In my prior life in San Diego, I was part of a ministry that saw a fair amount of people who suffered from PTSD due to abuse or sexual trauma of one kind or another, and it surprised me because I had no idea how widespread that kind of ‘thing’ was because outside of that ministry I had heard very few people talk about abuse of any sort, especially men. This is likely for reasons specific to each person, but from what I experienced in my four + years as an intercessor, shame was the chief reason most people kept silent.
Shame.
To varying degrees, many of the people I prayed with and for felt blame for what they’d been made to endure. The beauty of this ministry was that in most cases, those same people were able to find God’s truth about where the blame lie, and encounter Jesus in such a way they were able to find at least a measure of healing. Also the knowledge that healing was a process, and it was OK if it took some time. It certainly did with me.
I became a frequent intercessor for these types of sessions, and it eventually became clear that God had gifted me in such a way, and used me in such a way that I was often able to help these people by protecting them while those leading the session were able to do their own work.
Sometimes, though, I would need to step away a little bit, because I could feel myself moving away from what needed to be done and start thinking about things like how much dental reconstruction that piece of crap would need if I was able to go back in time and get hold of him.
That’s what rapists and molesters and people like them were to me, and what they remain. I need to remind myself constantly every person has worth to the one who made them. It is not up to me to assign value to them, and judge them for whatever they may have done, as appealing as that option might be to the part of me that hates injustice.
Especially when it is directed toward women or girls. When I hear about that stuff, immediate retribution always sounds like the best option, because screw rapists and other assorted creepers.
It isn’t up to me, though. But the man in me—the husband and brother and friend–wishes it was sometimes. The part of me that loves and respects women as beautiful creations of a loving God wants to choke rapists until they turn blue for making so many women think otherwise. For making them think they are unclean, and ruined, and to blame for what happened to them.
A while back I saw this picture:
And it made me think about that stuff again.
To rapists: while my personal belief is that you are crap on a cracker, I know in my heart that like the women, men, girls or boys your actions do permanent harm to, you are beloved by God. Deep in your sin, where your heart seems so far away from anything loving, you are loved. You know what you’ve done. Seek forgiveness. It can be yours.
To victims: my heart breaks for you as it always has. Know this, and hold it in your heart like the precious truth it is. You are loved. What you feel makes you unworthy is something you had no control over. What you feel makes you dirty is something you did not ask for, no matter what they tell you. This dirt is created by lies, and truth can set you free of them. God’s truth.
You are loved and loved and loved, in spite of what ‘they’ tell you and in spite of what you might think of yourself. Let those words fall away like broken chains. You are precious to the one who made you. He sees no blemish, or stain.
Try to imagine an oyster, fresh from the sea bottom. The oyster is held in a pair of hands–the sure and strong hands of the carpenter. You can hardly see the pads of scar tissue on his wrists. A small knife with a sharp blade appears in one of his hands and he deftly pops open the shell. With the blade he lifts the connecting tissue and extracts a small, slimy ball.
He begins to wipe away the slime, dirt and sediment that has been accumulated by years. Everything falls away at his touch, and he is eventually left with what was there all along; a shining and perfect pearl.
Know this as well: to Jesus, you are that pearl. You are no longer a victim. You are beautiful, and clean, and made righteous.
I want you to know that you are not alone in your pain. The hands that made you wait to hold you.
I want you to know and believe in your heart that you are not to blame.
I want you to know that it’s ok to let out what you feel.
I want you to know that healing is available—and your heart can be made whole again.
My words are failing me now and I will end with what I said before.
I read this article about the movie “God’s Not Dead” the other day online, and it was less a review than a callout to the filmmakers for misrepresenting atheists. Something akin to “What I learned about atheists from “God’s Not Dead.” The answer, of course, was either nothing, or falsehoods.
What stuck in my craw about it, was to wonder what they were expecting? It’s a faith-based movie about a student who defends his faith when a teacher tries to compel him to admit that God is dead, with the real statement being that he never existed at all. The student is made to try and attempt to convince the opposite, which is, of course, that God is not dead.
If the film wanted to educate people about atheism and how atheists perceive themselves, it probably would have done just that. That’s not the kind of movie it was. I believe it was meant to encourage believers in their ability to defend and represent their faiths. In that regard, I think the film succeeded.
However.
The professor was represented in the film as kind of a snarling bulldog and all-around jerk. It was a stereotype, to be sure, but it is also true that stereotypes exist for a reason. I have had many, many encounters with atheists who were actually quite similar to Kevin Sorbo’s character in the movie. They were indeed snarling, and condescending, and insulting, and very misrepresentative of Christians and faith in general.
