Geoff |a Naughty Sorcerer|

Talk at me.
Add me. Message me. If you don't know me, message me first. Or email me. Send Email. Or catch me on AIM. cstoner617
By the way, this page looks stupid if you're not using Firefox. Use it.
Most of everything you read from here on out on my page is most likely not exactly true anymore. I am constantly finding flaws in my descriptions of myself. And I am constantly changing. Getting new ideas. Perspectives. Learning so much more about myself and my world. Hopefully, once school is over for the year and I go back home, I will be able to give a better, more concrete, description of myself. Hopefully, I'll get the chance to make things right for the most part when I get home again. So yeah... don't take everything you read on this page as total truth about me. Because it very well may be completely untrue as of right now and I'm trying to figure it all out. Enjoy.
My favorite color is blood red. My favorite color combination is brown and green.
I like friends. I don't have many. I'm not very good at being one.
My iPod is my new best friend.
I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't swear. Please refrain from doing so while I'm present.
I clean when I'm bored. Or when I'm upset
I eat a lot. But I can easily last several days without eating anything.
I love to sing and dance.
I love books. I love music. I love movies. I love grammar.
Flaws: - I lack emotion. - The one emotion I do express is anger. - I can't control my anger very well. - I expect everyone I know to be perfect. - I'm a major hypocrite. - I'm clingy (not in dating relationships, just normal friendships). - I expect you to worship me. - I don't want you to have friends other than me and my friends. - I'm not attractive. - I'm hairy. - I'm pretty lazy. - I'm uptight. - I'm a pushover.
Strengths: - You'll find out when you get to know me.
Okay, so there are a few things that I'm all for and about... you know, my passions. I promise to write more about them within the next few weeks, but I have too much going on at school right now. So here are just brief descriptions and whatnot.
Youth ministry. I am all about youth ministry. That's what I'm studying at Cornerstone University. I might not necessarily be a youth pastor, but I will be pursuing some career that deals heavily in youth ministry. Check out The Vision below to get a nice description of how I look at youth ministry.
Invisible Children. This is an organization that I've been following for the last two years. It's amazing. I have a picture link on the right, so click on it to find out more until I get a chance to put up more stuff about it.
To Write Love on Her Arms. I actually just recently found this organization. But I'm already all for it and loving it and everything it does. It's simply amazing. The perfect actualization of what love is about, in my opinion. Check out To Write Love on Her Arms below for the story behind it all.
It may seem that there is so much reading on this page and that I'm just promoting organizations and everything more than talking about myself. It's because I am. These organizations, these poems/stories, these words and videos--this is what I'm about. These are my passions. Promoting awareness about cutting, drug abuse, poverty, genocide, and youth ministry is what I live for... besides actually changing these things for the better. So, reading through all of this stuff and taking a look at all the links I provide on this page (almost every picture is a link) is how you can get to know me and what my life is dedicated to. So don't just blow off all of the words here, take 10 minutes of your time, and read through everything. Who knows? Maybe you'll find something you can be passionate about.
“The Vision” by Pete Grieg
So this guy comes up to me and says, “What’s the vision? What’s the big idea?” I open my mouth, and the words come out like this...
The vision? The vision is Jesus: obsessively, dangerously, undeniably Jesus.
The vision is an army of young people. You see bones? I see an army.
And they are free from materialism— they laugh at 9-5 little prisons. They could eat caviar on Monday and crusts on Tuesday they wouldn’t even notice. They know the meaning of the Matrix, the way the West was won.
They are mobile like the wind, they belong to the nations, they need no passport. People write their addresses in pencil and wonder at their strange existence. They are free yet they are slaves of the hurting and dirty and dying.
What is the vision? They vision is holiness that hurts the eyes. It makes children laugh and adults angry. It gave up the game of minimum integrity long ago to reach for the stars. It scorns the good and strains for the best. It is dangerously pure.
Light flickers from every secret motive, every private conversation. It loves people away from their suicide leaps, their Satan games.
This is an army that would lay down its life for the cause. A million times a day its soldiers choose to lose that they might one day win the great “Well done” of faithful sons and daughters.
Such heroes are as radical on Monday morning as Sunday night.
