Credit Card Fraud, Go Daddy's Bad Service, & The Internet

January was a pain in the butt month that was made worse recently by bad customer service from Go Daddy. Recently, things got a little better because of the Internet.

Let's start with the problem. On New Years Eve, my debit card was declined at a grocery store. No big deal, I thought. Must be a problem with the system, because it wasn't a no-funds issue. The grocery store couldn't give me a reason that the card was declined, but I paid a different way and went about my business. (It was New Years Eve! Who cares about credit cards! I'll deal with it next year!)

When I got back home the next day (we were visiting family when it happened) I tried to use my card again to no avail. Finally, I called the number on the card who directed me to fraud prevention and they informed me that unless I was trying to make a large purchase at a Toy's 'R Us in Toronto, (which I wasn't) my credit card number had been stolen. No big deal, head out to the local branch and they can whip me up a new card with a new number.

The worst part, of course, is that now you have to go and figure out the recurring monthly transactions that are hitting your card, and go and change all those services. My wife does the bills, and I have had the same card for years, so it was basically a waiting game to see when we'd get notifications that the payment didn't go through and we needed to adjust our billing information. Steadily they came in...Netflix, Hulu, my Gym membership, etc., and as they did, I changed the number and called it a day.

Some of these children aren't ours.

Fast forward three weeks, day off of school for the kids, we go to the Museum of Natural History, my wife gets a text message from the bank about my card: "did your card just get declined at a grocery store?" Nope, it hadn't. I call them immediately, and they inform me that once again, my credit card had been declined, this time in West Virginia. Here we go again, I thought.

Two notes as an aside: first, I do my banking with Chase and they were top notch in handling both of these situations. They caught the fraud right away and no money left my account at all. Excellent service. Second, I don't use my card that much so I looked at my purchase history to see if there was any place I was using the card where it might have been taken. Because it happened so close to one another, it clearly wasn't a case of it being hacked into through an electronic/computer based system, or it would have been a part of a huge data breach that hadn't been reported. It was most likely somewhere that I went relatively often and actually handed my card to the cashier, where they would walk away with it and could transmit the information somehow. The only transaction that matched: the gas station. Here in New Jersey, all the gas stations are full service. Our little town is a small one, so there is only one gas station I go, and I like the guys there. So while I'm not convinced (I have no evidence) that someone at the shop was taking my credit card numbers, it certainly looks suspicious.

In any event, now I had to go and change all those recurring payments again...arghh.

GO DADDY's BAD SERVICE

One of those recurring payments was to Go Daddy for web hosting for my wife blog. For about four or five years she's had a blog that she doesn't update very frequently but we maintain because there's always the dream. (See the previous posts about restarting & the Christian life...) When I set it up for her, I used Go Daddy to purchase the URL and to Host the blog because that's what I was familiar with. She was familiar with WordPress, so that's what we used. We set up an economy hosting package and basically that was it. We didn't have to think about it from then on.

Until, of course, my credit card got declined and they couldn't charge us the recurring monthly fee.

The first email I got alerted me to the problem. Unfortunately, it was right around when my credit card got stolen for the second time so I didn't have the new number yet to enter. At some point, I got a second email. On that email, it informed me that the next billing attempt would be on February 3rd, but that's all it said. Good, I have time to get my card and fix the billing, I thought. Even though the blog isn't updated much, I know my wife wants to keep the stuff that is on there. 

On February 2nd, I finally get my new card. February 3rd, I get the email that they attempted to bill me, and it didn't go through again. I immediately login to the Go Daddy website, and find that there is no where to renew my hosting. In fact, it's not even listed as one of the products that I purchased. I check the email again, and there's the small print: f an item is listed as cancelled, it can no longer be renewed. It has been deleted.

What?!?

So I call Go Daddy and tell them what happened. Now, I know that although that is their policy, it's extremely unlikely that they just automatically delete all the data the second that the third attempt at payment doesn't go through. It's been less than three weeks since the initial email alerting me to the problem. I get that they may turn off access, or something, but deleting is pretty severe and, if this was anything other than a personal home-cooked blog could cause serious problems. So I know the data is around somewhere.

The gentlemen on the phone confirms this, and he begins to tell me that there is good news, they can recover the data! But since I don't have a backup, it's going to be a full-recovery which costs $150. But the good news was that if I sign up for hosting again, I could get their introductory pricing! I suggested to him that given the extenuating circumstances, it seemed like maybe they could help me out a bit more. Nope, he said.

Well, I guess I'll take my business elsewhere.

The bummer was that there were a bunch of posts that I know that she didn't want to lose. The good news is that the internet exists.

THE INTERNET

I woke up this morning trying to figure out what to do about this situation, because I wasn't going to pay $150 dollars to recover however many posts were there. It occurred to me that Google kept a cache of many websites. Unfortunately, not thishappymess.com.