Today I kind of understood why, at least to my line of thought.
I think people often respond in a hostile manner to things they don’t understand. Like faith in Jesus, or atheism for that matter.
As a person of faith, it’s difficult to understand why someone would respond to people of faith with so much hostility, as so many atheists do. Where the filmmakers went wrong—as I have done myself so many times—was to assume that all atheists are the same kind of lunatic as the professor in the movie.
Clearly that isn’t true at all.
I have several good friends and family members that are also atheists—who while they might not agree with what I believe and how I practice it—are also not condemning or insulting to me. They’re still people I love and pray for, and enjoy hanging out with. I’m not going to treat them like they are rabid or infected with the zombie virus.
The filmmakers of “God’s Not Dead” might have chosen to qualify the central premise of the professor character as being representative of some atheists, rather than all of them. Clearly not all atheists are as loathsome as the professor in the movie or people like Richard Dawkins (To me, he seems a step or two away from espousing the virtues of eugenics, and should definitely stay the heck off Twitter).
Now, where atheists go wrong is to assume all Christians are hypocrites and charlatans. That is also quite obviously not true. And to treat all people professing faith as if they are deluded dolts who hate everyone not like them and deride belief in any other religion (or lack of religion) is a mistake.
Christianity is not about derision, or hate. It’s about a relationship with the creator. It’s about trying to help others find that same relationship. It’s about loving people as you love yourself. It’s about loving God.
Certainly, there are Christian jerks, too. Lord knows I have been one of them.
So atheists should qualify their platform—their statements—as being representative of some Christians. Not assuming all are the same, as all atheists are not the same.
What I’m getting at is this: don’t assume you know people and are qualified to judge them because you may have had a bad experience or sometimes heard about a bad experience. You don’t have that right.
Get to know them, whoever they are. Have a conversation. Don’t try to convert the person either way. Just talk to them. You learn more about people and who they are by enjoying a cup of coffee than by holding a sign in their face and telling them what a tool they are.
And also, that plank in your own eye can get super uncomfortable.
Quite a few years ago, my friend Ken’s brother Ryan and his fiancé were driving to see Ryan and Ken’s dad at his Walter’s Camp cabin. The plans were to stay for the weekend, I believe. In the back of Ryan’s pickup was a 12 pack of Corona and their gear. On the way to the river, the pickup sideswiped another vehicle—a tractor/trailer—and Ryan was killed, almost instantly. His fiancé had quite a few cuts and bruises, but ended up mostly OK.
Ryan wasn’t drunk or on any drugs. Best guess is that he fell asleep at the wheel. In any case, he didn’t make it.
I remember there was a public funeral at some Unitarian Universalist church in El Cajon, and it was about what you would expect. Non-religious, lots of people crying, and a nice picture at the front of the church. Afterward was a reception, with even more tears and a few speeches.
Shortly after that, there was a much smaller gathering at the Walter’s Camp cabin, and I was a part of that. I remember we all had one of the Coronas which had remained completely intact in the back of Ryan’s truck, and toasted his memory. The next day Ryan’s dad attached a small, brown paper-wrapped package filled with Ryan’s ashes to a few very large balloons, with Ryan and his fiance’s wedding rings tied to the balloon strings. The object was for the balloons to be launched from a bridge over the river, and gradually drift down toward the water. The package would dissolve, and the balloons would rise to the heavens, carrying the couple’s rings.
It worked exactly as planned.
I remember standing on that bridge, and everyone was a wreck—though I was mostly able to keep it together. I placed my hand on the back of Ryan’s best friend’s neck as he knelt on the bridge crying and said anything I could think of to comfort him, praying silently for peace to come to these people.
We headed back to San Diego a little later that afternoon, and I never saw any of those people again. I don’t know if peace came to them, but I know those couple of days at Walter’s Camp made me heavily consider my own mortality. At the time, I also carried a lot of unresolved grief within my heart, and sometimes it was as bitter as bile, other times I was simply…stuck. In my grief, in my life. Stuck.
I would sit at home sometimes, or at work, and it would occur to me that for some, peace doesn’t come. At least not when you want it to, or the way you want it to. Sometimes, God doesn’t lift the burden right away. You get through things, and afterward you can’t remember how you did it, but you survive.
That was me. I realized it was mostly my own doing, but that didn’t change the way I felt.
