Stats (a post about my "purity" and my marriage)

A rainbow-colored bar graph. Image source.

This is a follow-up post to "How Far Is Too Far?" My Story, And What I Wish I'd Known, which I wrote last November. But it's not necessary to read that post in order to understand this one. 

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[content note: mention of how Christian "sexual purity" teaching doesn't distinguish between consensual and nonconsensual sex]

Number of boys I've dated:

So I've set out to write a post about the "stats" related to my "purity." Everything "my future husband" would need to know about "how far I've gone", which is the most important factor in my potential value as a wife. (Or so they said.)

Number of boys I've kissed:
On the cheek:
On the mouth, no tongue:
With tongue:

I wrote "boys" there because I am straight, so all my romantic/sexual experiences are with boys. I'm just writing about myself here, but obviously if I were writing about people in general, I would use all gender-neutral language. People in general aren't straight.

Number of boys I've had sex with:
Consensual:
Non-consensual:

Wow, we've just come to a very effed-up item on this list- the idea that non-consensual sex (ie, if someone raped me) would count as a strike against my "purity" and make me less of a good wife in the future. That is so wrong, but I'm putting it as a category on this list because that's the way it is according to Christian teaching on "sexual purity."

Number of boys I've had sex with:
Vaginal sex:
Anal sex:
Giving oral sex:
Receiving oral sex:
Giving a handjob:
Receiving a handjob (uhh is this the correct term for people with vaginas? sorry I am not very familiar with the terminology):

I separated out all these different sexual things because they would damage one's purity in different amounts. OBVIOUSLY, if you have vaginal sex (ie penis-in-vagina), that's the end-all and be-all of sex, that's the pinnacle, you do that and there's NOTHING left, no purity left. The other kinds of sex are of course bad and sinful and impure, but not *as much* as penis-in-vagina sex. According to purity teaching.

You may have noticed I'm not actually writing any numbers here. I'm not filling in the "answers." Why? Because the point I want to make in this blog post is that it doesn't matter. Back when I believed in "purity," I was so obsessed with this stuff, trying to repress my feelings in order to keep these numbers as low as possible. But now I'm married, and ... who cares? Who cares about how many boys I dated before my husband? Why on earth would that matter? So I'm not writing my numbers, because I want you to know these stats don't matter.

Well, I say "I was so obsessed with this stuff", but the items listed above are related to sex and I never got anywhere close to anything sexual back when I was in purity culture. Yeah, because it turns out I'm asexual. So the things I was "obsessed with", the places where I really really "struggled" to keep my numbers low, were about romantic attraction and sensual (not sexual) touch.

Number of boys I've had crushes on:
Number of boys I've hugged while we were dating:
Side hug:
Front hug:
Standing:
Sitting:
Laying down:
Was there any rubbing back/shoulders/arms/etc:
Total duration in seconds:

I want to clarify: The lists in this blog post represent my own (extremely asexual, it turns out) take on "purity." Nobody actually said I should literally make a list and subdivide things into all these little categories. But they definitely DID say we need to "confess" to our spouse if we've had any sexual experiences (consensual or not), if we've kissed other people (consensual or not), if we've dated other people. They DID say the best-case scenario is no physical contact at all before marriage. They DID say that every time you have a crush, you lose some of your "emotional purity" and that makes you not as good for your future spouse. I am a math person, so when I was in that ideology, my natural response was to think in terms of a giant list quantifying everything and giving different weights to things depending on how much of a hit one's "purity" would take.

Number of boys I've hugged where I was attracted to him but we weren't dating so the hug didn't "mean anything" to him but I was super excited and it meant A LOT to me:
Number of times I've touched a guy I was attracted to and I LOVED IT but we weren't dating so he didn't know how I felt:
Number of times I set up that kind of situation on purpose (for example, sitting next to a cute guy at bible study because I know we're all going to hold hands in a circle during the prayer):

Yep, I can subdivide and overanalyze physical touch FOREVER. That was the territory I lived in, back when I was in purity culture. Maybe my crush happened to brush his hand against mine and it made me so happy and I just wanted to keep daydreaming about it, but I tried so hard to stop those thoughts, "guard my heart" ... because having such happy feelings about a boy touching me would make me less "pure" for my "future husband." I prayed a lot about this, back then. Trying to repress my desires.

Number of times I told a boyfriend "I love you":
Number of times I told a boyfriend he's "the best", "wonderful", or other compliments like that:

Total duration of all dating relationships that eventually ended in a breakup:

Ugh, this list is getting tedious. I guess I *could* keep going, keep listing things that I worked so hard to control back then because I thought it mattered, little things like when I would hang out with an attractive guy and how totally delighted I felt when I made him laugh... I worried and prayed about that so much back then, but now it just doesn't matter.

Well, let me clarify what I mean by "it doesn't matter." See, Christian "purity" teaching says that the higher the numbers on this list, the less "pure" you are. Forever. Yes, really, forever. They were very clear about the "forever" bit. They said these numbers would follow you for the rest of your life and make you unable to have a happy marriage. Best-case scenario is all zeros- then you're a perfect wife. If you can't manage that, then for god's sake at least you have to have a 0 in the "vaginal sex" category or there's truly no hope for you. I am married now, and thinking about crushes I had back in high school, over 10 years ago, and NO, those do NOT matter to me now. Purity culture was SO WRONG about that.

Of course they mattered to me a lot back then. Those feelings were real and important. And they mattered in the sense that the ways I learned to deal with my attraction back then still affect me now. The experiences I've had with dating have helped me understand more about what's healthy or unhealthy in a relationship. They matter in the sense that learning how to deal with our feelings and desires in a healthy way is a very important part of growing up. (And I don't just mean in a dating/sexual context, because some people aren't interested in dating/sex and that's fine.)

So I might say my experiences with dating/attraction/etc matter, but these numbers don't. The numbers don't tell you anything. It's not true that high numbers are bad, or low numbers are bad- you can't tell anything just by knowing the number of sexual or romantic partners a person has had. The number doesn't matter; what matters is what the relationship was like. Was it healthy? Did they respect each other? Were they compatible? If your partner doesn't treat you right, you might internalize that and believe that you don't deserve good things, and that will cause problems for you in future relationships. Or you might initially believe that guys want sex all the time and "can't control themselves" (that's what purity culture taught me) but then you date a guy who proves that wrong, and even though you might eventually break up, the relationship was a very good thing for you because you learned you CAN hold a guy to that standard.

