Look at me, blogging up a storm. Who knew I could stay so on task with blogging?

Today I was working on some web design stuff, watching tutorial videos so I can learn Flash CS5, and scanning old documents so they can be thrown out, when an unexpected interruption came.

I heard a firm knock on the door, followed by a muffled bark. (PS is trying to become more of a guard dog these days by barking when people knock on the door, but she’s still getting the hang of it. It’s hit and miss, sometimes she gives a series of loud, threatening barks, sometimes no bark at all, and sometimes a half-hearted, quiet bark like today.)

I ignored the first knock, thinking that it might be the FedEx guy finally delivering the bubble envelopes I ordered on Ebay early last week. (I’m also in the process of selling many of our old books we don’t want anymore on Amazon, so I needed a large, cheap supply of bubble envelopes.) Anyway, I figured if it was the FedEx guy, he would knock once, leave the package, then take off and leave me in peace to finish my many projects. No such luck. Another knock came (this time no bark).

Photo by brentdanley (flickr.com)

I grudgingly got up to answer the door. I glanced through the peephole to see two nicely-dressed women smiling at me. They were youngish looking, not very threatening, and didn’t seem to be moving off my doorstep, so I decided to answer the door instead of pretending like I wasn’t home. I had a feeling they were religious solicitors, but we’ve had several fundraising solicitors come to our door in the past (selling cookies, magazine subscriptions, etc.) so I figured I’d give them the benefit of the doubt and maybe get some cookies out of the situation.

Unfortunately, cookies were not to be. My initial instincts were right. Young, well-dressed, happy-looking people = JW or LDS. These two were LDS. I wasn’t in the mood for, nor did I have time for a rigorous debate with them, so I feigned ignorance about their purpose and tried to be polite/nice/non-inviting. I left the door half-closed as I talked to them so they would understand that I didn’t want to invite them in.

As soon as I found out they were Mormons, my gut reaction was to end the conversation immediately, send them packing, and pray away the evil from my front door. After all, I was raised in a denomination in which people anoint their homes with oil and pray God’s blessing when they first move in so nothing left over from previous pagan occupants has an effect on the new owners. I was quite tempted to view these two girls as abominations and Satan’s workmanship, created to do evil works that he prepared for them in advance.

Then I caught myself emotionally. Also, it’s hard for me to treat anyone, no matter how much I may disagree with them, rudely to their face. So instead of making the sign of the cross and slamming the door in their faces, I talked to these girls like I would talk to anyone else. I answered their questions honestly and nicely. I asked them a couple of questions about their faith in a non-threatening way.

Although I would have liked a chance to share my faith with them and really get into the nuances of Mormonism versus orthodox Christianity, I didn’t have time for it, nor did it seem that they were prepared for that type of conversation.

At one point in our conversation, I asked one of the girls if Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon. She had told me that the Book of Mormon is the “words of Christ.”

“But how can they be the words of Christ if Joseph Smith wrote it?” I asked.

She quickly responded that Joseph Smith didn’t write the Book of Mormon; the prophets wrote it. “You know, like how the prophets wrote the Bible. Like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and all of the other writers of the Bible. They were the Eastern testimony of Jesus. The Book of Mormon was written by the Americans who were here at the same time that the Bible was written in the East. It’s the Western testimony of Jesus. Jesus isn’t just for one culture, He’s for all cultures. So this is just another testimony of Jesus, but it says all the same things as the Bible. Everything about Jesus has to match up and be true. Joseph Smith found the writings of the American prophets and translated it by the Holy Spirit.”

“So the Book of Mormon was written by Native Americans?” I asked with a hint of skepticism in my voice. (I really tried hard not to sound skeptical, but at that point, I couldn’t help it.)

“No, it was written by American prophets,” she responded.

“But you said that it was written at the same time that the Bible was written. And when the Bible was written, American hadn’t been discovered yet. So the only people here were Native Americans. So they had to have written the Book of Mormon.”