I would think about my own experience—my many experiences—with death and grieving, and I would wonder why it had to happen that way? Hadn’t I tried to be the best person I could? I loved my parents, and they were gone. I loved my friend, and he was gone. He gave his life to a bullet, within shouting distance of my bedroom window on the day before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded.
I didn’t really understand then—nor do I now—why endurance of those deaths was required of me. I trust God today that one day I will understand why those things happened. I don’t know how long that will take.
Maybe for me it’s like the refining process for gold. Heat is applied to the gold, and it melts. Impurities rise to the top and are skimmed off. The gold is cooled. More heat, more impurities, more skimming. Eventually, the gold is pure and valuable.
Perhaps I needed to be refined somehow. Perhaps we all do.
I just wish I hadn’t held onto my grief for so long. That was a mistake I didn’t really know how to correct at the time. I can tell you when things finally got to the point where I let go of them, though.
March, 2007. Canyon View Christian Fellowship.
Many years after everything went down, including those four deaths—five, if you include Tim Wakefield, which I completely should have. He died in 2000.
That day in March, my friend Ron came up to where I was sitting just before the service started, and said he was going to sit with me if that was ok. It was.
I had been a believer for about seven years at that point, but I never had given my grief to God, and that day it was heavy on my heart. Pastor Mike had given a bit of testimony just before Easter, regarding the death of his own mother. It hit me so hard I was nearly shaking. I made it through the sermon, but at the end I knew I was in trouble if I didn’t get out fast when church was over.
Without saying goodbye to Ron, I made tracks for the door. I stopped at the door like I’d hit a brick wall. I knew—somehow I knew—that today was supposed to be the day. I didn’t want it to be. I didn’t want to grieve. I didn’t want to think about things, or remember.
Yet I knew that my grief had been a slow poison to my life over the years and miles and so many tears since those deaths happened. It was a weight around my neck. It was so damn heavy.
I went back to where Ron was still sitting, and I asked him to pray for me. I don’t remember what he said, but I remember he prayed for me with his arms around my neck, and his face right next to my ear.
That morning, in the third row of the CVCF sanctuary following the 9am service, I finally handed 20 years of accumulated grief to my God. I grieved my mom, and dad, and my friend. I grieved for Tim, and even Ryan. I think I was still puffy eyed when the next service began, and I sat through that one, too. I was surrounded by members of my small group, and I leaned on them. It was good.
If I learned one thing over the years since, it’s that holding onto things really doesn’t help. It may delay your pain, but it doesn’t heal it. Acknowledging your pain does, when it is done before God.
Sometimes the comfort doesn’t come right away. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it comes when you least expect it, through the comfort of a good friend and whispered prayers. It can be a long and intricate process—it’s like that for me.
Grief can also sometimes be like a broken windshield. It starts with a speck–a chip in the glass. If it isn’t repaired, it begins to gradually creep out over the rest of the windshield, like a spider web of pain—with offshoots in many directions. Sometimes I see or feel things I haven’t thought of in years, and it triggers those old feelings. It’s easier, now. I have God to remind me he will carry them for me. I have my wife, who knows how to love. I have my kids, who lift my spirits when they get heavy.
The hands of God can feel like a strong grip, and also a gossamer touch. Often, you feel them through proxy. It’s always been that way for me. Yet comfort is comfort, and pain can be assuaged in so many different ways. Remember, one of His many names is Comforter.
Surrender. Give him your grief. Drop that burden at His feet. Be refined. It can be a lifelong process, but it’s worth it.
There’s been a great deal written over the past few years about how the church is “losing” millenials (young people coming to adulthood around the turn of the century, the year 2000, that is) or members of Generation “Y.” Many have speculated as to the reason, but it seems to me to have something to do with the rise of liberalism in both politics and the church. This is manifested in many ways, but I believe most significantly is the extreme antipathy of many young people toward conservatives for what they feel is a hawklike view of the war in Afghanistan and the potential for war is places like Syria and Gaza. Not to mention conservative support for legislation like the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and legislation against gun control reform.
There are probably lots of personal reasons people have for turning away from or leaving the church, but based on news coverage and changing public opinion, it seems to me the perceived treatment of LGBT men and women by conservatives and “evangelical” Christians has had the most effect on young people as far as changing their views of the church.
I do believe in God, in Jesus, and in his sacrifice on behalf of the world and everyone in it. Not just everyone who believes, but everyone.
Many of the people who share my faith also share a view that (and I am not speaking solely of the loathsome Westboro Baptist “Church” here) homosexuality is chief among sins, and will be what will ultimately bring down the country, the world, and bring about the return of Christ to wreak vengeance on a gay-loving world. Or something like that.