They don’t need fame from names. Instead they grin quietly upwards and hear the crowds chanting again and again: “COME ON!” And this is the sound of the underground, the whisper of history in the making, foundations shaking, revolutionaries dreaming once again. Mystery is scheming in whispers, conspiracy is breathing… This is the sound of the underground.
And the army is discipl(in)ed— young people who beat their bodies into submission. Every soldier would take a bullet for his comrade at arms. The tattoo on their back boasts “for me to live is Christ and to die is gain.”
Sacrifice fuels the fire of victory in their upward eyes. Winners. Martyrs. Who can stop them? Can hormones hold them back? Can failure succeed? Can fear scare them or death kill them?
And the generation prays like a dying man with groans beyond talking, with warrior cries, sulfuric tears and great barrow loads of laughter!
Waiting Watching: 24-7-365.
Whatever it takes they will give: Breaking the rules, shaking mediocrity from its cozy little hide, laying down their rights and their precious little wrongs, laughing at labels, fasting essentials. The advertisers cannot mold them. Hollywood cannot hold them. Peer-pressure is powerless, to shake their resolve at late-night parties before the cockerel cries.
They are incredibly cool, dangerously attractive (on the inside). On the outside? They hardly care! They wear clothes like costumes: to communicate and celebrate but never to hide.
Would they surrender their image or their popularity? They would lay down their very lives, swap seats with the man on death row, guilty as hell: a throne for an electric chair.
With blood and sweat and many tears, with sleepless nights and fruitless days, they pray as if it all depends on God and live as if it all depends on them.
Their DNA chooses Jesus (He breathes out, they breathe in). Their subconscious sings. They had a blood transfusion with Jesus.
Their words make demons scream in shopping malls. Don’t you hear them coming?
Herald the weirdoes! Summon the losers and the freaks. Here come the frightened and forgotten with fire in their eyes! They walk tall and trees applaud, skyscrapers bow, mountains are dwarfed by these children of another dimension.
Their prayers summon the Hound of Heaven and invoke the ancient dream of Eden.
And this vision will be. It will come to pass; it will come easily; it will come soon.
How do I know? Because this is the longing of creation itself, the groaning of the Spirit, the very dream of God.
My tomorrow is His today. My distant hope is His 3-D. And my feeble, whispered, faithless prayer invokes a thunderous, resounding, bone-shaking great “Amen!” from countless angels, from heroes of the faith, from Christ Himself.
And He is the original dreamer, the ultimate winner. Guaranteed.
TO WRITE LOVE ON HER ARMS by Jamie Tworkowski
Pedro the Lion is loud in the speakers, and the city waits just outside our open windows. She sits and sings, legs crossed in the passenger seat, her pretty voice hiding in the volume. Music is a safe place and Pedro is her favorite. It hits me that she won't see this skyline for several weeks, and we will be without her. I lean forward, knowing this will be written, and I ask what she'd say if her story had an audience. She smiles. "Tell them to look up. Tell them to remember the stars."
I would rather write her a song, because songs don't wait to resolve, and because songs mean so much to her. Stories wait for endings, but songs are brave things bold enough to sing when all they know is darkness. These words, like most words, will be written next to midnight, between hurricane and harbor, as both claim to save her.
Renee is 19. When I meet her, cocaine is fresh in her system. She hasn't slept in 36 hours and she won't for another 24. It is a familiar blur of coke, pot, pills and alcohol. She has agreed to meet us, to listen and to let us pray. We ask Renee to come with us, to leave this broken night. She says she'll go to rehab tomorrow, but she isn't ready now. It is too great a change. We pray and say goodbye and it is hard to leave without her.
She has known such great pain; haunted dreams as a child, the near-constant presence of evil ever since. She has felt the touch of awful naked men, battled depression and addiction, and attempted suicide. Her arms remember razor blades, fifty scars that speak of self-inflicted wounds. Six hours after I meet her, she is feeling trapped, two groups of "friends" offering opposite ideas. Everyone is asleep. The sun is rising. She drinks long from a bottle of liquor, takes a razor blade from the table and locks herself in the bathroom. She cuts herself, using the blade to write "FUCK UP" large across her left forearm.
