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Today is the 15th anniversary of my turning 18!

This is the first birthday I can remember where I really didn't care that it was my birthday, and I have no emotional sentiments about the passing of another year. Since it is my birthday I told myself that on an important day like this I have to blog. I've been absent here for so long that people have actually contacted me to tell me they miss me. I didn't realize people cared so much about my online rants. I've had lots going on in my life, but not the time and the energy required to blog about it at the same time.

So last night was a birthday dinner with friends and family. Today was church, then lunch with my neighbor Wally (the one I say hi to every day when I walk to work, and who turned 81 on Thursday) and the friends I drug along so Wally wouldn't mac on me. He asked me at the end of lunch if I was afraid of him, and I said I had avoided him a bit when I first met him because I thought he was hitting on me, to which he replied that he had been, and he flirts with all the girls. After lunch we hit Ikea, where I got the butcher block and legs for the work table I wanted to make for my kitchen. Now I just need a drill to put it all together. Walking through Ikea makes me want to win Powerball so I can buy everything there I want. All in all it's been a lovely and low-key birthday.

Another strange and amusing development in my life since my last blog is that I signed up on an online match site. I was on eHarmony once before, but then cancelled my subscription because the whole thing just seemed weird. But a friend of mine challenged me to go for it to face some fears about how I feel I'm perceived by people, and how much relationship and trust wounds in the past have caused me to limit how much I allow myself to be accepted by people. And she's right. So now I'm officially putting myself out there, hoping to use this as just another tool to get over some of my miss-judgements of other's motivations. It's a strange tool, and one I would not have thought I'd ever employ, but somehow I know this is something God is nudging me to do. I don't expect to find "him" but I do think God intends to use this somehow in my life. So I'm going with it.

The whole thing is amusing for a few reasons, one being the notion in my head that only desperate people use online match sites, and I don't consider myself desperate at all. I've always been confident that God has the right person for me, and as long as I walk where God calls me to walk, the man He has for me will join me at the right time. So to go "looking" online is funny to me, and I hope nobody thinks I'm on there because I'm pining for my boo - whoever he is. Another reason I find it amusing is that it's so darn hard to write a profile that doesn't make me sound like a dork or like a Bible-thumper. It seems to be one or the other. I ended up writing a profile where I start by saying how hard it was to write my profile until I asked myself "What Would Jane Austen Write", at which point I wrote the profile as she would've written it. It hasn't gotten me any dates, but at least I don't sound like a freak. Well, not a Jesus freak anyway.

It's amazing how all of us have areas (some have more areas than others!) where we just can't get our hearts around our own worth. Today in church the message was all about what it means to accept the Father's love. There was response time at the end, and I realized that I don't have trouble believing God loves me no matter what. My trouble is believing that anyone else loves me no matter what. I have people in my life I've been close to for 10 or 15 years, but I still (often) get smacked in the face with the fear that I'm too annoying, needy, chatty, conservative, American or whatever else can be deemed a negative, for them to want to be around me.

I know that God loves me, but clearly His love hasn't really reached all the places it needs to if the acceptance of people matters so much to me that it effects my sense of my own worth. The question God has been asking me for months is the question Elkanah asks his wife Hanna in I Samuel 1:8 - "Don't I mean more to you than ten sons?". He's asking me the same kind of question - "Don't you realize my love is big enough to fill even the places that ache with the emptiness of unfulfilled dreams and disappointments?". I think this is the season where my prayers of "How do I let you love me that way? Will you show me?" can finally be answered. And hopefully with a few amusing stories about my online matching experiences along the way.