Name:Stephanie Country:United States Gender:Female
Interests:Anything and everything about God, Lord of the Rings, LOST, The Dead Zone, The 4400, Law & Order: SVU, CSI, Spongebob, Writing, Reading, Hanging w/ friends, cooking, Phantom of the Opera, Dominic Monaghan, Music... especially piano!!! Expertise:Writing, Spelling/Grammar (DON'T MESS WITH THE SPELLING QUEEN!!!), Lord of the Rings, LOST, playing the piano, clarinet, et cetera et cetera... Occupation:Student
Honestly, I don't know what it is with people and taking their clothes off. I try to go on the internet with my ten-year-old brother, and I have to hide the screen every time I go to a new page just to make sure I don't screw him up with pictures of things he shouldn't see. But the bigger problem is when I am looking for a picture or just browsing and I see pictures of young women who seem to have no respect for themselves.
Here's a tip, ladies: in order to be respected, body, soul, and mind, you must make yourself respectable.
We complain all the time about how men are dogs, how men just want to get in our pants, how men are just interested in what we look like. Guess what? Men were created to be turned on by the visual. Which means as women, if we don't want a certain kind of attention, we need to dress appropriately. If you don't want guys staring at your cleavage, don't expose your cleavage. If you don't want guys staring down your thighs, don't wear short shorts and miniskirts. If you don't want to be seen as a sex object, don't present yourself as one.
I have a real problem with artistic nudes. You know what? There is nothing artistic about taking pictures of naked women. It is a disgrace and you are disrespecting a beautiful woman. The only man who should see a woman naked is the man she loves, her husband. Now, I know that that is just an opinion, but think about it. By revealing yourself to even more than that, what are you doing? You are not being artistic. You are disrespecting yourself. Those who say they appreciate the "art"? They're not appreciating the art. They are appreciating your beautiful curves, but those curves are not for their eyes. Those curves give them dirty thoughts. About you.
Have a little respect for yourself. Cover up. Let men respect you for who you are, not what you look like.
So, Daniel and I did some Bible studying today. It was pretty epic. I think I'll share my Bible notes on here for a while, see who actually still reads my blog.
Bible Study: Who is Jesus?
(1) In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (2) He was in the beginning with God. (3) All things came into being by Him and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. (4) In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. (5) And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it. -John 1:1-5
Studying the terminology:
1:1 - WORD. Greek word logos: omniscient, powerful intelligence of God. The preincarnate form of Jesus--God. 1:2 - reiteration of v.1 - Jesus = God. They were together in the beginning. BEGINNING - Greek word arche: the BEGINNING of ALL things, which is Christ, or, God. Since God created everything, He is the beginning. 1:3 - COME INTO BEING: to be made or created from NOTHING. He is the beginning of all things. Everything that exists was made by God. 1:4 - LIFE: Zoe, Life in the spirit and soul; as opposed to life of the physical body, bios. Highest form of life. LIGHT: never-ending, uncreated, unstoppable light, which is LIFE, or, GOD. 1:5 - DARKNESS - Skotia, figurative darkness, which is RUIN. Life without GOD. Those in the darkness, which is the consequences of sin, cannot comprehend, or understand, God's light. COMPREHEND - Katalambano, the darkness of man and Satan rejected God's light. Therefore, they are rejecting life.
So, who is Jesus?
Jesus is God.
Jesus existed with God in the beginning.
Since God is the beginning, Jesus is also the beginning.
Jesus is light, which is life, which is in God/Jesus and exists through Jesus--eternal life with Him.
Those who reject Jesus reject His life and His light, and cannot understand Him, and therefore cannot be connected to Him. They will be separated from Him forever and be thrown in the lake of fire, because by rejecting Jesus, they are rejecting their own eternal, zoe life.
There are some teachers who you never forget because of the impact that they had on your life. Then there are some teachers you want to forget the moment you walk out of their classroom for the last time. And then, there are the teachers who you remember for the moments that they did something so outrageous, so incredible, that you just have to do one of two things: tell everyone you know or write a story about it. This is the story about Dr. Joel King, the Child & Adolescent Development professor at the University of Maine at Farmington.
