Light my fire!

I am not an Internet surfer. I never have been. When we first got the Internet at my parents house I was a Junior in highschool and we had dial-up service, so no matter how bad I wanted to "surf the net", I never did because it took so long. When Jake and I decided to get Internet service I would check my email, I swear, 30 times a day or more. (The sad part is that noone ever emails me!) Well, that has all changed now!

I have discoverd the Stumble button! I switched my browser on my laptop to Mozilla Firefox and downloaded the neatest application for a toolbar that I have ever seen! I surf websites for hours at a time now, and I have yet to see the same one twice! I have found some of the neatest websites, too. The cool thing about the stumble button is that when you download it, you get to choose the things taht you are interested in and that is what the majority of the websites are that you see. I have seen so many different maps and geography websites that I hardly have the time to look at then and spend the amount of time on them that I would like to.

There is a downside to it though. Besides being addicting, there are somethings that come on the screen that come to take over your mind. I was on it Monday night when a website came on the had a disclaimer that said something to the effect of "The following photos may be graphic and disturbing to some individuals, I am not posting these to offend anyone. People of the world need to be aware of what is going on and how it affects others." Well, it's only human nature after reading something like that to keep looking at the website. Some of the pictures were disturbing, some didn't really bother me. There were pictures of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, pictures of young AA's being hanged from a tree, a picture of Hitler and the entrance to a gas chamber with dead bodies piled up outside of it. But, there was one in particular that I can still see very vividly in my minds eye. It was of a little African child knelt down on the ground, his tiny bony little body curled up so tightly, and not to far away from where he lay on the ground dying from starvation there was a vulture waiting.

Can you imagine? I am the kind of person who cries when the commercials for starving kids come on tv and when someone is mean to an animal. When I saw this I was sick! I sat at the table starring at the screen longer than I should have. I wanted to burn that image into my mind even more than I wish that I had never seen it. I was numb by the time I looked away. When Jake come home that night I must have still been acting strange about it, he asked me over and over what was wrong. I never told him what I had seen. When I went to bed that night I cried myself to sleep while praying for God to help these people.

I think of that picture constantly. I have never been touched by anything in such a way.