In process of searching that out, however, I came across the Internet Archive, which does have bots that go around and take snapshots of web pages, and lo and behold, they had taken a few snapshots of my wife's blog. It's not the same thing as totally recovering the content, but it did allow me to save a dozen or so posts. The key was that, on her main page, she had each entry in their full format, one after the other, with maybe 10-15 posts per page.

So that's the good news. I end on somewhat of a happy note. I got some of her stuff recovered. And Go Daddy stinks. Don't use them.

Helpful Links re: Gordon College

Going straight to the source is generally a good idea in matters of controversy. With that in mind, I submit the following list of links.

Letter to the White House re: the ENDA

Boston Globe Article

Moveon.org Petition

President Lindsay's Response

Response of the Board of Trustees

You Are Responsible for Your Story

“Child, I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.”

— Aslan in The Horse and His Boy

It's amazing how much information you can find out nowadays. You hear about some allegations being leveled against someone as unknown as a pastor (let's face it: even some of the most well-known pastors are only well-known because most Christians live in a bubble), and a couple of Google searches and Facebook posts later you've learned all that you need to know. Or at least, all that you can know by looking on the internet. Suddenly your mind is filled with information that you almost certainly don't need, and you are left to your own devices to sort it all out.

Let's call them "non-relational reflections". Or something of the sort. It's the type of thing you think about when you don't really know a person and all you have in front of you is data. At least, you think it's data. It may be gossip. Or it may be true. It's hard to say.

It got me thinking a little bit about responsibility, and what I'm supposed to do with all this "truth" I discovered online. And then it got me thinking about my own story; the one that I'm living right now. The one that I actually am responsible for.

I've been reading The Horse and His Boy with my boys, Michael & Anthony. Does that make me the horse? If it does, then I am a wild stallion. Or perhaps one of those Budweiser horses. But I digress.

As Aslan explains to the boy, Shasta, why things happened for him the way that they have, Shasta eventually begins asking questions about his traveling companion, Aravis. What was the meaning of her story? Aslan's response stuck with me: "Child, I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own." Later, Aravis receives the same reprimand from the Lion when she asks about Shasta.

It stuck with me because of the regularity with which I can and do find out about what is going on in someone else's life; someone else's story. It starts with curiosity. Then I form opinions. Eventually I act as if what is happening in someone else's story–a person I don't know and have never met–is somehow my responsibility. Either my responsibility to call out their bad behavior; my responsibility to reprimand them or warn others about them; or my responsibility to simply know. Then it's my responsibility to let everyone else know what I think. Judging by all the information and opinions I found on the internet, I'm not the only one who has a problem.

The trouble is that it can lead to at least two really dangerous paths. The first path is that we start wishing that we had someone else's story. The second path is when we start criticizing someone for how they are living their story.

The first path–wishing we had someone else's story–is human nature. We already know that we're prone to coveting what someone else has. More often than I care to admit I find myself wanting what someone else has; I wish that what happened to them would happen to me: they get a new house, new car, new clothes, their church grows faster than the one I'm at, etc. 

The second path, however, is much more subtle: criticizing others for how they are living their story. The reason it's more subtle–and I think, more dangerous–is because we can couch it in a whole lot of nice sounding things like "brotherly concern", or treat it as if we're just trying to "protect the sheep from wolves", or "hold them accountable!" or whatever other spiritual jargon we want to throw at it.

No one says, "for your own good and the glory of God I think you should give me your house." There's no way to be spiritual about your covetousness. But it's easy to be spiritual about your criticism.

Here's the thing. Well, the two things. First of all, we're all going to have different stories and Jesus makes pretty clear that when he's talking to Peter at the end of the book of John that it's a really good idea for us to worry about the story God has for us and not the one he has for someone else. And secondly, and I think, as a result of the first, we need to be really careful about these "non-relational reflections" into or about other people's lives. 

Yes, we should hold people accountable–but it's supposed to happen in relationships. The proximity of our relationship has a major impact on the responsibility of our relationship. If you don't have a relationship with someone, no matter how much information you can Google about them, no matter how many blogs you read about them, it's almost always going to be best to keep the criticism to yourself. Better yet, stop reading it altogether. What good does it do? If you have no responsibility to correct this person in the midst of their story, and you aren't going to do anything with the information but sit there thinking about how screwed up that persons story is or how stupid they are, then just leave it be. Most of the time, the people we are quick to criticize are people that we don't know and therefore have no responsibility for.

So I'm left with the data in front of me and I have to sort it out and then I conclude with this: it doesn't matter. It's almost impossible to figure out what's true and what's not true, and at the end of the day, it's almost never even information that I need. I'm responsible for me, my family, how I live my life, the choices that I make, and how I lead the people that God has told me to lead. I hope to live my story well, and I hope you live yours well.

I guess at the end of the day I hope that the pastors I read about on the internet live their story well, too. I'm just going to stop worrying about it so much. I have enough responsibility already.

“When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, “Lord, what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!””