It feels ridiculous to me now, how I really thought those things would follow me for the rest of my life. In 2005 I used to sit next to a cute guy in French class and I always hoped he would lean over and make some sarcastic comment to me, and then I would say something clever in return. I had a lot of fun joking around with him; I had a huge crush on him. Can you believe that purity culture says that that's supposed to affect my current relationship with my husband?!!! 2005, you guys. Can you believe adult Christians actually taught me that stuff like that would matter for the rest of my life?

These numbers don't affect my marriage. Ha, how bizarre to think that they would!

But do you know what actually matters in my marriage?

When I fly somewhere, my husband lets me borrow his noise-cancelling headphones so I can sleep on the plane. And then, even though I'm the kind of person who thinks it's fine to just haphazardly shove things back into their case, I know he doesn't live that way so I carefully unplug the cord from the headphones and roll it up and put them back in their case perfectly for him.

I buy yogurt cups and bring them home because I know he likes them.

He is from China and doesn't know much about celebrating Christmas, but he knows it's important to me so he listens and we do Christmas traditions together.

He watches a lot of videos online, on Chinese sites that are similar to youtube, and when he finds a video I would like he insists we watch it together. For him, that feels really romantic.

Sometimes we have plans to have dinner together and he's running late so he texts to tell me I should eat a cracker so I don't get too hungry while waiting. Because he knows I get really hungry if I eat later than normal.

I make sure we get all the laundry done before going on vacation, so that when we come home there's not a bunch of dirty clothes waiting for us.

It's all these little things, all these day-to-day things that come with living with another person. Learning what they like, what they need, what makes them happy, how to take care of each other. Right now, in the present. Every day. That's what actually matters, in my marriage.

And it's big things too, like having conversations about money, about our plans for the future, our goals, etc.

Sex is just a small part of our marriage. Because of purity culture, I very much expected that marriage would mostly be about sex. Ha. No, it's not. It's about the little everyday things we do to take care of each other. It's about love. It's about spending time together. Working together.

My "purity"? His "purity"? We don't care about that. Why on earth would we? Who cares that I liked other boys a long time ago? Of course I did! I have romantic attraction- most people have romantic attraction- of course I've been attracted to other people, and I have "acted on it."

And you know what else? I am still attracted to other men who are not my husband. Yep, purity culture always presented it like your wedding day is the finish line, and after that, your spouse is the answer to all your attraction so you don't have to worry about repressing yourself anymore. Ha. Nope. I am still attracted to people, and wow I wish I had learned how to deal with it in a healthy way a long time ago. My current thinking is that it's fine to be attracted to people and enjoy those feelings and daydream, but I shouldn't tell anyone about it. (Including my husband.) They might gossip, they might misunderstand and think I'm saying there's a problem with my marriage or that I am comparing my husband to another guy.

(Wow, the purity-culture belief that comparing sex with my husband to ANYONE OR ANYTHING ELSE would just be THE WORST THING EVER could be a whole separate blog post...)

When I was a teenager, it felt like the most important thing in the world when a cute boy talked to me and I got fluttery feelings. Purity culture said it would be important for the whole rest of my life- and I believed that. Now I'm out of purity culture, I'm married, and I find the entire premise of purity culture ridiculous. As if the number, the quantity, of romantic or sexual experiences a person has is the most important thing. Seriously, all that mattered was the number, the "how far", the "line", the list of sexual things you've never experienced. Now I'm married, and now I realize that "purity" stuff is a bunch of crap. What really matters is the way me and my husband treat each other, how we know each other's needs and we take care of each other. That's what really matters- OF COURSE that's what really matters! I'm not going to make a list of stats to quantify my "purity", because who the hell cares.

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Related:
"How Far Is Too Far?" My Story, And What I Wish I'd Known
The Checklist: Purity Culture's Alternative to Actually Getting to Know Someone
Scripts
He's Not "My Future Husband"

Blogaround

A baby wearing a squirtle costume. Image source.

1. One type of diversity we don't talk about at work: Body size (posted January 3) "Studies show that discrimination increases the higher a person's body mass index."

2. Trump’s tweet about migrant kids' deaths caps a year that was horrible for children (posted December 31) [content note: mention of child death] "The rash of school shootings and the effects of immigration policies are glaring examples of direct harm to children, but there are a host of less visible issues that also are devastating to children."

Children are the most vulnerable members of society. Within any oppressed group that suffers discrimination, violence, poverty, etc, it's the children who suffer most. I believe that's why Jesus said the kingdom of heaven belongs to children. We need to do better. We need to prioritize children's needs.

3. Our Bail System Costs the Country $15 Billion Per Year (posted December 20)

4. The Women’s Resistance We Aren’t Hearing About is Happening Now In Kerala. (posted January 5) "On New Year’s Day, 5.5 million women formed a human chain across 385 miles spanning the state of Kerala, India. They demanded that the Hindu temple at Sabarimala should open its gates to women in accordance with a ruling by the Indian Supreme Court in September 2018."

5. ‘Sheer Joy’: Ireland Will Have Free Abortion Care on January 1 (posted December 17) "Abortion in Ireland will be free, safe, and legal up to 12 weeks into pregnancy starting January 1, a major blow to the Catholic Church and opponents of the country’s abortion rights law, who tried to drag out the legislative process with support from U.S. anti-choice advisers." Good news~

6. Film Theory: What is Disney's Body Count? (posted December 9) and part 2 and part 3. Wow. Matpat goes through every Disney movie (not including sequels) and overanalyzes everything in order to calculate death counts. I love it.

7. Every congressperson along southern border opposes border wall funding (posted January 8) "One thing they actually all do have in common is that they all agree with virtual wall protection but not physical wall protection."

8. James Dobson Wants You to Pray and Fast to Protect Trump from Impeachment (posted January 8) Grosssssssssss. How will I explain this to my children.

9. Why Was Dumbledore Teaching Defense Against The Dark Arts? | Harry Potter Theory (posted January 8) I LOOOOOVE videos like this because it's EXACTLY THE SAME THING as biblical apologetics. In this case, Jon Carlin noticed that the timeline implied by a comment by Dumbledore in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" (set in the 1990s, published in 2005) seems to contradict what we see in the movie "Fantastic Beasts 2: The Crimes of Grindelwald" (set in the 1920s, released in 2018). Because of our firm belief that both of these sources are inerrant and set in the same universe, we need to go on a grand research quest to resolve this problem. It involves reconstructing timelines based on offhand mentions of durations and dates contained throughout the canon, quibbling about sentence structure and how something may or may not mean what it first seemed to mean, and completely missing the point of the story. Yep, that's apologetics.

