You can go ahead and put this under the funny weird category. Even though some of it might bring a chuckle now, when it was happening it wasn’t so funny.

I’ve been working on GodlyGals online for about 8 years now. A little longer if you count the time before it made its WWW debut. In the beginning, well, things were rocky. I knew very little about the administration of online communities before I jumped in the deep end. Mistakes were made. Trolls were mishandled. Disputes happened. And I learned, quickly, just how out-of-hand a heretic can make everything go real, real fast.

For a while it bothered me and I let things get under my skin. Now, they weren’t little things, but at the time I didn’t know how to deal with them and it soon became clear that I was going to have to learn as I went along.

I’ll say that the ministry itself had a few people with a “difference of opinion” (to put it nicely) come in and ruffle feathers from time to time. But those people, now that I look back, were the easiest to deal with. Because being inside the ministry I had the support of others in leadership. It’s the stuff that I faced on my own, outside of GodlyGals, that has been the real challenge. Because for the most part the weirdos haven’t been interested in the minstry itself, just whoever they hear is the “leader.”

(The following two cases are true stories — the second story will be featured in part two. I won’t mention names because I’m not out to assassinate someone’s character, I just want to share these as a sort of cautionary tale. You don’t even have to be in ministry to experience something like this. I think being a citizen of the Internet is enough to make you a target of any of these folks.)

Incident #1: In the early days of GodlyGals a lot of the advertising was done in Yahoo chat rooms. We gained a few new members that way, but the amount of time spent advertising there compared to the people that eventually joined the community showed that it was one of the least fruitful ways to get our name out. After a year or two of that I stopped. But what happened one day whenever I was in a chat room telling people about GG was enough to keep me out of there for a few months.

I was in a Christian chat room one day when I started receiving instant messages, one after another, from a person in the room. Random messages were things that I rarely answered unless someone was asking about the ministry. Usually it would end up that they were in an Internet cafe in Nigeria looking for a wife. I didn’t need that. (Little did I know…) So I just let this one go like all the rest. After signing off I didn’t give it another thought.

Later that evening we had a new member on the boards. Their first post was a long thing, paragraph after paragraph saying that they were seeking someone named Liz. Well, that was me. It wasn’t long before we figured out this was a guy and had him removed from the boards, but that didn’t stop him from emailing me. Weeks went by without him stopping. He was just begging for me to answer him. I would block one email address only for him to create another or pose as a girl to try to get my attention. He said he just needed to speak to me.

Finally, in an act of sheer idiocy, I said, “Okay, what do you need to tell me?”

I wish I’d kept the email. It was gold.

He proceeded to tell me that whenever I had been in the chat room that fateful day my username had lit up in yellow (as it did in those days whenever you selected someone’s name) and because he had been praying for some time before, he took it as a sign that I was to be his bride and travel to the Philippines to be with him forever.

Umm…okay. “Not interested,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” he told me. “God has mandated that we be joined together as husband and wife and serve him together for the rest of our days.”

This went on and on. I just let the fella talk. Then I told him, “I’m not going to tell you that it was or wasn’t God speaking to you. I don’t know. What I will tell you is that I have no intention of going to the Philippines, be it for a long or short term visit. Also, I’m 19 and have no intention of marrying anytime soon. Lastly, if it was God speaking to you and we’re meant to be married, I’ll leave it to Him to speak to me, too. Because I’m certainly not going to move to the other side of the world because some stranger tells me it’s a ‘mandate from God.’”

And that was that. I never had any more to say to him. He’d drop a line from time to time, reminding me that we would be wed soon, but I finally learned to let it roll off my back. I wasn’t worried about being kidnapped (I don’t think he had those resources). However, this whole thing could have been really scary if he was some guy in a cabin in Arkansas. Luckily, I haven’t had any of those.

Funny, haha…yeah.