“Yes, so it was written by Native Americans,” she said.

At least we were getting somewhere logical. These ladies were pretty adamant about the Book of Mormon being entirely compatible with the Bible and simply illuminating the Bible even more. It would take hours to travel down nuanced paths of theology with them to point out incompatible things between the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and unfortunately I was out of time.

They could sense my impatience, so one of the girls asked if they could give me their number so they could come back and talk for 15 more minutes. (She actually said, “Would you have 15 minutes to have us come back and talk to you again another day?” I guess the LDS church teaches 15-minute increments for best conversion practices.)

I took their number and told them I would see if my husband wanted to talk to them. One of them was Chinese and I thought he might be interested in practicing his Mandarin with her. But mostly I took the number because I would have done the same if they had been generic fundraisers and not religious people. I did it because I wanted them to feel normal, and I wanted them to think of me as a kind person.

At the beginning of our conversation, they had asked me if I went to church. I told them about Calvary and why we liked it. I told them I went to Wheaton College. I made it clear that I was an evangelical Christian. I didn’t want their impression of an evangelical Christian to be someone who is hateful and afraid. I wanted them to see that I treated them with respect and care.

It was funny – when they small-talked with me at the beginning and the end of their spiel, I felt like I was talking to any normal girl. They were nice. I felt like we could actually have been friends in other circumstances. But the reason they were on my doorstep talking to me was because they wanted me to convert to their beliefs. They had an ulterior motive.

On the one hand, it impressed me that they were so zealous about what they believed that they would knock on strangers’ doors and ask them about their faith. It impressed me that they cared about others’ relationships with God enough to do uncomfortable things.

On the other hand, I feel like genuine relationships (versus doorstep blitz conversations) have a lot more weight in actually changing the way people think. I have never made any life-changing transformations in a 15-minute conversation with a stranger.

Instead, it was hours of discussion over lunch, it was midnight prayers and tears, it was genuine compassion and love from people who really knew me, that had an impact on me – drawing me closer to Christ and shaping the way I relate to Him. In those 15 minutes today, I wished that I could give that kind of relationship to these two girls. Maybe we’ll connect again, maybe we can develop a relationship. But probably not. It’s hard to have that kind of relationship with people, even people you see every day.

Relationship is uncomfortable. But I think it’s how God wants us to relate to each other, how He chooses to reveal Himself, and how He’d like us to reveal His love.

So what do you do when Mormons come knocking?

Recently, we’ve decided to start a business doing online marketing and web design. Or rather this business decided to start itself. Basically, every time people found out that we do (or for me, did) web design and email design at our jobs, if they were in need of any design work themselves, they asked us if we could help them out.

Since we’re the kinds of people who do the same to others (“Oh, you’re in med school? Look at my throat; does it look funny to you?”), we don’t mind when people we know ask us to do web design for them.

But as more and more of these side projects kept cropping up, we figured maybe we should put a legitimate business name out there, so people who don’t already know us can hire us too.

And with that, the idea for AmLee Web Design was born. Initially, we thought about some other name options, including Lee Web Design Solutions. But we thought AmLee was more unique and clever, so we went with that.

We bought our domain name so that we could make an amleewebdesign.com site, but then we realized that to run a business in Illinois, you can’t name the business anything other than your full legal name unless you officially register the business name with your county clerk.

So today we went to the county clerk’s office and filed an application to name our business AmLee Web Design. It cost $5. We thought that was a pretty reasonable start-up fee.

After filing our application, the lady at the clerk’s office told us we would have to go to a local newspaper and get them to run our business name in their legal section for three weeks before our business name would become fully official.

She neglected to mention that it costs $99.12 to have the newspaper run your business name in their legal section for three weeks. *Sigh*

Oh well, we’re pretty sure that cost can be a tax write-off at least.

