be very disheartening to repeatedly have pregnancy like symptoms, only to have it turn out to be false. You know though? After reading that article, I felt hope for the first time in months. Before that, I had been in what my friend Jes refers to as survival mode. I was still going to church, but I stopped reading my Bible, and though I still prayed in an intercessary manner, it wasn't necessarily for the purpose of knowing God better. I wasn't trying to grow relationships, I was just trying to make it to the next day. Honestly, I was kind of mad at God, but also drowning in self-doubt about whether He was doing this because He thought I'd be a terrible mom.

Part 1: Transparency

When I got angry or upset as a kid, I’d always run and hide in my bedroom. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I still tend to do that. Joey has commented that he knows it’s safe to approach me if I’m hiding under the covers, but not as much if I’m hiding in the bathroom. Smart man. ;-)

I realized after this weekend though, that my lifelong fear of transparency has only led to me trying to hide from God. Stupid, right?

Awhile back, Joey and I were talking about the concept of transparency and what makes it so difficult. He ended up sharing a Casting Crowns song with me called Stained Glass Masquerade, part of which goes 

“Cause when I take a look around
Everybody seems so strong
I know they'll soon discover
That I don't belong
 So I tuck it all away, like everything's okay
If I make them all believe it, maybe I'll believe it too
So with a painted grin, I play the part again
So everyone will see me the way that I see them”

How often do we as Christians look around and see masks of perfection, comparing ourselves to what we imagine their life is like, or judging them based on that thought? We’re almost (if not all) all guilty of comparison, but if nothing else, it only reinforces our “need” to hide our true selves.

For me, I felt that as a pastor’s wife I couldn’t talk to anyone about my struggles with staying close to the Lord during the dark times. I feared that they’d hold that against Joey, among other things, and that I wasn’t fit to be a wife.

After one of my best friends, Holly White, died last May, I was consumed with both grief and survivor’s guilt. She was supposed to get married two weeks after us, and I felt so so guilty about getting married so soon after her death and funeral (her funeral was on a Thursday, we got married two days later). We almost postponed the wedding, but didn’t. I felt so guilty that here I was, alive and married, when someone so beautiful and kind and Godly and everything I felt I wasn’t, hadn’t made it there. As a result, I basically pushed away most of my friends and retreated into our home and into work. Obviously there are still days when I miss her so much my heart hurts, but I can’t help but wonder if some of the pain had been eased by transparency.

Stef Chappell once said something at a Fall Advance that I’ve never forgotten: there’s no sanctification in isolation.  God made us to have and crave relationship, not to hide from them. He calls us to share our burdens so that we don’t have to strain under them alone.

Part 2: Waiting

Do you remember Christmas morning as a kid and being beyond excited to see what was inside your presents? Maybe your parents made you wait until a reasonable hour to open them, and you got frustrated because you wanted them RIGHT THEN. Sometimes waiting on God’s gifts and promises to you is that same type of frustrating. We know something AWESOME is in that box and we can’t wait to find out what it is, but yet sometimes we still have to wait to find out what that awesome something is.

The concept of waiting has been on my mind since reading the blog post mentioned in the beginning of this post, so I decided to look up waiting in the back of my Bible and see what came up. The one that stood out to the most was Psalm 130.

Psalm 130
A song of ascents.  

Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord; O Lord, hear my voice.
Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy.  

If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness, therefore you are feared.  

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.
My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning. 

O Israel, put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.
He himself will redeem Israel from all their sins. 

Sometimes, we get so excited about what's in that box, that we try to force His hand. Here are some examples of when I tried to force His hand because I thought my plan was better.

My plan: When I started applying to colleges, I literally wanted to go anywhere in WV (I had the Promise Scholarship) but FSU. I did a lot of research and fell in love with Concord University. I applied for their Library Science program, got in, got some kick butt scholarships, and they promptly cancelled their library science program. So I applied to WVU. Same deal. They told me that I couldn’t do library science but they’d love to have me for journalism and English. So the last school in WV that offered library science had to do. That school? FSU.

God’s plan: Get me to FSU, where I met Jesus my sophomore year at a Chi Alpha Thursday Night Worship Service.

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My plan: I was 100% convinced that I was called to serve in Romania for a year. Nothing went right with: the interview (I hit a deer on the way there and they had to do it by phone),the medical application (they made me do a test against my doctor’s wishes and basically told me I had to lose 20 pounds), or even the process of turning in the application (the missionary was itinerating). No joke, I applied in April of 2011 and to this day the application has never been confirmed or denied. I was devastated and my self esteem plummeted.

God’s plan: Stay here and rekindle a friendship with the man who not only debated my beliefs the summer before sophomore year and helped convince me to come to XA, but would a few years later become my husband and best friend. Plus, as my Father-in-law pointed out in his sermon this morning, "If God doesn't do it, He didn't promise it."

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My plan: Have a baby as soon as we started trying.

God’s plan: Honestly? I don’t know. But reflecting on the events of the past reminded me that no matter what my control freak plan is, even if that plan sounds good at the time, His plan is better than what I could’ve imagined, for He only gives good gifts.

Epilogue

To get back to Psalm 130:

Maybe, like David, you are crying out from the depths of despair about something for which you are waiting. Maybe you’re waiting for a sign. Maybe you're waiting for a miracle or for hope. But for me in that moment, the Lord gave me opportunity to look back on what He’s done, and rejoice. Rejoice that even in the midst of despair over death, sickness, infertility, whatever we’re going through, He is steadfast. He is still good... and honestly, His plans for us are probably bigger and better than we can even begin to imagine.

To quote the same verse that was at the end of the article I read Thursday,

“Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.” Ephesians 3:20-21