Often, the approach of my fellow believers toward gay people—both at gay events and in other forums, such as online, in newspapers, magazines, etc.—is to let those men and women know in no uncertain terms what fate awaits them should they choose not to change their evil ways and repent. Seldom–if ever–mentioned is the true message of Christ.
The problem that I have now—and have for many years—is that approach sounds nothing like Jesus to me. Jesus didn’t tell his followers to condemn. He told them to love their neighbor. That doesn’t mean love their sin. It just seems to me that spewing vitriol at people does not let them know a loving God exists, a God who is in the business of deliverance. Not to mention that if I ignore the plank in my own eye, I am also sinning before God.
Let me backtrack a bit—all the way back to the very early 1980s.
My first encounter with a gay person was in the 8th grade, shortly before I moved up to high school. I wrote about that day a while back here. For those of you younger folks, homosexuality wasn’t something much talked about then. It was a different time, in almost every way. For my part, and also for many of the kids I hung out with, the word “fag” was tossed around almost haphazardly, without any concern for what it meant (many of us didn’t have anything but a rudimentary understanding of what homosexuality was, or how it was practiced. I include myself in that number).
We just said it, and it was almost a…good natured insult. Never considered was the fact that it could have been hurtful to anyone. It was just something we said. A lot.
I still regret what happened that night in my friend’s backyard, and I probably always will, to an extent. I’ve asked God’s forgiveness for my part in it, and I wish I could find the young man we hurt and ask for his, but that is not to be. Believe me, I spent a considerable amount of time looking.
So what has happened since then is that I have come into contact with a great many gay men and women at various jobs, and at the junior college I attended back in the 1990’s. With each encounter—and with each friendship developed—I began to notice something.
Each one of these men and women were people just like I was. They ate, and slept, and got dressed, and showered, and pooped. The only difference I saw was that they were drawn to people of the same sex and I was not.
They loved the people they were with, and in many cases had been committed to them alone for long periods of time. I worked with one lesbian couple that had been together for decades—almost as long as my parents were before they died.
Another thing to consider is the tendency of many gay people (not to mention the unquestionably liberally-minded media) to single out Christians, conservatives, and the “religious right” as chief amongst their oppressors, in a world that otherwise loves and supports the LGBT lifestyle and practices. The truth is, in many parts of the world (including the parts practicing Islam and orthodox Judaism) homosexuality is condemned in stronger words than most Christians use, and gay marriage isn’t mentioned at all. That typically is not discussed, though.
Another thing I do disagree with is the tendency of late for LGBT people to liken their quest for what they call “marriage equality” to that of the struggle African-Americans faced during the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s. Yes, they are fighting for what they deem a right they are being denied, but of the states who are denying LGBT men and women the right to use the word “marriage” to describe their unions, I would submit that many—if not most—of them are doing so based on the definition they have to work with on what marriage is—which for a great many conservatives and those on the religious “right” means the union of a man and a woman. While that is how I would personally define the word as well, I would do so while taking the following into consideration.
What had changed in my heart over the years (and this is way before I became a believer) was that I no longer cared about whether or not these people wanted to do the same things I did with the people they were involved with. It occurred to me it was none of my business. It still isn’t, and I still don’t care. I wouldn’t want them to try and peek into my bedroom, either.
I dealt with and related to gay men and women on a personal level, based on how they treated me and others and not who they slept with (or didn’t). It worked out pretty well, and I made a couple of good friends over the years.
When I came to belief in 2000, I was in a place in life where I didn’t work with or know anyone who was gay (that I knew of, anyway). I began to grow and deepen my faith, and it was so interesting to see that the Jesus I came to know through scripture and discipling was not the same one I’d heard about over the course of my life before knowing him.
In the course of time, I became somewhat involved with a young woman I worked with, and we began to spend time together with a group of friends of hers—most of whom were gay men.
I did not make a secret of my faith, and they respected it. I treated them just like I did everyone else, and I began to notice something the more time I spent with them. The gay community—at least to the extent of my involvement and casual friendships with these men—was way more of a community than the straight people I’d hung out with prior to that. They supported each other unconditionally, and seemed less interested in judging themselves and others than they did in simply living their lives.
