"You just got PUNK'D!"

OK, so here's the deal. The night before I left for Memphis I had a great idea: "It would be fun to write up some blog posts before I leave about how the week gets progressively strange and set it up so that the posts get posted while I am gone... that would be fun!"

So I did just that. At midnight the night before we left (AKA: we were leaving in 6 hours) I sat down and wrote out 8 blog posts and post-dated them so that they would come out during the week. Truth is: I made up the post about me bringing my laptop to write the posts, it was all written before I left! The stories about us driving up, the gleaning of the potatoes, and cleaning out the cemetery were all made up.

But like the saying goes, even the biggest lies have a kernel of truth. The gleaning story is based on our trip last year to Washington DC in which I did glean sweet potatoes, and the cleaning of the cemetery we did do this week (I knew we were going to do it, so I wrote it into the post).

The backbone of the story, the part that was going to be most absurd, was how I was going to meet this girl named CJ (who turns out to be Mormon, which Mother somehow guessed) and fall madly in love with her. By the end (Friday) the story culminated in "CJ and I have fallen madly in love with each other, so we are going to leave the rest of the group, drive to Las Vegas, and get married at a drive through Mormon Temple they have down there. Yup, I am eloping!" At that point I came out and revealed that it was all a prank, and I explained how everything worked. I even had a separate post about how I came up with all of the wild stories.

So all of this was typed out and organized in about two hours the morning before we left. While on the trip the posts posted right on schedule, everything was working just as planned. But as the days went by, I kept worrying about the prank, I kept worrying that it was too much, that it was over the top. Then, Wednesday night we had a great worship session, and I kept worrying about the posts, and I thought: "If I can't get it out of my head, maybe this is a sign, a *nudge nudge* from the Holy Spirit saying that it needs to stop". So that night I went to the hotel lobby where there were some computers and I stopped the posts that were scheduled to come out. In fact, I stopped Wednesday night's post 10 minutes before it was scheduled to come out.

So I stopped the prank not because I thought that there was anything specifically wrong with it, I just felt like I should. It may just be one of those "I don't see how it subtracts glory from God, but it doesn't add glory to God, so is it worth it?"

I still have all of the text, and I will probably post it all soon, but I just wanted to let you know that that is the reason that I deleted the posts. It was all a sham, a prank, and I wanted to set the record straight.

Matthew