But it did get me thinking…$99.12 is a lot of money to have a tiny hometown newspaper run three lines of fine print in a legal section no one reads. But in a faltering industry, you have to get your money any way you can.

A few weeks ago, this little boy knocked on our door. He was selling newspaper subscriptions to this same local newspaper for $10. He said that the money would go to help him get a scholarship for his school.

He was cute and looked sincere. He seemed to have official paperwork with him. So I said I would give him $10, but I didn’t want to get a newspaper subscription. I just wanted to give him $10 toward his scholarship without the newspaper taking a cut. I didn’t have any cash, so I wrote him a check. When I asked if I could write the check directly to him or to his school, he said, “No, you still have to write it to the Naperville Sun.”

Hmm. Seemed fishy, but okay. He promised me he wouldn’t sign me up for a subscription.

A week later, we started receiving newspapers on our door step. I barely glanced at each newspaper before throwing it in our recycling bin. That was precisely why I didn’t want a subscription. I already have an AP News app on my phone that I don’t have to throw out when I’m finished reading. I just press a button and it refreshes the next day.

As a literature lover and someone who’s just old enough to remember the days before we had the internet, I understand that old-fashioned love of printed material. I still love the smell of old library books.

But now that we have so many useful tools at our fingertips that save time, money, and paper, I sometimes feel that sticking to our old-fashioned, impractical ways can be detrimental to our current growth as a society.

Photo by rklau (flickr.com)

If newspapers are struggling to survive, maybe they should learn how to do online news better. Maybe they should offer a cheap, online application for posting legal ads. That way I wouldn’t have to drive 20 minutes out of my way on gas that costs $4.09 a gallon to get them to print three lines of fine print that no one will read anyway.

What do you think? Do you still read newspapers the old-fashioned way? Do you think there will come a day when newspapers will be too outdated to survive at all?

We had a friend over for dinner the other day who graciously reminded me that cool new inventions exist…like Survey Monkey. So now you can answer my survey questions in an even more anonymous way than by posting a comment with fake information.

Click here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3FQXYKZ to answer my six survey questions in an entirely anonymous survey that no one else will be able to see except me. I will see answers to the questions, but I won’t see any personal information attached to the questions.

Feel free to respond no matter what stage of life you are in, married, single, dating, sexually active, not sexually active, etc. These are questions about childhood impressions of sexuality, so they most likely apply to everyone on the planet.

Thanks! And sorry for my initial archaic survey.

As I mentioned many many blog posts back, I’m working on a book manuscript. The working title is Sex 101: An Introductory Guide for Christian Virgins. I’ll include some excerpts from my introduction below, but before I get to that, I’d like to take a moment to ask anyone who is willing to help me out by answering some survey questions.

While the book is mainly going to be about and from my perspective, I’d like to make it a little more comprehensive by including completely anonymous perspectives from others. I’d also like to make sure some assumptions that I’m making are correct, and the best way to do that is to get feedback from people other than myself.

So if you wouldn’t mind helping out, please take a moment to think about and respond to the following questions.

I realize these are intensely personal questions, so please feel free to respond to these anonymously. You can do so by entering a fake name and email in the comment boxes. Even if you do give me your real name, I will not use it in the book manuscript.

1) What is one of your earliest memories concerning something sexual? How old were you when it occurred?

2) Who or what first taught you what sex means? (i.e. parents, siblings, internet, television, etc.) How do you think that shaped your early view of sexuality?

3) Did you or other adolescents you knew engage in premarital sexual activity? (anything beyond kissing) If yes, how did you feel about this spiritually?

4) Give one word that most strongly resembles your feelings toward sexuality when you were a child.

5) Give one word that most strongly resembles your feelings toward sexuality when you were an adolescent.

6) As a child and as an adolescent, how did you think that God viewed sexuality? How did you think that the Church viewed sexuality? Please describe any specific experiences that led you to your beliefs.