I didn’t preach to them, and they didn’t try to convert me. I was more than willing to talk about any aspect of my faith they wanted to hear about, but I did not shove hell down their throats, either. I just tried to love them the way they were, to the best of my ability—even if I didn’t understand their lifestyle. It just didn’t seem to fit with the way we were made. But I could let that slide, for the most part. They didn’t share details of what they were doing in their relationships, and neither did I. So we had a mostly very friendly relationship, each of us understanding we were different, and that—for the most part—was OK. And the truth is, this particular group of gentlemen was a lot of fun to hang out with.
One time in particular, one of them told me, “It means a lot that you’re here. I don’t think anybody’s used to that with people like you.” I assumed he meant straight people at first, but then I realized he meant Christians.
I told him that I just loved God, and that scripture says I’m supposed to love people, too. He smiled and gave me a hug.
Eventually, though, things began to change a little bit, and I started to struggle with some of the things I saw. It culminated in an evening where the young woman I was involved with and I were at a party where we were the only straight people, and things started happening around us. Very quickly, it started making me feel really uncomfortable, and I told the girl that I wanted to leave. It got to a point where I could no longer balance what I believed versus what these men did—mostly because I was being confronted with it in a way that got me a little weirded out, to tell the truth.
It wasn’t in the privacy of anyone’s bedroom, so I no longer had the luxury of not being involved. She didn’t feel the way I did. That was the night we decided to “take a break,” which we never recovered from. There have been times when I wondered what would have happened if things hadn’t gotten so crazy that night. Would God have convicted me in some other way? I don’t know. And with things being as they are now, I can’t imagine wanting to change anything or go back. Yes, it ended up being a painful end to my relationship. Perhaps that was what it took to refine my heart.
In any case, after the party that night, I didn’t spend much more time with the group of guys, as I didn’t spend much more time with the girl—not any more, actually, outside of work.
It was five years later before I was involved with anyone else, and that was with the woman who would later become my wife. As we grew into our relationship, and our marriage, it was around the time all the gay marriage propositions were going through the process of becoming law. “Marriage Equality” and all that. I hadn’t thought much about the fact that gay people couldn’t (or could) be married over the course of my life prior to that time period, so it was interesting to see all of the various things on the news, including the Chik-Fil-A controversy of couple years ago.
It was interesting—and I felt a little conflicted inside—because while so many of my fellow Christians were up in arms about the potential legalization of gay marriage, I just…wasn’t. I knew what the Bible had to say about homosexuality, and I agreed with it, but I also did not have a troubled heart about any of those people who wanted to get married. It didn’t matter to me what these folks wanted to do in the privacy of their own homes, and it seemed fair enough that they should be able to marry, if it made it easier regarding insurance and benefits, etc. I never felt that if they were able to marry it would threaten the sanctity of my own marriage. How could it? How could two men or two women marrying each other make my own union any less holy in the sight of God?
What did occur to me, though, was to wonder if all these people who complained, and protested, and cried out about how gay marriage was a danger to the family felt the same about divorce. Why is it we never see news stories about millions of people marching to protest how common arbitrarily ending a marriage has become? God is also very clear how he feels about divorce–perhaps even more clear than about gay marriage. And while all these people were spouting off about how a word is defined, it occurred to me to wonder about how a marriage is defined? What does it mean to these people?
Certainly, I am not trying to say that divorce is never the right course of action, because sometimes it is the only course of action. It’s just that people are often so…fickle about it. The statistic you hear all the time about 50% of marriages ending in divorce? I believe it. Why wouldn’t it be true? It seems that few people understand what a covenant is these days. To me it suggests a sacred promise, and the rings my wife and I exchanged are a symbol of that promise. In short, I got married to her because I wanted to, because I knew I didn’t want anyone else, ever.
And last week, I think I realized what marriage really was. It’s spending the night before Valentine’s day in the ER with your husband, while he practically yells and pounds chairs and walls in his pain. It’s spending the day itself in a chair next to his bed, and praying for him. It’s holding his hand and making him think of other things. It’s sleeping (sort of) sitting up rather than going home, even for a little while. It’s devotion to the person with whom you made the covenant, and that is what my wife showed me last week, and it made me love her all the more, if such a thing is even possible.
So to recap. While I understand the biblical reasoning behind the stance so many take on whether or not homosexuals should be able to marry (based on the “biblical” definition of what marriage means), the conflict I feel comes from feeling like if people are devoted to one another, and are willing to make a covenant saying they are going to mean it for the rest of their lives, it’s hard for me not to want to just let them. Even if I don’t agree with or practice the same lifestyle they do.