There is always a hint of sarcasm, a twist of irony, in every story Dr. King tells. He likes to portray himself as narcissistic and pessimistic, but he’s really not. Whenever he says anything, he looks completely confused about what he is saying, like he can’t believe that it is coming out of his mouth. He pauses every once in a while and shakes his head slightly, as if his anecdotes are completely unbelievable. He is a man of average height and weight, with round glasses and curly gray hair. He likes to wear button-up t-shirts, usually plaid, neatly tucked into pair of nice pants, and a belt to match his shoes. He usually holds one hand by his side and the other halfway in the air, as if he is shrugging with one arm. The whole appearance can be rather comical.
Dr. King likes to talk about his daughters. The day on which this story occurs is no exception. According to Dr. King, one of his daughters is absolutely magical with words.
“And Heather bent down for the ball. Now, the runner is running normal speed, remember. And Heather is going… Heather speed. And everyone is completely silent. They can’t believe what’s happening. Then my nine-year-old daughter calls out, in the dead silence—‘Heather! My clothes are going out of style!’ She just had the perfect words.” We all laughed.
“And Heather picked up the ball”—he bent down and straightened up in slow motion—“and threw a perfect ball. It was perfect. It just arrived about five minutes too late. Everyone had packed up and left, the other team was already on the bus back. It was a great throw, just too late.”
This is how Dr. King always tells his stories. He likes to exaggerate the details—according to him, “Heather speed” was just about equivalent to watching a slow-motion video. He once told his class that a child shot himself because the child thought an airplane was small and his mom told him the big metal thing at the airport was also and airplane. He enjoys morbid details.
He continued on to tell the class that he had a professor when he was in college named Professor Frymark. According to Dr. King, “there are people who are a young old, and then there are people who are… old old. Professor Frymark was old old. There was a rumor that he had died five years before I got there, that’s how old he was.”
Dr. King had to write six essays for Professor Frymark’s class.
“I got twelve words on those six papers. Six ‘good’s, six ‘ideas’. Good ideas. Good ideas. Good ideas. That’s all I ever got. My way of writing consisted of two rules. One, use really big words. It makes you sound smart. You have no idea what you’re saying, but you sound smart. Two, use really long sentences. If it’s longer, there’s got to be something good in there somewhere, right? I got B minuses on all my papers.
“So you know how you can get anything you need for an essay in any ten random pages from the book? You just open up to a random page and read the five pages before it and the five pages after it, and you’ve got all the material you’ll need to write the paper. Don’t tell Erica over here that, she’s in senior seminar, she shouldn’t know that. Anyway. So you know how when you want to study, but you don’t really? Studying is holding the book in your hand. When you want to study, you go to the dorm lounge with the other people who don’t want to study, and you can sit down and chat. Holding the book doesn’t really get in the way.
“So I was in there, not studying, and there was a Creative Writing major in there. I’d never met one of those before. And he’d had Professor Frymark. First, he asked me if he was dead. Then he wanted to see my paper. He looked at it and he laughed at me.”
Dr. King’s problem, according to the Creative Writing major, was that he tried to write about the whole book in a five-to-seven page paper.
“You’re supposed to focus on one idea,” the guy said. “And use short sentences.”
“See Spot run,” Dr. King told the class. “Hard to mess that up.
“So I figured I’d give it a try, I mean, what did I have to lose? The only thing that changed was Professor Frymark dropped the s. It said ‘good idea.’”
This ridiculously long story that started with his daughter and ended with his good essay ideas actually had a purpose, however. Dr. King meant to show us how to write our papers on our psychology articles, and somehow his life history was tied to this knowledge.
Now is probably a good time to mention that I was in this class, and I witnessed the next horrifying event myself. I would call what happened next an English major’s nightmare. I wasn’t paying attention at first; I was too busy writing song lyrics. I did, however, catch that Dr. King was telling us how to write our essays. I managed to look up as he switched the slide to show us what our introductory paragraphs should look like. I don’t remember the topic, but I do remember the basic layout of this piece of horrifying narrative:
“The purpose of this paper is to discuss such-and-such. This is how I will do so. First, I will do this. Second, I will discuss so-and-so. Third, I will talk about this. Finally, I will conclude by discussing this.”
I could believe this display of words so appallingly arranged on the screen. I looked to Dr. King.
“Do you want us to write like that?” I asked incredulously.