10. Why a Medieval Woman Had Lapis Lazuli Hidden in Her Teeth (posted January 9) Science!

Did God Make Me Miss My Flight?

Two people with luggage, running through an airport. Image source.

So here's some exciting news: I am now part of the elite group of losers who has run through the Chicago airport panting and wheezing, and arrived at the gate to find out the door's been closed and I'm not getting on my flight. And, actually, I'm in an even more exclusive group of losers, because it was an international flight, yep, the kind of flight that only happens once a day. Chicago to Shanghai. And bonus points for me because the plane was sitting right there, right outside the window. I asked the gate agents, "I really can't get on that plane?" If I had been 10 minutes earlier, I would have made it. Not my fault, it's because my first flight was delayed and arrived in Chicago several hours late.

Check that off the bucket list.

So they booked me on the same flight but 1 day later, and gave me a hotel room for free. I ended up contacting some friends who live in Chicago and I got to see them. And had fun exploring Chicago, because I'd never been there before, apart from all those times I've been in the airport. Yep, and by "exploring Chicago" I mean I rode the subway and I bought a smoothie. ("Wow, I wasn't expecting I would need American money today...") Fun times.

The next day, I got to the gate 2 hours early, got on the plane, 14 hours later arrived in Shanghai. Missed 1 day of work.

So, because I'm an ex-evangelical, this has all got me thinking about why God "let this happen." Is there "a reason"? I don't believe in that anymore, but I used to, and this kind of stuff is a big deal in the Christianity I was taught. If something bad or inconvenient happens to you, well, it must be that God has "a reason" and it happened because of "God's plan."

If this was a sermon illustration, you know the first plane would have crashed. It would have been a story about how somebody missed their plane and was so mad at God, so stressed out, and then that plane crashed and everyone died and our hero learned that God was taking care of them and they shouldn't have been so angry at God, they should have trusted. A happy ending to a nice story.

Why were there so many sermon illustrations where death suddenly makes an appearance? Anybody else grow up in a church like that? Stories about getting shot because you "stand up for God", about missionaries being tortured, an effed-up retelling of the trolley problem where a man pulls the switch and the trolley kills his son, to show up how God felt about sacrificing Jesus, and make us feel guilty for not appreciating it enough. Sermon illustrations that make you go "well, that escalated quickly."

But this wasn't a sermon illustration, this was real life. I looked up the flight number on google. Arrived in Shanghai on time. And then, the next day, the flight I managed to get on: arrived in Shanghai on time. One uneventful flight, and then the next day, another uneventful flight. I arrived in Shanghai on time. Well, 1 day late.

And the evangelical I used to be wants to find reasons. Okay, we know that nothing bad enough to be newsworthy happened, but we can speculate about other hypothetical bad things that I avoided by not being on that plane. Maybe I would have gotten into an argument with the person in the seat next to me. Maybe there was a baby crying the whole time. Maybe someone was throwing up, in the seat next to what should have been my seat. Maybe the line to go through immigration at the Shanghai airport was really long and slow that day. Maybe I would have lost my luggage. (Well, definitely. If I had to run through the airport to make it on to the plane, you know my luggage wouldn't have made it.) Maybe a thief would have stolen my phone while I was waiting in line for a taxi in Shanghai.

Yes, lots of bad things that God decided to spare me from. But God's totally fine with those things happening to the other 300 people on that plane.

See that's the problem with these stories where God causes an inconvenience in someone's life, but it turns out to be a good thing because they end up avoiding some worse problem. In these stories, it's all about you and everybody else is a red shirt. God has a plan for your life, but apparently not for all those other background characters in your story.

When I hear those sermon illustrations, I don't hear "don't worry, trust God." I hear, "isn't it great when God makes bad things happen to other people instead of you?"

I look out for myself first. That's good and normal. But God shouldn't do that. God shouldn't be biased towards helping me over other people.

Or perhaps the "reason" God "made" me miss my flight wasn't so I could avoid a bad thing, but so I could have a good thing. Maybe to give me the opportunity to see friends in Chicago I haven't seen for a long time. Maybe so I could do some fun sightseeing (ahem, ride the subway and get a smoothie). Maybe so I could be friendly to other people who also missed their flight and cheer them up a little. Maybe that was the day that the in-flight movies got updated and I got to see some new ones that weren't there the day before.

Or maybe God did this as a punishment. (Like what happened in The Worst Bible Story.) Hmm, let's think back on the past few weeks- did I commit any major sins? Maybe I haven't been "putting God first." Maybe I haven't been making God a priority, maybe I've been too busy and haven't read my bible enough. (Note: I rarely read the bible now, but back when I was an evangelical I did every day because obviously that's what good Christians are supposed to do.) Maybe I had been having some selfish feelings. Maybe I didn't pray for God's protection over my travels, and that shows I'm arrogant and I think I don't need God, and God is like "well I'LL SHOW HER!" (Wow, I'm so glad I don't believe in any of that anymore. So glad I'm no longer constantly thinking in terms of "am I putting God first?")

Or, how about this: God was punishing someone else who was on my flight into Chicago. God delayed that one so that this other person would end up missing their next flight, and unfortunately I happened to be on the plane too so I got caught up in it accidentally. But no, nobody in evangelical land speculates along those lines. "God's plan" is always all about me, and everyone else is an unimportant background character. I'm never the background character.

And we could go on and on like this forever, imagining things that aren't real and believing that's what was on God's mind when They "made" this happen. I don't believe any of that. I don't think there was a reason; I don't think God had anything to do with it. I think it's just bad luck. Every day, people miss their flights. Miss their international flights, even. It's a pretty normal thing. Just bad luck that it happened to me that day.

Back when I was an evangelical, I always heard people say, "everything happens for a reason," and I told them I didn't believe that. Because I knew they didn't really mean "everything"; they meant "things that you are emotionally invested in enough that you want to have a reason when they go wrong." RIGHT? Like, let's say you dropped your pen on the floor and you picked it up. Did that "happen for a reason"? No, nobody is talking about the "reason" for that because it's such a small thing it's not even worth mentioning. Like, it's so small it doesn't even count as an inconvenience. Probably a minute later you forget that it even happened.