— John 21:21-22

Stop Being a Superstar

We live in the age of superstars. We love celebrity status. And it's killing us.

To be fair, we have a heart-level problem. Christians call it a "worship" problem. Worship, simply put, is what we do when we ascribe ultimate value to something. The thing that we most ultimately value will be the thing to which we devote our attention, our resources, our energy, and even our full selves. We do it all the time, without even thinking. We'll give ourselves over to the thing that we most highly value. The problem is that we ascribe ultimate value to cheap substitutes rather than to an eternal and complete God, and end up feeling used, broken and frustrated. The Bible calls that misguided worship "idolatry". Idolatry is worshiping something other than God, displacing Him from his rightful position of having ultimate value.

The reason I provide that as an up-front caveat is because time and time again we find that the thing we consider to be ultimate is usually ourselves. In fact, we have been bombarded by the message (at least in my lifetime) that we need to look out for ourselves; that we are the most important person in our universe, and that we should be okay with that reality. We want to, and nearly succeed in, worshipping ourselves.

But the situation is even more complex. When you ascribe ultimate value to something–when you are worshipping it–it is rarely if ever just a personal thing. The natural outcome of your worship is that you will want others to worship the thing you ultimately value as well. It's impossible not to! The 21st century result is that all of us are vying for the attention of others; holding out the thing that we consider to be of the most value–ourselves–and hoping that others will join us in our idolatry.

While self-worship may have always been the agenda of the human heart, it has been propelled by advanced communications in the 20th century, and exacerbated further by social media in the 21st century. Give someone your smartphone and tell them to take a picture of the most interesting thing they can think of, and nine times out of ten they'll take a selfie. But that's just a symptom. Advances in communication and social media gave us at least three opportunities to promote our self-worship that most people throughout history didn't have.

First, it expanded our influence. Prior to the extreme advances in communication in the 20th century, the number of people whose influence extended beyond their town, city, and especially their state was few and far between. Most people's influence extended to their family, at best. Now, you can have instant access to literally billions of people. Drop the right tweet, post the right status, and you might find that suddenly you have real influence. The truth is that even people with a modest number of followers on Twitter or Facebook have a significantly higher amount of influence than someone would even dream about 100 years ago, simply because we are more connected.

Second, social media allows us to craft an alternate identity, or at least, highlight only the good parts of our real selves. The advances in technology mean that we can craft our little self-worship idol in a way that we know people are going to value it. Celebrities are created not because of who they are, but because of who we perceive them to be. We value the false identity they've created; not the real deal.

Alternatively, the best way to make sure that no one ever worships you is to let them get to know you. Then they find out the whole package and realize it's not that great. That's why your family doesn't think you're a superstar, even if everyone else does. In fact, no matter how great you are, your family never thinks you're that great. I'm pretty sure Barack Obama doesn't have his kids call him Mr. President at the dinner table, and I'm doubly sure that they talk back to him just like my kids talk back to me. I doubt LeBron James' mom and family cater to his every need at Thanksgiving dinner because he's arguably the best basketball player in the world. (Not to mention that if either of them actually expected that type of behavior from family, we'd think they were arrogant turds anyway, not worthy of our respect.)

Social media allows us to skip past having to let people in on the real deal and only show them what we want them to see. And we're okay with it, because the vast majority of them are never, ever going to know the real story. It's not just that what they are consuming is a limited version of ourselves; it's that all they will ever know is a limited version of ourselves. We can carefully craft the idol.

Third, and perhaps the thing that destroys us the most, is that our celebrity is quantifiable. How many followers do you have? How many friends? How many likes did you get on that last status update? Who commented? Who is talking about you if you google your name? You might not have had even a percentage of that information before the advances in technology. "How famous am I?" would have been a much more difficult question to answer with any accuracy.

These three opportunities exist for every single person in the 21st century to allow them to promote their own ultimate value. All of us have access to the tools that will give us influence. All of us can create a false identity to be worshiped. And all of us can quantify, every second of every day, exactly how well we're accomplishing our agenda. And it's killing us.

Every day we measure our self-worth (intentionally or unintentionally) by comparing ourselves to other people's false identity, and then turning around and seeing how many people are "liking" ours. Admit it: you would feel better about yourself if 50 more people liked your last status update; no one posts that selfie and feels good when they get zero comments or likes. Chances are, they'd be devastated.

This is why today, more than ever, we need to be pointing people's hearts and affections back towards Jesus. Only once we begin to see Jesus as having ultimate worth do we begin to release our agenda for our own glory. Jesus, through his Holy Spirit, promises to change us on that heart-level. Jesus gives us the confidence that we measure up and that he loves us, regardless of how many likes or comments we get. He's the only one who is going to love you perfectly, and not the fake you that you've crafted for outsiders. The real you that's sitting on your side of the computer.

My advice? Stop chasing celebrity or superstar status and start embracing Jesus. Instead of killing yourself trying to chase down the love of others, enjoy life with a God who chases you down because he already loves you.