From Sampler to Sower

A screen capture of my old homepage.

And to think we laughed when a teen at our youth center declared one afternoon “I’m going to delete the Internet.”

He meant he was going to uninstall Internet Explorer on his laptop.  But that’s not what he said.  Ever since “I’m going to delete the Internet!” has become a running joke for us.

But it’s not so funny any more.

Last night, Yahoo! deleted Geocities.

Now, before you get too mad at Yahoo!, I should probably point out they had every right to do so.  They bought Geocities all the way back in January of 1999.  And they gave the world fair warning – the then-impending deletion was announced in April of this year.  We had six full months to get ready.

But still…

They deleted Geocities!

I lucked out.  Lifehacker covered the closing yesterday and I happened to read about it, giving me the chance to back up the things I had hosted there.  I haven’t added anything to my Geocities account for over five years now.  So it probably would have taken me a while to notice.  (Although, ironically I was on my Geocities site Monday looking at an old lesson I had taught in Decatur, IL about Halloween, before I knew anything about the closure.)

Among the things included in that old time capsule were some old papers I wrote as part of my Master’s Degree work at ONU.  There were also a couple of Holiday “Who Wants To Be  A Millionare” PowerPoint Games for Lent and Christmas I developed back in Illinois.  There’s a couple of old sermon manuscripts. There was a copy of our policy manual, philosophy of ministry and spiritual disciplines journal.

And there was some art.  I’m posting it here just to show how far we’ve come in the last seven years.  (And so that it still has a home online somewhere.)

Operation Gatestorm Poster

Operation: Gatestorm was the name of a special outreach event we had at Agape, our midweek youth service in Decatur, IL.  I think we came pretty close to nailing the look and feel of a movie poster that we were going for, but boy does that look cheesy now…

Antioch Medical Series Artwork

Antioch: Medical was the theme of one of our summer camps in 2002.  It was based on the Gospel of Luke, Doctor Luke.  (Get it? Luke was a Doctor, and we did a series about Luke with a medical theme. Get it?)  I vaguely remember that there was a TV series of a similar name back in those days.

One Nation Under God Title Slide

One Nation Under God Slide Background

These two slides (title and slide master background for PowerPoint) were created back in July of 2002 when the news came across the wires that the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in Michael Newdow’s favor and found that the phrase “One Nation Under God” constituted an endorsement of religion and was therefore unconstitutional.  I don’t think I still have text of that sermon, though I imagine it’s somewhere in the archives of the old YS Listserv, if such archives exist.  The gist of the message was that empty pledges don’t impress God if we’re not living our lives under His reign every day.