When something doesn't go according to plan, but you quickly adapt and move on with life, take it in stride, roll with it like it's no big deal, then you don't ask God "why?" But if it's something that you just can't accept, if it takes time to cope with it emotionally, if it means you lost something important to you and you have to mourn it- that's when people want to believe God has "a reason." And- get this- it could be the exact same bad thing, but because you attach different emotions to it, in the first case you barely give it a second thought, while the second case has you praying and looking for the "reason" for days.

Missing this flight means I missed 1 day of work. Just a regular day, didn't have anything important planned. Not a big deal. But what if there was something really important scheduled for that day, something I had been looking forward to for months? What if it really mattered that I wasn't there? What if ... what if it was something I had been praying about as I prepared for it? Then the evangelical version of me would have believed there was "a reason" and it was "God's plan." In fact, the reason would have to be proportional to the emotional fallout I suffered from missing whatever important event I missed.

That's what I believed. If I prayed about something and was looking forward to it with a ton of emotions and anticipation, then it was less likely that something would go wrong. Because, like, God wouldn't do that.

I don't believe that anymore. Now I just believe in probability. The universe doesn't care if you're happy to take an unplanned vacation in Chicago or if you're missing your grandma's funeral. In both situations, you have that same probability of missing your flight. I believe in a God who causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

And when I travel international, I always build in an extra day so I'm not missing any hugely important thing if I end up stuck somewhere unexpectedly. Because, it happens. It's just bad luck. So I do what I can to minimize the damage.

So no, I don't believe God made me miss my flight. If it was to spare me from something bad, well what about the other 300 people on the plane, doesn't God care about them? Believing that there's a "reason" means believing in a reason that's proportional to the emotional distress I feel about it, and that just gets too complicated- why would "God's plan" depend on the whims of my emotions? And I don't think all this endless speculation is healthy either- all this imagining of hypothetical "reasons" that God "made" it happen, trying to force myself to believe one of them must be true.

No, I don't believe any of that. It's just bad luck. It happens to people every day. I made the best of it- I got to see friends in Chicago. It worked out okay. But it doesn't make sense to believe God had anything to do with it.

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Related:
Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk

Blogaround

A very useful diagram which shows us that if a chocolate wafer, white filling, and chocolate wafer is an "oreo", then a wafer, filling, wafer, filling, wafer is "oreoreo", 5 layers of filling is "rerererere", a stack of 5 wafers is "ooooo", and so on. Image source.

1. Explaining in the Guise of Listening: A Review of Josh Harris’ New Documentary (posted December 27) "Harris appears to have done less actual analysis of his teachings than I have here on this blog—or a dozen other bloggers." AIN'T THAT THE TRUTH.

2. ‘What if someone was shooting?’ (posted December 26) [content note: gun violence] An article about how school lockdowns are traumatizing for children.

3. Anonymous donor provides free lunches to Georgia district's families in need during holiday break (posted December 26)

4. Visionary Brain Genius Elon Musk Has Invented The World's Worst And Most Expensive Subway (posted December 19) "Literally the only innovation here is that it’s a worse version of both driving and riding the subway, and only available to people who’ve bought one brand of car."

5. Trump Moves to Deport Vietnam War Refugees (posted December 12) Nooooo. Support all immigrants.

6. CCM Comes to a Presidential Funeral (posted December 8) Michael W. Smith performed "Friends" ("friends are friends forever") at Bush's funeral.

7. The Dangerous Rise of the IUD as Poverty Cure (posted January 2) "This sort of language should set off alarm bells because the idea that limiting women’s reproduction can cure society’s ills has a long, shameful history in the United States."

8. #MeToo law restricts use of nondisclosure agreements in sexual misconduct cases (posted December 31) "'Women don’t want to sell silence and lawyers shouldn’t be selling or buying silence,' Smith said."

Top 20 Posts From 2018

A cat happily standing on a laptop keyboard. Image source.

Happy 2019, everyone! It's a new year! So here's my round-up of the top posts from 2018, here on Tell Me Why The World Is Weird.

Top 5 posts by pageviews:

1. Globophobia "In reality, the efforts to 'desensitize' me to loud sounds communicated to me that my pain didn't matter. That I would just have to accept it when something hurts me, and I shouldn't react or expect other people to care."

And part 2: "But in college I finally surrendered all to Jesus, and I accepted what everyone else had been telling me for my whole life: It's wrong for me to protect myself. It's wrong for me to expect people to care about my pain. It's wrong for me to claim I have needs different from those of a 'normal person.'"

2. Dr. Strange's Ways Are Higher Than Our Ways "It’s too easy. Too convenient. This line of thinking can be used to excuse any kind of atrocity."

3. Feminism 101: Toxic Masculinity and Fragile Masculinity "Really? Masculinity, which is supposedly so strong and tough, can be destroyed by the mere act of holding a purse?"

4. Asexual and "Impure" "Worked so hard fighting my desires, couldn't even let my guard down enough to actually feel those desires and realize none of them were sexual attraction."

5. They said it was about "valuing our bodies." That was a lie. "Better to just pretend that my vulva doesn't exist- that's what a good, pure girl does, right?"

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And here are a few other good posts from the year:

1. "How Far Is Too Far?" My Story, And What I Wish I'd Known "Like... the idea that I could write you a few lists of all the physical things we did in each of these relationships, and that you could learn anything meaningful from that information alone... that's absurd. It's laughable. But that's the entire focus of purity culture. How far? How far?"

2. From "Virtues Morality" To "Boundaries Morality" "Virtues morality isn't able to diagnose situations where it's not worth your time and effort to 'help others' because you already tried to help but they refused to cooperate, or where your attempts to 'help' aren't going to work anyway, or where people aren't treating you right and therefore they don't deserve your help, or where it comes at such a huge personal cost to you that it's not healthy."

3. Reading US History Inerrantly "And just as I had trained myself to read about the Canaanite genocide without ever thinking 'hey, maybe this was a bad thing that God commanded here', I read about the kidnapping, sale, torture, beating, and murder of African people without ever thinking 'hey, maybe it's actually NOT true that this country was founded on principles of liberty and justice for all.'"

4. This Is Exactly the Martyr Fairy Tale We Aspired To "Furthermore, it is DISGUSTING to pray that God would violate these people's wishes."