That’s it for now. I’ll probably be posting some other surveys for book research in the future as I progress through the manuscript. Thanks in advance to anyone brave enough to share your experiences! If you prefer to have only me view your response but you would still like it to be anonymous, leave a comment with a fake name/email and ask me in the first sentence of your comment to change it from public to private view. If you don’t care if I see your name/email, feel free to email your comments to me at angel.e.bolka@gmail.com or send me a message on Facebook.

Here is an excerpt from my introduction about why I’m writing this book:

One of the side effects of removing all things that even hint at sexuality from your life is that when the time for marriage finally comes, you’re not quite sure what to think. I graduated from a conservative Christian college and realized soon after that times had changed for my friends and me. Several of us were in serious relationships, and engagements were on the horizon. Suddenly sex wasn’t some far-off taboo that needed to be avoided at all costs. It was approaching like an out-of-control freight train, and for the first time in our lives, we weren’t supposed to dive out of the way before any damage could be done.

I remember having a conversation with my boyfriend during our senior year of college. I told him how terrified I was to have sex – that I had spent my entire Christian life avoiding it and fearing it, and I didn’t know how I would be able to easily change my feelings about it once we got married. He was kind and sympathetic, but he also asked me to pray and think about how that transition to married life and sexual freedom could be healthy. Our conversation motivated me to begin researching healthy, married sex.

I found some great resources that taught how Christians could have fantastic married sex. The only problem was that most of those resources spent about two pages focusing on people like me – people who knew about sex and had all these great fantasies that sex would be wonderful, but in reality had no idea what they were getting into and were pretty scared to find out.

Some of the resources I found were quite graphic. They included diagrams of vaginas and cervixes. They encouraged readers – virgins and non-virgins alike – to take out a mirror and examine themselves. I was trying to wrap my mind around the idea of having happily married sex, but I was not ready to examine my cervix. First of all, the very thought of it was gross. Secondly, I still had strong impressions that sex – and everything that had to do with it – was bad. I wasn’t married yet, and I certainly didn’t want reading these books to bring even more temptation into my relationship with my boyfriend.

So I stopped researching and decided I would figure it all out later….

Basically, this book is the result of my “figuring it out later.” I’m writing it with the hope that others will be able to have a comprehensive resource in dealing with these kinds of issues a little more thoroughly before the honeymoon. It’s the book that I wish I had found. Now that I have some more free time, I’m hoping to get a completed manuscript finished within the next month or two. Your prayers and research support are greatly appreciated!

I recently joined a cool program that Thomas Nelson publishing company started. It’s called Book Sneeze. If you agree to review their books on your blog, they send you free copies of some of their new releases for you to review. Here’s my first…

A Review of The Fight of Our Lives by William J. Bennett and Seth Leibsohn

I’m sure we all remember the post-9/11 fervor that hit the country immediately following the largest terrorist attack on American soil. Church attendance skyrocketed and people started to think about what really matters in life. People also banded together in patriotism and defense of the US. Most of the public approved of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the strong stance of President Bush in the “war on terror.”

But now, almost a decade later, Bennett and Leibsohn say that America has lost its resolve. And that loss of resolve began even in President Bush’s second term. They show several examples of “doublespeak” and “nospeak” from both President Bush and President Obama, as well as from many other American leaders. They claim that political correctness and appeasement of Muslims have overtaken the desire of the American people to see radical Muslim terrorists brought to justice and stopped from making further attacks.

According to the book’s cover summary, “The Fight of Our Lives helps readers refocus, to reframe and understand the threats we face. By surveying and explaining the current scene, Bennett and Leibsohn point the way to a future in which our enemies are properly acknowledged and firmly opposed.”

I think that Bennett and Leibsohn do a good job in their book of disclaiming that their intention is not to start a war with all Muslims. They agree that most Muslims are peaceful and don’t want to harm Americans. But they point out many disturbing facts that show how moderate Muslims are allowing extreme Muslims to get away with unacceptable, violent behavior because many moderates are unwilling to address root causes in Islam that make peace with Jews and Christians impossible.