Also, a while back, my adopted state of Arizona has passed (and sent to the governor–who vetoed the legislation) SB1062, a law that in essence allows people who refuse service to someone a defense (‘deeply held’ religious beliefs) in the event they are sued for descrimination or something of that nature. Of course, while legal recourse may ostensibly be what the law is about, the unspoken subtext is that it would also give others what they feel is license to treat gay people and their potential business in an unfair and descriminatory manner.
I believe that is it in a nutshell, and is also what has millions of gays and pro-gays in such an uproar once again. They’re crying foul, and likening the legislation to the old Jim Crow laws from decades ago. While that may be a much lengthier discussion for another time, it does seem to me that while the “Jim Crow” battle cry is closer to pro-gay hyperbole than anything else, there is also a great deal of potential for descriminatory ugliness with this law, because people are people, and prone to do bad things with ambiguously worded legislation such as this.
With all that in mind, I think perhaps it is not just what some Christian folks are saying, but how they’re saying it. The arguments are the same, and probably always will be. Scripture decrying homosexuality is referenced, and gays along with supporters throw up scripture they feel counters their Christian counterparts efforts in the same regard. It gets uglier all the time, and nowhere on either side of the discussion is the real message of Jesus referenced.
It seems like this to me: if the bible is true, and it tells us that God is love and that all people will know we are the disciples of Christ if we love one another, then how are we showing the people who do not know his love the face of Jesus by so often treating them with open hostility? How does feeding gay people fettucini alfredo or making a wedding cake for them make you a participant in whatever sin you feel they’re committing? I mean, I get it, but I don’t agree.
The problem is the wording and the design of the legislation, and I wonder sometimes if that was an intentional, CYA move on the part of the legislators. If so, we have to think about how this legislation is like (or could be like)…giving people already inclined to do so the right to treat others shabbily. There may be a place for some similar type of legislation, but this particular law is not going to go over well, not with the social climate surrounding this issue what it has become.
For my part, I can’t do it anymore.
I can’t treat people that way, and I never really could. Maybe some of it is my California-ness regarding gay people carrying over into my life in Arizona, but it’s really more about not wanting to feel like I’m any better than anyone else because my sin is different. I am not better than anyone else. I am the same. In my dotage, I’ve found it so much easier to treat people kindly. I would rather make them their food or a cake or floral arrangements, and then tell them God loves them and died for them. I want people to know the Jesus I do. Whether they’re gay or straight or…whatever, I want them to know him, and know how he feels for them and what he did. I do not now—nor have I ever—felt my marriage (or any marriage) could be threatened in any way by who else can get married.
I wonder, though, how many gay men or women are known by the folks protesting gay marriage?
I also wonder how many Christians are known by gay people?
If we don’t know each other, how can we expect anything to change in either direction? Jesus talked to people. Walked with people. Ate with them. Probably fished with them, and laughed and drank and danced. I believe that in the end, the Eternal Kingdom will not be filled courtesy of those who spoke out against the things God hates the loudest—those who shouted condemnation from every rooftop. I think souls will quietly slip in thanks to the people who have shown them the most love, who have shown them Jesus.
To that end, because I am loved, I will try to be loving. I will choose to show people the Jesus I know by telling them about what he’s done in my life. I will tell them about how I am incomplete, and wounded, and broken, and still sin, but am loved in spite of the things that queue up to keep me from Jesus. I will explain what scripture means to me as I understand it, and I will tell people what I think if they ask me. If I love Jesus like I say, I owe them the truth.
I just have no intention of shouting it at them, or telling them God hates them because of their sin. Brand me a heretic if you must, but I feel that if God hated people because of their sin, he would hate all of us equally. And he would not have redeemed us from anything. You don’t die for people you hate.
And to see so many people caught up in the definition of a word and how it threatens them rather than simply getting to know people and telling them about Jesus just doesn’t make any sense to me. I can’t understand how telling people they’re damned for what they do in their bedrooms is going to show them the Jesus I know that has changed my life and could also change theirs.
To be clear, once again, I am aware of the mentions in the bible of homosexuality, and that it is addressed as sin. While it is true that God hates sin, it would be errant—once again—to imply that he hates homosexuality more than any other type of sin. And that he hates homosexuals more than anyone else. Sin is sin. If God hated homosexuals, he would also hate every other type of sinner, and probably all Christians. The bible doesn’t say any of that.