5. In Your Anger Do Not Sin (a Hulk fanfic) "Yes, he knew- in an abstract way- that his sin had killed Jesus, that every sin is an infinite offense against a holy God, that his sinful nature was a dangerous thing that shouldn't be taken lightly, that it meant he deserved nothing good, he deserved to die and go to hell... but today his sin had literally turned him into a huge green monster."

6. Great Wall (Qinhuangdao, China) "I know what you're thinking. 'Perfect Number, you've been living in China 5 years, and you haven't shown us pictures of the Great Wall! What gives? Cough 'em up!'"

7. Perfect Number Watches VeggieTales (Master Post) "In November 2017, I decided to do a rewatch and analysis of all the VeggieTales movies, because they were an important part of my childhood in Christian culture."

8. Miss me with your "we are all sexually broken" hot takes. I'm asexual. "I never had the desire to have sex, but I lived in fear that my romantic desires were an indication that I could potentially be so sinful as to desire sex."

9. "You Don't Want Justice": Here Are the Receipts "Living in a constant state of anxiety because you truly do believe that God would be well within their rights to just kill you at any moment."

10. Don't Invite Anybody From 'Desiring God' to Your Funeral "You call this 'good news'? No- If you think it's a good thing that someone stood up at a funeral and announced that the dead person is in hell, then you are FOREVER DISQUALIFIED from telling us what is or isn't 'good news.'"

11. A Post About Masturbation "Just because we're in love and I fully intend to spend the rest of my life with him, why on earth would that mean that he needs to be present every time I stimulate my genitals?"

12. A Little Story About a Mission Trip and Money "Nobody ever said the reason I got to go to China is because I knew a lot of rich Christians. Even though that's the truth."

13. What Sex Is Like (According to Purity Culture) "You may be asexual if you don't get why everyone says it's THE BEST FEELING EVER to do things with their partner's genitals, but you assume it will be self-explanatory once you try it. Yeah, turns out it's not self-explanatory."

14. Cut Out the Middleman (or, why I am the master and commander of my own life) "Because if it's actually me picking which god to follow, then doing what that god tells me to do, why not just cut out the middleman and do what I think is right in the first place?"

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Happy new year everyone! I've got some good stuff planned for 2019 on the blog~

The Bible Lied About Lot's Daughters

Artwork that shows Lot and his two daughters fleeing Sodom (which is in the background on fire). Behind them, Lot's wife is looking back at Sodom and waving her arms. Image source.

[content note: child sexual abuse]

Here's a post with a bit of bible interpretation that blew my mind: The Lot of the Abused: How We Shift the Blame Onto Victims. (It's from 2016 but was recently shared on Love, Joy, Feminism.)

The writer, Ryan Stollar, says that the biblical story about Lot's daughters just doesn't add up. According to the bible, after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot lived in a cave with his two daughters, and the daughters decided they needed to get pregnant by their father because supposedly there were no other men in the world. They got him drunk and then the older daughter had sex with him. The next day they got him drunk again and the younger daughter had sex with him. Both got pregnant. And Lot was so drunk that he wasn't even aware of what was happening during sex- "he did not know when she lay down or when she arose." In other words, the two daughters raped their father.

Yeah, Stollar says he doesn't buy it. Remember the part (before they lived in the cave) where Lot lived in Sodom and an angry mob came to his door and he offered to let them rape his two virgin daughters? Stollar asks:

How did these marginalized young girls, who were just moments prior about to be thrown out to be sexually assaulted themselves, become—seemingly overnight—active and machinating sexual criminals?

Instead, he sees it this way:

This causes me to have a different take. Reading the text with an eye towards child liberation and child protection means I place the children at the center of the story. When I do that, here is what I read: two young girls are offered up for gang rape by their father—a father prone to drinking, who cares little about his daughters’ protection, and has no qualms with sexual violation provided it is girls who are violated. The poor children are dragged from one city to another until they are forced to live in isolation with their drunken father in a cave. Shortly thereafter both children are pregnant. A child liberative and protective lens would color this story as child sexual abuse.

In other words, what really happened is that Lot raped his two daughters, but Christians traditionally teach it the other way around. Yep, I can confirm, that's how I always understood this story, look how Lot's daughters were such bad people, right? Wow that whole family was messed-up, right? Maybe I even told myself not to feel that bad for them, when Lot was going to send them out to the angry mob, because look, they are dirty and bad people anyway. They must have learned that in Sodom, such a bad and sinful place.

Wow, very not cool how Christians have always blamed these two children for their sexual abuse. Stollar says:

That is how child abuse and sexual abuse stories work in our world.

The adult claims the child wanted it—or the child deserved it—or the child masterminded it—or the child needed it—or the child was sinful. Abusers constantly are trying to shift blame for abuse onto the victims they abused.

Seriously, go read the whole thing.

When I was reading Stollar's article, I noticed something was missing. Or, maybe not, maybe he knew his readers already knew and it wasn't necessary for him to mention it. He never explicitly stated that just because the bible says something doesn't mean it's true. If I had read this article when I was an evangelical, I would have assumed it was coming from a biblical-inerrancy perspective, because I didn't know there were people who would put so much effort into analyzing a bible passage if they didn't believe in inerrancy. ("Inerrancy" is the belief that everything in the bible is true and without error.)

I can imagine myself as an evangelical, being quite interested in Stollar's interpretation, and then going back to Genesis 19 to see if the text could in fact be read that way. I can imagine myself getting quite stuck when the older daughter says, "Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve offspring from our father." Trying to imagine how BOTH could be true- that the daughters are victims that Lot sexually abused, AND ALSO the older daughter said these words.

It seems to me that Stollar believes the older daughter did NOT say these words. The bible is just plain wrong, here in this verse. But personally I found it odd that he didn't say so in his article. If I was reading this and I believed in inerrancy, I would have completely missed his point. It would be unimaginable to me that the writer of such an article would not believe in inerrancy. It would never have occurred to me that the writer is saying the bible is just plain wrong about what happened with Lot's daughters. I would have been so confused, trying to imagine a scenario where the two girls were victims of sexual abuse, but where it's still possible to write the account we get in Genesis 19 and have every part of it be *technically* true but wildly taken out of context.

It's so important that Christians read the bible the way that Stollar presents in his article. Noticing when things don't add up. Hypothesizing about the ways the biblical writers may have added some "facts" that weren't true, the reasons they could have had for doing so, and what that tells us about the passage.