Islam is not a tolerant religion. Muslims believe that everyone should be Muslim. But then, Christianity is not really a tolerant religion in its rightful form, either. The key is for both Muslims and Christians to realize that violence and war are not acceptable ways to make converts. One of the great things I learned about American government in high school is that the American system is designed so that people can believe whatever they want to believe – even that everyone not like them is going to hell. But once a person’s belief is acted out in a harmful way toward other people, their belief can no longer be protected.

Bennett and Leibsohn do a very good job of showing how radical Muslims have been able to get away with beliefs that intentionally harm others because our nation has become overly concerned with political correctness.

The only strong criticism that I have for this book is that I don’t think it analyzes fairly enough the tendency of all people toward prejudice, groupthink, and racism. Here is a quote from the book:

“Have their been outbreaks of violence against American Muslims beyond the odd nut-job perpetrator? Have we as a country, under both Republican and Democratic Party administrations, not shown wide berth of tolerance and civil liberty that, for example, might be contradistinguished with how Franklin Roosevelt’s administration and the American people treated Japanese Americans in World War II?” (pg. 108-9)

One of the points Bennett and Leibsohn are making here is that many Muslim governments have actually treated their own people worse than Americans have treated American Muslims. And yet America is blamed for killing more Muslims than al Quada has killed non-Muslims. While this may be true, I don’t think it excuses us from looking inward at our own thoughts, feelings, and actions toward other people. This book is not really intended to be read from a Christian perspective, but Thomas Nelson is a Christian company, and I assume that Bennett and Leibsohn are Christians. Being a Christian myself, I read this book mainly through the eyes of a Christian, secondly through the eyes of an American. In other words, I consider my first duty to be trying to be more like Jesus. After that, my patriotism can kick in, but if my patriotism blinds me to seeing people through Christ’s eyes, then my patriotism isn’t worth much.

I think that Bennett and Leibsohn’s message is an important one. But I think that in not delving further into our responsibility as Christians to love and pray for our enemies (instead of just keep our anger stirred up so all the bad guys can be stamped out once and for all), they lost some of my respect and attentiveness to their message.

I am not a pacifist because I realistically understand that there are cruel people out there who will commit atrocious acts against defenseless human beings, and if it’s in our power to prevent those atrocities from being committed (whether against other nations or against our own nation), then I am supportive of taking action.

But even as I acknowledge the realistic actions secular governments need to engage in, as a believer in the power and grace of Jesus, I also want to love and pray for these enemies who hate me and my country. I don’t believe that there is anyone so far gone that the grace of God could not reach them. I’m not saying I think we should sit back and wait for all the terrorists to just come to Jesus and become happy peacemakers. Would it be amazing if that happened? Yes. But is it likely to happen? No. They still have free will, and no matter how much we pray, many will probably use their free will to continue to act out in violence and hatred.

But still, I am responsible for my own feelings and actions. Despite what Bennett and Leibsohn say, I remember the newspaper reports of American Muslims being attacked and raped in the US after 9/11 happened. I remember a guy in my American History high school class saying that we needed to take all the Muslims and deport them to Afghanistan, then drop a nuclear bomb and get rid of the problem once and for all.

As a nation, we may need to do a better job at identifying our enemy for what they are – radical Muslim terrorists – but I, for one, do appreciate the efforts of our leaders to make sure that American Muslims are not treated like second-class citizens. Our leaders have a very difficult job to do. They are expected to take all necessary actions to keep our country safe. But they are also expected to protect the rights of their citizens under pressure from very emotional people on all sides of the issue. Could they have done better? Could they still do better? Absolutely. But Bennett and Leibsohn’s failure to recognize the legitimate threat of groupthink and racism overtaking the American public, and the success of our leadership in preventing that, made their argument just a little too weak and naive in my eyes to make a strong difference in public opinion.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze®.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”