Next, I took a picture of all the other people at Underground. They were clustered together at the far end of the room, studiously ignoring our visitors. No wonder we can't retain people...they don't feel welcome.

We invited Rachel Merchand to play at Underground's side stage on Sunday night. She arrived, and I took this picture of her and her two friends as the merchandise table.

The other day I tossed something into a box on my bed. As soon as I did, I noticed movement. It was Tab! I then apologized profusely for throwing things on top of her. Later I went back and took a picture.

Our pictures taken, everyone filed out. Goodbye, Global Night Commute. Hello warm bed!

Davey, the coordinator for the Charlotte GNC, gives us last-minute instructions and we listen with rapt attention. Wondering when we can leave and grab some breakfast.

We crossed the street like an unruly herd of ducks and posed in front of the fountain to have our "official" picture taken. With about 8 different cameras.

Eventually everyone got up and stood around, huddling in blankets.

This picture looked much better in person.

Something was special at our Global Night Commute. People actually slept.

The Global Night Commute was at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Aquatic Center.

This is Leigh, who is friends with Polina. Leigh is not from Russia, though she can make great faces.

This is Polina. She's a foreign exchange student from Russia, attending high school in the Charlotte area. She wrote her letter to President Bush in Russian.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

I'm going to the Global Night Commute tonight, and was planning to take a group from the church. No one showed. My friend Caleb said he'd probably go, so I waited a half hour to hear back from him about whether or not he's coming. He just let me know that he is not...so this means I get to go to this thing and won't know a single person.

I'm also in a bad mood, which makes it worse.

Well, off I go.

It was January 49 BC, Caesar was staying in the northern Italian city of Ravenna and he had a decision to make. Either he acquiesced to the Senate's command or he moved southward to confront Pompey and plunge the Roman Republic into a bloody civil war. An ancient Roman law forbade any general from crossing the Rubicon River and entering Italy proper with a standing army. To do so was treason. This tiny stream would reveal Caesar's intentions and mark the point of no return.

-Eyewitnesstohistory.com

I pulled out of my trailer park today and saw five cop cars following each other. I'm sure that the driver of the white van you can see in the distance is pretty nervous.

I'm debating whether or not this should be a journal entry. My faithful few may have noticed that I stopped writing anything worthwhile in my blog a few months ago. Since then it's either been short, pointless posts or pictures. I'm a writer, and as a result I usually end up writing about my thoughts. And I do. But lately the things I've been thinking are so personal that they've not really been fit for public consumption.

Most of you will know the situation I'm talking about, and it is for those of you out there that I'm making this a blog entry. As for the rest of you...tough cookies.

I'm not a huge fan of waiting. Most people aren't, so I suppose that's not the shocker. Come to think of it, there's nothing really all that shocking about it. Life seems to be about various stages of waiting. When you're a kid your life is about waiting for your birthday. Or waiting for Christmas. Or waiting for your favorite television show.

Then you grow up and find yourself waiting for more things. Waiting to get out of college. Waiting for your life to really start. Waiting to get married. To have kids. To get a mortgage. Okay, I'm not really all that thrilled about the mortgage part. Waiting to die.

We see our life as events, and the really important parts are what are worth living for. Everything else is just waiting. Before I go on, I'll just point out that this is an incorrect view...life is everything...not just the waiting. We tend to lose sight of that.

I've been waiting on something for a while. A long while. Years.

I gave up on it for a while, and felt like God was leading me back to it. So now I'm back to waiting. In regards to this thing, my emotions seem to go in cycles. One day I'm optimistic that God is behind things and is actually speaking to me. The next day I'm discouraged and feel like a fool. Which is it? It can't be both. I seem to get just enough information to keep me wondering; never enough to decide definitively one way or the other.

I want to move on with my life. I'm tired of waiting. Tired of feeling as though my life is at a standstill. I am being productive with my time while I'm waiting, and developing myself as a person. I try not to focus on what I feel God has been saying because there's nothing going on. No need to be counterproductive.

My approach has been a passive one; waiting for God to put all the pieces into place, and then waiting for an angel with a flaming sword to appear and tell me it's time to proceed. And so things have dragged on...and on...and on...and nothing has happened. Just more waiting.

As I've waited, God has been doing some great things in my life. I've made great strides with my self-esteem (not to mention confidence) and it's been something I've really needed. But when does the waiting stop?

I can take matters into my own hands and stop dancing around the issue. But is it the right thing to do?

A few months ago I had a "I Don't Give A Damn" day. It's a day where I said to myself that I really didn't care how others reacted to me. I would stop squelching my first response to something and just be who I was, whether or not people understood me. And you know what? That day went pretty well. What if I did that here?

It's not exactly a life or death issue. It's important, but nothing that I won't recover from if I'm mistaken.

That's another issue. What if I am mistaken? I'd rather know now and get it out of the way instead of wait and wait and wait and THEN find out "Hey, I didn't hear God at all." And if I have not heard from God, then it's possible that I have some deep emotional problems that need to be resolved before I can move on. That's not a pleasant thought to have, but until I know for sure one way or the other how this pans out, it's going to have to remain a possibility.

I'm tired of standing in the boat. Even if I sink, I guess it's time to step out.

So Lord, if it's you...tell me to come to you.

Nate Drye, ladies and gentlemen. This is his "deer in the headlights" look.

Brandon and Nick are taking a break from their relationship this month, which means they don't talk at all. Unless they happen to run into each other at church or the North RCCC campus.

Then "Redeemed" began to dance. My camera phone was at the ready, prepared to take lots of pictures so I can add scathing comments to them.