It's interesting to me to think about how, back when I was evangelical, I knew how to be skeptical about things people said, how to think about what biases they may have that would lead them to lie- but I didn't apply that to the bible at all. Of course not! Something that, in any other context, would be highly suspicious, I would accept without question if the bible said it. Like "God told us to kill all these people and take their land." Instead of asking, "What might have motivated the writer of 'Joshua' to claim that God told them to kill the people and take their land," I just... believed it. And now I'm realizing how my study of the bible could have been so much richer and so much deeper if I had been allowed to see the layers, see how the writers changed and adapted stories for their own purposes, how they were motivated by politics, how they embellished with completely-made-up "facts" that showed their own biases. Instead I just read the bible like "here's what it says, therefore that's what happened and that's all there is to it." (Plus a lot of research into fan theories- uh, I mean, apologetics- to explain the contradictions.)

Anyway, to sum up: The biblical account of Lot's daughters raping their father is NOT how it happened. The story itself doesn't make sense. It sounds like the story an abuser would tell to cover up the abuse and blame the victims.

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Related: 
Reading US History Inerrantly
Perfect Number Watches VeggieTales "Josh and the Big Wall" (1997) 
The Bible's Contradictions Matter, And It's Not a Logic Problem

My favorite genre of bible fan fiction is about taking characters the bible portrays as "bad" and reimagining their stories. Here are 2 fics I've written along those lines:
Noah's Evangelism
Achan's Sin

Blogaround

A sleeping cat wearing a Santa hat. Image source.

1. A 5-Month-Old Girl Has Been Hospitalized With Pneumonia After Being Detained By The Border Patrol (posted December 19) "Portillo told agents that her daughter was sick shortly after being detained, but they told Portillo it was normal and that everyone coming into the holding cells was ill. She wasn't allowed to get new medication or see a doctor."

2. The best $6,250 I ever spent: top surgery (posted December 18) "Last year, I publicly admitted to having a body for the first time, an act so embarrassing I have still not fully recovered."

3. Blogger Elizabeth Esther Regrets Her Participation in Josh Harris Documentary (posted December 20) "My takeaway is that nothing has changed for Josh Harris. He still believes the same things. He just doesn’t like how he said it in a book he wrote." (My post about Harris's documentary is here: So I Watched Josh Harris's Documentary.)

4. The Amazonian tribe defending their land with technology (posted December 20) "Over four years, the Waorani used hi-tech GPS technology, camera traps, and drones to map out 180,000 hectares of their territory."

5. Advent Calendar Day 17: Fair and foul are near of kin (posted December 17) "A Christmas caganer is a figurine of someone — traditionally an anonymous peasant in traditional dress — squatting and pooping."

6. When Teen Cas Innocently Suggested Testing a Miracle (LSP #73) (posted December 17) "And then, and then, and then we could sit back and wait for the world to wonder and marvel at how a little girl could possibly have known an ancient language so fluently at her age."

My Urbana 12 Commitment Card

Logo from Urbana 2012. Image source.

Urbana 18 is going to be held December 27-31, so I'd like to talk about my experience with Urbana. Urbana is the huge student missions conference that InterVarsity Christian Fellowship holds every 3 years. It's about missions- about the world, about God calling you to go be a missionary, about embracing different languages and cultures, about the needs of humanity on a global scale, about our radical obedience to a God who wants us to sacrifice everything for the gospel.

ANYWAY here is a rough timeline of what happened to me:

2009: Went to Urbana
2010: Went on a short-term missions trip to China
2012: Went to Urbana
2013: Moved to China, and I've been living here ever since.

Umm. Did I come to China because of Urbana? No? Kind of? Maybe? It's more complicated than that. It wasn't like "while we were in that giant auditorium singing 'I Will Go' I just got this sense like God was telling me, 'Perfect Number, go to China.'" It wasn't like how the Christian leaders at my college encouraged us to sign up for Urbana by name-dropping famous missionaries who apparently "heard the call" at Urbana. It wasn't like that.

(And because it wasn't like that, I spent 2010-2013 living in the US, wanting SO MUCH to be in China, but not even sure if I was "allowed to", because "God didn't 'call' me." But that's a story for another time. Seriously, ask me about that sometime and I will TELL YOU. Or look through my blog posts from 2012.)

I already believed- because I had been taught this in church for my entire life- that God loved the whole world, and that all around the world there are people who desperately need our help, either because they're living in poverty, or because they haven't "heard the gospel." And I believed I should obey God no matter the cost. Urbana just helped me see, in real-life practical terms, what it would mean to live like I really believed those things. (I no longer necessarily think those are good things to believe...)

It wasn't like "I moved to China because at Urbana God told me to move to China." Nope. Not one bit like that. Maybe it was more like "I moved to China because of these things I believed about God and the world, which I had believed my whole life, but Urbana reminded me of them in a way I couldn't shake."

(I've actually been working on a post about "the real reason I came to China" for a while, so stay tuned for that. Maybe in the next few months.)

Anyway. What I really want to talk about in this post is my Urbana 2012 commitment card.

What is a "commitment card", you ask? Well on the last day of a Christian conference, they have all the attendees fill out a "commitment card" where you write down what actions "God is calling you" to take as a result of your experiences at the conference. As it happens, a while ago I found an image online of an Urbana 2012 commitment card, and I posted it on the blog post I wrote about radical Christian missions. Here is the image:

Urbana 2012 commitment card. Image source.

Here is the text, the different "commitments" you can choose from:

I say "yes" to Jesus, who extends God's lavish welcome
1. I am deciding to become a follower of Jesus for the first time.
2. I am deciding to recommit myself to following Jesus.

I commit to extending Jesus' invitation
3. I will invite someone who is not a follower of Jesus to study Luke with me

I commit to join Jesus in his global mission
4. I commit to serve and learn in a global or cross-cultural setting

5. Short-term: less than one year
6. Mid-term: one to two years
7. Long-term: more than two years

So for each of the numbered items, there's a box you can check if you're "committing" to that one. Yep, this is exactly what the commitment card I filled out looked like. I remember I checked off the last one- commit to doing cross-cultural missions long-term, ie more than two years.

All right, that was 2012, that was 6 years ago, how about we revisit that "commitment" and see if I did it or not?

