“trusting god”

I’ve been recently perusing some of the emails we received when we had our FOC blog up last summer. Many people poured their hearts out to me which I found really touching, but even the ones who no longer attended a FOC church still spoke the “special language” of a FOCer and were still in the process of deprogramming themselves. Some of them were sweetly manipulative in asking me for access to this blog. One lady — who actually goes to Maybe Church — wrote me quite often and at one point said, “I’d really love access to your ‘real’ blog but I don’t want to ask. I’m just trusting God with that.”

She had been quite complimentary to me in the email and then followed it with that non-request request. It’s classic FOC. Butter ’em up to get what you want and for extra emphasis, throw God into the mix.

Uhm, peaches, here’s the thing: You were actually asking for access to this blog, there just wasn’t a question mark in your request. I’m all for trusting God, I am, but unless God appears to you in a burning bush to give you this blog’s URL, he’s not the one in charge of giving you that. I am. (Or, alternatively, I suppose you could ask Joe, since goes to your church and seemingly has this blog’s URL memorized.)

Assuming you wouldn’t do that, then yes, I’m the only one who could give that information to you. So why are you trusting God with that since I’m sure we can both agree he’s got more important things to do than to appear to you in a Starbucks cup announcing this blog’s URL?

Ohhh, wait a minute.

Could it really be that you’re trusting God to move my hard heart to give you the URL? That can’t be what you really mean, could it? But giving you this URL would totally defeat the purpose for having published a whole different blog elsewhere. It would make that decision seem irrational and, while I can be quite irrational, I’d rather not appear to be so if it can be easily avoided.

But that’s what you’re really doing: You’re trusting God to move my hard heart to give you the URL.

Well, it’s been over a year now, so good luck with that, Crackie.

I kind of hope God moves my hard heart to give you the URL in, oh, 23 years so you’ll look in your inbox and say, “What the hell is this?”

That would amuse me.

just in case

Just in case it wasn’t clear from the post below — but it probably was — that’s the last of the Maybe Church posts.

I’m debating whether to write new posts about what it was like to have our FOC blog and some of the responses, good, bad, or whacked, that our story got, but I just don’t know how long I want to keep strrrrretching that thread, you know? I’ll ruminate on that a bit more. I’m good at the ruminating.

For now anyway, since I didn’t say it ……

Thee End.

And back to our regularly scheduled blogging. Whatever that was.

Thank you so much, everyone, for reading this ridiculous epic and for your wonderful comments and support. It’s meant a lot to both of us to tell the story here and find that no, we’re not crazy. Or at least not crazy about this.

So thank you again, pippa, from the bottom of our inappropriate little hearts.