To my surprise, they were one of the better church dance groups I've seen.

After the Underground House Band played, a dance group called "Redeemed" came up to dance. Either they were supposed to wear matching outfits, or it was a stroke of incredibly good luck.

This shot was taken after the silence had actually begun to be broken. People that are part of the event take up the first three rows. What you don't see is the hordes of people we had to turn away.

Look at that crowd. And we brought half the people in the shot.

My roommate Brandon never voluntarily poses for pictures, though he constantly complains there are never any of him. In order to take this picture, I had to surprise him. Note the surprised look on his face. It also kind of says "Ben, I hate you right now. I really, really hate you."

But with all the love of Jesus he can muster.

And for the record, I have no idea whose butt is in the shot.

We were at the North Campus for Rowan Cabarrus Community College because of an event that the local Campus Crusade for Christ was having. It was called "Break the Silence." I may never know what silence they were breaking.

Underground, the college ministry I'm involved with, was there. One of our guys helped organize the event, and he asked the Underground band to play. I showed up to help load and unload the free Coke products we were giving away. And to get a free lunch out of the deal.

Nate helps Caleb back the van up so we can load it for the trip to the college.

Tab often decides to sprawl on my lap. Today was one of those days.

Guess who I ran into at church this morning? I asked for an autograph but he was too busy healing the sick and raising the dead to really sign anything.

Xina and Gina gaze in awe upon the statue erected by the city of Columbia.

The rainbow is much easier to see in this picture. We watched it for several minutes as it disappeared. I wanted to go find the pot of gold, but the girls were afraid of getting mugged or something silly like that.

And you might see a rainbow. It's faint, but there.

I could not believe this when I saw it. It's a paper filled with news for black people. I think this sort of thing is incredibly racist. If our nation is ever to stop worrying about racism, then we need to stop segregating ourselves. It's fine to recognize cultural differences, but indentifying a group based solely on skin color needs to stop...even if the group does it to itself.

Xina and Gina.

Gina was willing to pose for camera-phone pictures. Let me point out her spiffy purse-thing. In it she carried her college's rule book and a Bible. Where the Bible is silent, the CIU handbook provides guidance.

I know that I put down North Carolina a lot, but at least we don't have a whole museum dedicated to monster trucks. I mean, how much more redneck can you get?

I am about to leave for work. I'll be home at 6:30am and will sleep for a while. After I wake up, I'm planning to head down to Columbia, SC to meet an online friend I've known for several years. She is from Wisconsin, but has been attending school in Columbia for the past two semesters. We've been intending to get together at some point, and tomorrow is the day.

Christina, be forewarned that I am bringing my camera phone and intend to use it. So deal with it! :)

Somewhere in Kannapolis, there is someone without a face.

This is my cat's namesake, Tabitha. She was visiting her boyfriend, Jared. Since Jared is my friend, I will not be posting a picture of him in his hospital gown.

The web site has been transferred to the new web server, and everything made the transition. Now to do the same thing for all my other web sites...

A better picture of Tab chillin'.

I didn't know that fish wear hats.

I'm doing some behind-the-scenes stuff which may make the site go down. Just so you know...

...but who is my visitor from Atlanta?

In honor of Easter, here is a human video from my days in Master's Commission that features Jesus coming back to life after being crucified. Unfortunately we didn't have enough people to show Jesus busting out of the tomb soon after the Easter Bunny rolled the stone away.

Cast listing is in alphabetical order. Since my name starts with a B, I'm first!

Ben - Jesus
Daniel - Pharisee/Guard/Jesus Hater
Japheth - A paler version of Daniel's character
Nicky - Adulterous woman who abandons her evil ways after the Pharisees almost kill her

This is from a service we did in Puerto Rico. As bad as this video is, there are funnier ones on the way sometime soon.

Windows are the televisions for cats.

Tab again makes me smile. She likes to get as close to me as possible, and if I'm sitting forward in the chair, sometimes she jumps up behind me and lays down for a while.

My original plans for lunch fell through, so I had lunch with Daniel at Chick-Fil-A, the unofficial Youth Pastor Restaurant. I'm not really a CFA fan, but since Daniel is a youth pastor, we sort of have to eat there every now and then.

Today I had an interview for a job with Piercing Pagoda. It would pay what I'm being paid now, but I would work during the day and interact with actual people. I think it went really well.

Julianna, aka J-Bug, got a haircut today and it was on display at the church office this afternoon. When asked for comment she said, "Mulan, for it is a funny word."

You heard it here first.

Recently I began to feel as though my time as a Security Guard is over, and I can start looking for a job elsewhere. The reason I've stayed so long at the Security job is because I felt like God wanted me to stay there. It's because of that job and having hours on end to do nothing that I started praying again.

I think it's safe to say that prayer is now a regular part of my life. Not to mention that after working at Cold Stone I needed some time to unwind and recover from all the stress that the job inflicted on me.

Now I'm doing better. And I really want to be around people again. So I've decided to start applying for jobs. I found one today that seems to be right up my alley; working on a web site for a local furniture store. Since I've done that very thing in the past, it means I've got some related experience in that particular industry. Hopefully that will be enough of an edge to get the job.

Added bonus: it's 10 minutes from my house.

Tab cracks me up.

Zack and Beth at Midtown Sundries. No, they aren't dating.

Last night I made it to the end of the second draft of Snafu. I need to go back through and make some changes so it's ready for other people to take a look.

More details forthcoming on the Snafu blog...probably within the next hour or so.