Homosexuality is not something I indulge in, and whether or not I “approve” of it does not really even matter. I think the bible makes it clear what God thinks of homosexuality and what it entails, and I acknowledge the punishment for it is the same as any other sin—all other sin. Omission of mention by Jesus is not the same as approval. While Jesus himself may not mention homosexuality specifically, he did come in fulfillment of Old Testament Law, and prophecy, not to nullify it. I think where we go awry is when we start classifying sins, and justify ours as less terrible than homosexuality.
It isn’t.
No one is righteous, no not one. “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9)
Certainly not me.
We’re all different, but we are also all the same. We need God.
We need Jesus if we are to be freed from our chains and our sins. God knows it, and Christians do, too. Yet if we can condemn someone else for what they’re doing, then we don’t have to think as much about what we’re doing. All of which means that we can take comfort in our own perceived righteousness, while we decry the unrighteousness of gay men and women as if it were anything different than sins that we have committed, now, and throughout history.
Take a look at Matthew 5: 27-28. Go ahead. Read it and come back. Still here? Good. Let me repeat what I said before. Sin is sin. No one is righteous, no not one. How can I justify condemning a gay person with my own words, while justifying my own actions as a lesser sin. To God, they are the same. The punishment is the same.
Let’s talk about those Old Testament laws for a few minutes. You know the ones. Many people will talk about how scripture also mentions other things as being sinful that people don’t seem to care about anymore, like eating shrimp and other sea creatures for one example (take your pick, there are many others). They will tell you that those old laws—like the ones that condemn homosexuality as well as other sexual sins—do not matter or apply anymore, because the world is a different place. That’s partly true, and I’ll get back to that in a bit.
Those laws again, from the Old Testament. Taken specifically, there are three different types.
Laws pertaining just to the (ancient) state of Israel. They are pretty specific.
Also for consideration are ceremonial laws (many pertaining to sacrifice, and diet, and things of that nature), which were superseded by the New Covenant, fulfilled in the person of Christ.
Lastly, moral laws. It is only the moral laws of the Old Testament which remain and are held as truths by most Christians based on the validity of the Ten Commandments. I won’t go into every piece of scripture here, but at least to address the dietary laws and some of the other laws that seem to apply mainly to those of the Jewish faith rather than Christians: take a look at Mark 7:19, Acts 15: 5-29, etc.
Of course, if one does not hold the Bible as truth, then this would make little sense. And there’s the rub.
Then Jesus enters the picture, and everything changes.
As believers, we are called to share him and his truth with people. So while the biblical principles of the Old Testament make it clear how God feels about all different types of sin, there is hope, and in a world that seems to have so little, that is indeed something.
I posted a picture on Facebook not long ago I’d seen online of a group of Christians (mostly men) at a Gay Pride event, and they were holding signs and wearing shirts that said “I’m sorry.” They were apologizing to gay people for the treatment they’d received at the hands of standard bearers for Jesus. In the picture I posted, a gay man in great physical condition wearing tighty-whiteys gripped one of the shirt-wearers in what looked to be a very emotional bear-hug.
I thought it was a great picture and that it was a great way to actually show Jesus to people who needed to know him instead of just telling them they were on the Bullet Train to hell.
I got a bit of an ass-chewing from a couple of people to the effect that treating gay people as if their lifestyle was OK was the same as personally condoning and supporting it, and that wasn’t right—as if because I was a Christian, I should tell them they were going to hell. Never mind all that “love your neighbor” stuff. I want to tell people about Jesus, and I will tell them about sin. I just feel the right thing to do is let them know they are loved first.
I can’t convict someone of any sin, and I wouldn’t want to if I could. Jesus does that. And it isn’t my function, as a believer, to punish people for sin. Let him without sin cast the first stone?
That ain’t me, man—I’m a mess.
I’d rather tell someone I’m sorry, then hug them and tell them Jesus loves them.
This is an excerpt from a longer piece. I was thinking about old friends today, and how they can shape your life in good ways and in bad. Also, how much the experiences we have when younger stay with us…
I’m sure junior high was (and is) meant to prepare kids for the mind-sucking black hole that is high school. Our classes get harder, and we have more homework. We start working on group projects, and have the opportunity to participate in more organized activities–things like athletics or student government. We start to notice the opposite sex. We experiment with cuss words, and our bodies start doing all kinds of crazy things. For me, it was a little different. Puberty ran a little late, and I was quick to discover how cruel and sometimes merciless early teenage boys can be. Though both years of my junior high experience were powerfully difficult, they were also where a learned the most about myself, and who I was to people. Eighth grade was even worse than seventh, if such a thing was possible.