Well to start out with, let's talk about what the word "commitment" means. This is a two-year commitment. Wow. That is a really big deal. I wonder about the other students who checked off that box. I wonder if it was a decision they made at Urbana, or if they had already been planning to move to another country.

In my case, I was already planning to go to China, before I went to Urbana 2012. The commitment card didn't represent me making a decision; it was just me writing down the decision I had already made, the decision that had been on my mind constantly since that short-term mission trip in 2010.

But the way Christians always talked about Urbana and God's "calling", I imagined that typically, these "commitments" were something new, something that had just come up within the few days that people were attending the conference. As if someone showed up at Urbana with no plans at all to do long-term missions, but with their "heart open to God", and during the conference they felt like God was "calling" them to go to such-and-such country that they had never been to before and knew nothing about.

(I even knew Christians who chose not to go to Urbana specifically because they were worried that God was going to "call" them to go be a missionary in some foreign country. Ha, I could write a whole post analyzing what this says about obeying God and not being allowed to make our own choices.)

I have no idea, in reality, how long people thought about it before making "commitments" at Urbana. I don't know what percentage of them counted the cost. But I do know that we were encouraged to "step out in faith" and "trust God" and go ahead and make that commitment even though we didn't yet understand how it would work out in practical terms. After all, if God is telling you to do it, then God will make sure those minor details work out. (Minor details like "I don't speak the language"...) No worries.

It seems to me that an idea which comes to you in an emotionally-charged Christian environment like the Urbana conference can disappear just as fast when you go back to your normal life. If, out of nowhere, "God calls you" and you "commit" to moving overseas for 2 years, but that's something you had never actually thought about before, then how on earth is that actually going to happen? Raw emotion isn't going to get you there. You have to find a job or find a missions organization. You have to fill out visa applications. You have to buy a plane ticket. You have to pack medications and maybe get vaccines, depending on which country you're going to. You have to at least learn how to say numbers, so you can buy stuff, and "where's the bathroom?" But before you do any of that, you have to do A LOT OF RESEARCH to figure out where to even start.

So I wonder, how many students made "commitments" at Urbana to do missions, and then nothing ever came of it.

What about me though? I committed to 2 or more years of cross-cultural missions. And I've been living in China for 5 years now. So, uh, does that "count"?

I mean... Back when I was an evangelical, I believed in the concept of "we are all missionaries, no matter where we are." Basically, even if you're not living in a foreign country, even if you're not in a Christian job like being a pastor, even if you just have a "normal" life (whatever that means...), you should still think of yourself as a missionary. That means that you should work hard to "show God's love" to people and to "share the gospel" with them- that should be a high priority for Christians no matter where we are or what job we have.

And I still believe that. Well, in an ex-evangelical way. I no longer do evangelism- because it's BAD and UNLOVING to assume that I know what complete strangers need (ie, they need to become Christians). But I believe in doing good and loving people even if that's not part of my actual professional job description. Do the right thing, spend time and effort caring about people, etc.

Umm. So. ... Am I a missionary?

LOLOLOLOLOL no. No, I very much DO NOT identify as a missionary.

Do I "serve and learn in a global or cross-cultural setting"? (The actual text of the commitment card.)

I mean, yes... except that I think the "serve" here is actually Christianese for "doing the things that good evangelicals are supposed to do, like evangelism." So if we're using that definition, then no. If any of this is dependent on being a good evangelical, then no, no I have NOT spent 2 years doing that.

Overall, I have no regrets about this. I did good enough. I moved to China. As for that stuff about continuing to buy into that whole ideology about evangelism and missions, nah I don't feel bad about leaving all that behind.

One more thing I want to say about the concept of committing to move to a different country for 2+ years: Actually, that's not really something you can commit to, because there could be unexpected problems that come up and force you to move back to your home country.

When I first came to China and I was teaching English, I had a coworker who was also from the US, let's call her Anna. She had been working in Shanghai as an English teacher for less than 1 year, and then she started having health problems, and she had to move back to the US to get treatment.

I met another American here in Shanghai, let's call her Cathy. She came to China because she got a job as a music teacher here, but then when she got here the school was like "actually you won't be a music teacher, you're going to teach English." Yeah, that happens sometimes- the job they actually want you to do is completely different from the job they said you were going to do.

Cathy, as you might imagine, was NOT HAPPY about this. She spent a few days scrambling around to find a new job- at one point saying to herself, "If I don't find a new job today, I will have to go back to the US." She did find a different teaching job, and she worked there for a few months. But then she had problems with her visa, and China is a giant bureaucracy, and she couldn't get those problems solved so she did end up moving back to the US.

I have another American friend, let's call him Tim, who was studying in Japan in 2011 when there was a huge earthquake that caused a huge tsunami and nuclear power plant meltdowns. It was bad. Wikipedia says 15000 people died. Because of that disaster, Tim ended up leaving Japan and coming back to the US. From what he told me, it sounded like most of the international students he knew in Japan were leaving.

In her book When We Were On Fire (which I blogged about here), Addie Zierman talked about the period of time she and her husband spent in China. For her, it was a very low point in her life. She developed depression because of the culture shock and because of how isolated she felt. For her own mental health, she needed to leave.

And the book Runaway Radical (which I blogged about here) tells about how Jonathan Hollingsworth went to Cameroon as a missionary, because he was so "on fire for God" and bought into all that ideology about sacrificing everything for the sake of the gospel. When he was there, he suffered spiritual abuse from the leaders of the missions organization. The situation got worse and worse, and finally he decided to leave, and they wouldn't even give him his plane ticket or refund any of the money his donors had raised. He was able to get back to the US, eventually.

My point is, sometimes you plan to move to a foreign country and live there for a certain period of time- 1 year, 2 years, whatever- but then circumstances outside of your control force you to leave. So I'm really really uncomfortable about the idea of "making a commitment" about it. Yes, you can make a commitment to try, to put in a reasonable amount of effort in pursuit of that goal, but making a commitment to actually do it... uhhhh... Especially if you've never even traveled there before and you really have no idea what you're committing to. (*cough* like most of the students at Urbana *cough*) When you don't know how hard and painful it is to be an immigrant.