Dr. King looked at me with a smile. “Sure, if you want to,” he said. He then addressed the whole class. “I know that some of you who are gifted in language could not start an essay like this without throwing up on the paper, and that would be pretty nasty. But for those of you who really can’t write, this is fine with me.”
I stared at the offensive paragraph on the screen, my mouth agape and my eyes wide. I had not written such a blunt, poorly written paragraph since the fifth grade. And he was endorsing this… mediocrity?
He continued on, and much to my horror, it only got worse.
“This is what your conclusion should look like,” he said. He clicked his little button, and the only thing on the screen that changed was the word INTRODUCTION at the top, which now said CONCLUSION. I could not rip my eyes away; it was too terrible. He clicked his button again. The first “will” changed to “did”. He clicked twice more. The next two “will”s changed to “did”s, as well. I was in shock.
“And the final touch…” he clicked the button of doom one last time. The concluding sentence changed from “Finally, I will conclude by discussing…” to “Finally, to conclude…”
I wanted to shoot myself. It was like being in the fifth grade all over again. How could a college-level class be accepting of such terrible writing? My face still expressed my initial horror; my eyebrows were furrowed, and my jaw was as low as it could be without falling off. I felt like a part of me was dying inside. This had to be a crime. There was absolutely no way that this type of writing could be allowed in a university, especially in 200-level psychology classes. And yet, there it was. Dr. King watched my face in amusement. He didn’t care too much.
“All right… please leave, everyone,” he said. “Oh, wait, I have your tests.”
I prayed for my test to be near the top, prayed. I had to leave the room of the offensive-yet-acceptable paragraph. No such luck. Mine was so near the bottom that I was almost the last one to leave. I was in agony. Dr. King handed me my test, finally; I shoved it in my bag and rushed out of the room, my face still contorted in disbelief.
I knew then that I was a true lover of the English language. Such a butchering of the art of language hurt me down to my very soul, and I could not believe that my eyes had witnessed such a horrible sight as that sample paragraph in a college setting. I resolved to write a flowing, well-written essay, not a mockery of the English language itself. I prayed that no one else would consider such a paper acceptable, but as Dr. King said, not everyone is a writer.
I do not know how the essays turned out for that class, as they have not been turned in as of today. I am so grateful that I am not the one reading them. I haven’t written my essay yet. In fact, I should probably be working on that instead of writing about my professor’s crime against my beloved English. I’ll let you know how it ends.
--------
Yes, that was a short story, so you can critique it as such if you want. Or you can just sympathize with me for this horrifying incident in my life.
Wow, Kansas City was a blast. Everyone who reads this should come with me next year!!
Although... you probably want to know what you're going to...
IHOP (International House Of Prayer, not pancakes) is based in Kansas City, Missouri (not Kansas!) and every year they hold what is called onething in Kansas City. It's a time of worship and learning and lots and lots of prayer! I learned SO much and I really feel like my life has been changed from going to this conference! I received direction from the Lord considering college and leading my friends to Christ... also, I really broke loose with my worship... I've never felt so free to worship before! I could really see that God was the only person that I cared about when I was worshipping, and I didn't care what the people around me thought! I danced, I raised my hands, I sang, it was a blast! Okay, too many exclamation points. I'm getting wayyyy excited...
But seriously, there is so much to learn at this conference, the Holy Spirit just moved throughout that place like you wouldn't believe... I'm going next year, and anyone who is interested in going to the next level with God should do the same! You can look up onething at god.tv or ihop.org or even thecall.com. TheCall is a separate from onething but we did it at the end, twelve straight hours of prayer, worship, and fasting! It was so incredible... we prayed for things like an end to abortion, revival in California, and for our next president to be a man of God! Well, after TheCall... well, first of all, this is just speculation, since he is a former pastor and a definite Christian... but after we prayed for a man of God to rise up as our next president, Mike Huckabee won the Republican Iowa caucus! He may or may not be the man God has called to be our next president, but he is the only one I know of who is Christian Christian through and through, and not just a politician who goes to church because it looks good.
So, if you have questions about what happened at onething just ask me, or look it up at the websites above! Come with me next year, all of you!
Stephanie
P.S. - Here's a clip from one of my favorite parts of the worship... I was in like the verryyyyy front almost during this part, I could see their faces without the screens
Stephanie 