The nurse at the treatment center finds the wound several hours later. The center has no detox, names her too great a risk, and does not accept her. For the next five days, she is ours to love. We become her hospital and the possibility of healing fills our living room with life. It is unspoken and there are only a few of us, but we will be her church, the body of Christ coming alive to meet her needs, to write love on her arms.
She is full of contrast, more alive and closer to death than anyone I've known, like a Johnny Cash song or some theatre star. She owns attitude and humor beyond her 19 years, and when she tells me her story, she is humble and quiet and kind, shaped by the pain of a hundred lifetimes. I sit privileged but breaking as she shares. Her life has been so dark yet there is some soft hope in her words, and on consecutive evenings, I watch the prettiest girls in the room tell her that she's beautiful. I think it's God reminding her.
I've never walked this road, but I decide that if we're going to run a five-day rehab, it is going to be the coolest in the country. It is going to be rock and roll. We start with the basics; lots of fun, too much Starbucks and way too many cigarettes.
Thursday night she is in the balcony for Band Marino, Orlando's finest. They are indie-folk-fabulous, a movement disguised as a circus. She loves them and she smiles when I point out the A&R man from Atlantic Europe, in town from London just to catch this show.
She is in good seats when the Magic beat the Sonics the next night, screaming like a lifelong fan with every Dwight Howard dunk. On the way home, we stop for more coffee and books, Blue Like Jazz and (Anne Lamott's) Travelling Mercies.
On Saturday, the Taste of Chaos tour is in town and I'm not even sure we can get in, but doors do open and minutes after parking, we are on stage for Thrice, one of her favorite bands. She stands ten feet from the drummer, smiling constantly. It is a bright moment there in the music, as light and rain collide above the stage. It feels like healing. It is certainly hope.
Sunday night is church and many gather after the service to pray for Renee, this her last night before entering rehab. Some are strangers but all are friends tonight. The prayers move from broken to bold, all encouraging. We're talking to God but I think as much, we're talking to her, telling her she's loved, saying she does not go alone. One among us knows her best. Ryan sits in the corner strumming an acoustic guitar, singing songs she's inspired.
After church our house fills with friends, there for a few more moments before goodbye. Everyone has some gift for her, some note or hug or piece of encouragement. She pulls me aside and tells me she would like to give me something. I smile surprised, wondering what it could be. We walk through the crowded living room, to the garage and her stuff.
She hands me her last razor blade, tells me it is the one she used to cut her arm and her last lines of cocaine five nights before. She's had it with her ever since, shares that tonight will be the hardest night and she shouldn't have it. I hold it carefully, thank her and know instantly that this moment, this gift, will stay with me. It hits me to wonder if this great feeling is what Christ knows when we surrender our broken hearts, when we trade death for life.
As we arrive at the treatment center, she finishes: "The stars are always there but we miss them in the dirt and clouds. We miss them in the storms. Tell them to remember hope. We have hope."
I have watched life come back to her, and it has been a privilege. When our time with her began, someone suggested shifts but that is the language of business. Love is something better. I have been challenged and changed, reminded that love is that simple answer to so many of our hardest questions. Don Miller says we're called to hold our hands against the wounds of a broken world, to stop the bleeding. I agree so greatly.
We often ask God to show up. We pray prayers of rescue. Perhaps God would ask us to be that rescue, to be His body, to move for things that matter. He is not invisible when we come alive. I might be simple but more and more, I believe God works in love, speaks in love, is revealed in our love. I have seen that this week and honestly, it has been simple: Take a broken girl, treat her like a famous princess, give her the best seats in the house. Buy her coffee and cigarettes for the coming down, books and bathroom things for the days ahead. Tell her something true when all she's known are lies. Tell her God loves her. Tell her about forgiveness, the possibility of freedom, tell her she was made to dance in white dresses. All these things are true.
We are only asked to love, to offer hope to the many hopeless. We don't get to choose all the endings, but we are asked to play the rescuers. We won't solve all mysteries and our hearts will certainly break in such a vulnerable life, but it is the best way. We were made to be lovers bold in broken places, pouring ourselves out again and again until we're called home.
I have learned so much in one week with one brave girl. She is alive now, in the patience and safety of rehab, covered in marks of madness but choosing to believe that God makes things new, that He meant hope and healing in the stars. She would ask you to remember.