I just hate the idea that someone could spend so much time, effort, money, and emotional energy to move to another country, and then something bad happens and they're more or less forced to move back to their home country- which is a difficult situation just by itself- but then on top of that, they feel the weight of guilt because they broke a commitment they made to God. If it was me, no matter what the problem was that forced me to leave, I would feel like it was my fault, that I should have just tried harder and I could have found a way to stay. Or I would feel like my sin was in making that commitment in the first place- making a "rash vow" like Jephthah, am I right? Like it didn't matter if I'd vowed something that was actually impossible for me to do. It's my fault for not adding fine print to the Urbana commitment card.

(By the way, here is a link to the BEST POST I HAVE EVER READ about the biblical story of Jephthah's daughter. "The story of Jephthah is the story of everyone who decides that vows and codes and rules must be absolute. That way of thinking always ends in death.")

Anyway. I'm revisiting my 2012 Urbana commitment card because it's a big deal to commit to 2 years of cross-cultural missions, and that matters to me. InterVarsity keeps statistics about these commitment cards, as if they really matter and these are real commitments we are making. Look at this link- it says in 2012 at Urbana, 4248 students committed to that last option on the commitment card, 2 or more years of "long-term mission." I was one of them. I want to know what happened to the other 4247. 6 years later, where are they? Did they do their 2 years? Did they quit being evangelical, like me? What did it actually mean, that we made this commitment?

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Readers: If you have experience with making "commitments" at a Christian conference, leave a comment about it! Especially if you went to Urbana.

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Related: 
I Didn't Count the Cost Before I Moved To China
This Is Exactly the Martyr Fairy Tale We Aspired To
InterVarsity just strained out a gnat and swallowed a camel. (I no longer support InterVarsity because of what they did to queer people in 2016.)

Trans and Religious

A church with a rainbow flag over the door. Image source.

For Advent this year, I'm giving money to support trans people, and posting links to some good articles about trans people and Christianity.

Today I want to share this post by Shannon T. L. Kearns, How Do You Reconcile Your Trans Identity With Your Religion?

Can I tell you a secret? You don’t actually have to reconcile your faith and your sexuality/transness. Not really. What you need to do is free your mind from the narrow view that says there is only one way to understand Christianity. That there is only one interpretation of Scripture. That there is only one way to read the Bible. That there is only one way to get into Heaven (and that getting into Heaven is the be all end all of the Christian life). Because once you do that work; once you really understand what it means to be a follower of Jesus (and what it doesn’t mean) then you will find that there is no reconciliation to be done. Because you’ll find that who you were created to be is good and holy and beautiful.

(go read the whole thing)

Also this: The journey of one transgender Latina in the church, about Nicole Garcia, a trans Latina woman.

The report Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that while discrimination against transgender individuals was pervasive, “people of color in general fare worse than white participants across the board, with African American transgender respondents faring far worse than all others in most areas examined.”

For example, while transgender people are twice as likely to lose their jobs as the general population, transgender people of color are four times more likely to face unemployment, the report says. The majority of those killed in transgender hate crimes are transgender women of color, according to Transgender Day of Remembrance.

“We didn’t stop being black, Latino, Asian or Native American just because we became trans,” noted Kylar Broadus, executive director of the Trans People of Color Coalition.

On a grass-roots level, Garcia said she has experienced a wonderful welcome at Mount Calvary Lutheran in Boulder, Colo., where she serves currently as a seminarian. And two other Colorado churches, St. Paul Lutheran in Denver and Christ the Servant Lutheran in Louisville, have given her funds toward tuition.

Yet Garcia still wonders if a congregation will accept her as a minister just as she is. “How can I feel comfortable as a Latina with dark skin in a denomination where inevitably at least 90 percent of the congregants in any ELCA church will be white?”

Garcia is very aware that when she graduates, she will have up to $25,000 in student loans. “Even though I have church credentials as a national church leader and a background in counseling, who will hire a 58-year-old Latina trans clergyperson?”

The answer to that question will help determine how radically inclusive mainline churches can be moving forward.

(go read the whole thing)

Merry Christmas everyone~ If you have money, consider donating to trans people in need on the #TransCrowdFund hashtag, or to Trans Lifeline.

Blogaround

Scene between Steve Rogers and Bruce Banner from the first Avengers movie, except the image has been edited so they are both wearing Santa hats. Rogers says, "Doctor Banner ... Now might be a really good time for you to get merry." Banner says, "That's my secret Cap. I'm always merry." Image source.

1. “Father, Husband, Brother, or Son” Is for White Men (posted December 13) "Conservatives talk about a “war on men,” and then they turn around and accuse migrant caravans as being mostly made up of men as though men are less deserving of peace, and safety, and employment, and they, in fact, are the ones waging a war on men."

2. 7-year-old migrant girl taken into Border Patrol custody dies of dehydration, exhaustion (posted December 13)

3. ‘No matter what the laws might be, you would honor yourself for doing it’ (posted November 24) "The ICE agents operate with support from exactly the same kind of white Christian who supported the slave-catchers in 1858."

4. A Christianity That Makes Room for Rage (posted September 28) "I slowly came to understand that if I was going to remain a Christian, I needed to find a path that had room for the rage and grief I carried with me as a rape survivor."

5. Anne Graham Lotz: My Breast Cancer’s a Sign That an Attack on Israel is Imminent (posted December 15) "If that’s her logic, she’s going to be shocked when she learns how many other people are also born in 1948." Yep, I know all about how the "personal relationship with God" strand of Christianity can lead a person to think the whole world revolves around themself.

6. You Can’t Be Autistic Because. . . You Speak (posted September 12) Debunking this myth~

7. Lament for the Slave Girl in Pharaoh’s House (posted November 19) "It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. She didn’t have a lamb, or doorframes. She couldn’t even call her body her own."

8. Advent Calendar Day 5: The quest for the canonical Santa Claus (posted December 5) "Why should “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” be more authoritatively canonical than, say, “Here Comes Santa Claus”? I’m not sure, but I think it is — just as I think the Tim Allen Santa Clause movies are, while amusing, heterodox and non-canonical."

9. Today I learned the Newsboys did a cover of "All I Want For Christmas Is You." Nice.



Note: This is the Newsboys as in "Michael Tait is the lead singer of the Newsboys." Those of us 90's kids who grew up evangelical may remember when Peter Furler was the lead singer of the Newsboys, and Tait was part of dc Talk. Good times. Here is a Newsboys Christmas song from that era:



10. A Christmas Miracle: Speaking in Tongues at the Company Party (posted December 11) "To this day, I don’t think that hypnotist realized that he had assigned me the role I had been born to play."