My friends and I mostly kept to ourselves, and did the same things probably most boys did during the early 1980’s: we played outside. We walked along the culvert that ran parallel to Fanita Drive and pretended we were on a long journey. It would only go so far, though. We figured out pretty early on that when you got to the point where the ditch turned into a tunnel and went, I think, under Grossmont College, that it became darker than a politician’s heart in no time at all. We learned this the day my friend Robbie’s little brother earned the immortal nickname “Shit Stains.”
We had thrown some granola bars and 16-ounce bottles of Coke into my friend’s backpack, and simply started walking down the ditch, as we called it. After about a half mile or so, we came across a dead and bloated white cat—it was puffed up like an over-inflated balloon. Ronnie’s brother (prior to his christening) got the idea that it would be fun to poke it with a stick. He jabbed at the side of the cat, and as the stick pierced it, a vile cloud of decayed stink hissed out and all three of us nearly hurled immediately. Little brother dropped the stick and we all started running along the top of the culvert toward the street—Prospect Avenue, I think.
After a few more minutes, we got to where the cement sides of the ditch ended and the tunnel under Harvard on the Hill began. Little brother took point and we began walking into the darkness. I suddenly wished someone had remembered a flashlight. It was freaking dark! Water trickled from somewhere, and though we could barely see, we heard our feet splashing through the shallow water as we walked.
Suddenly, there was a noise in the darkness, like something falling over. That was all it took, and we turned around and started running as if the devil himself were behind us. Little brother was in the rear this time, and just as we were passing from the darkened reaches of the tunnel into the bright daylight, his feet slipped out from under him and he went down on his ass. He skidded for a short distance, and when he stood up to dust himself off, we noticed the small amount of water in the ditch combined with the dirt had left a green smear along with a shit brown mark down the length of his backside.
Shit Stains was born.
We decided to cut the adventure short after that, and after a brief intermission for a clothing change, we adjourned to the field next to Ronnie’s house for a safer pursuit—no rules tackle football. It wasn’t much of a game, really. Sometimes we just tossed the ball into the air and tackled the hell out of whoever caught it—which was really just the timeless and very politically incorrect game of “smear the queer,” though we didn’t call it that at first. Mainly, this was because none of us had much of a clue what a “queer” was, other than something you didn’t want to be.
For all we knew, queers were some nameless thing that parents came up with to scare kids into behaving, akin to the Boogey Man, or Bloody Mary, or the chupacabra. We had only the most rudimentary ideas about what homosexuality was, and certainly didn’t have any clue they were people in the same way we were people. Also, people during the early 1980’s (especially my parents) didn’t really talk about gay people or gay things when I was a kid—at least not to me.
Of course, my parents really never talked about hetero sex, either. I didn’t know much besides you laid on top of someone and things happened—what “things” I had yet to figure out. It wasn’t until I was 11 or 12 that I found my dad’s stash of skin magazines. There was a stash under the sink in our camper, another in my dad’s boat, and still another under the bathroom sink. A few stolen glimpses through those were my initial exposure to “how things worked.” I never had “the talk” with either of my parents, and I remember my dad saying something to me once that I “had to learn somewhere.”
It never really occurred to me that it should have been from him. That was something I would not learn until many years later, when I had two boys of my own.
So, we played “Smear the Queer,” and we shot BB guns, and we threw mudballs and read comic books. Every once in a while, we would be able to summon up enough guys and enough enthusiasm to play an actual game of football—those days were the best. The kids who swung by the field would not always want to join the game (we played pretty rough). Often kids would just hang out for a few minutes and move on, while those willing to risk getting piled on by a group of geeks would leap into the fray, and join us for a game. It was a day like that when David came by. We knew him from school, but he was never really part of our little enclave, because we thought he was a little weird. He and his family were Jehova’s Witnesses, and to us that just didn’t make any sense at all.
We didn’t know anything about the minutiae of his religion, only that they didn’t do anything cool; like celebrate holidays or birthdays. He had a little brother, and a pretty cute sister a year younger than us, so we were friendly enough when we did interact with him.
This one particular day, he came by and we had just finished an especially bloody game of Smear the Queer. Skinned knees and elbows abounded, along with a split lip on Shit Stains. We decided to adjourn into his backyard and begin work on a fort we wanted to build from scrap plywood and stolen nails—it ended up taking most of the weekend. The highlight was waiting until dark one night and destroying one of those newspaper recycling boxes for the six pieces of blue painted plywood it would yield. Then I jacked a couple handfuls of nails from my dad’s toolbox. After that, the work went relatively quickly, and soon enough we had a single story plywood fort with a single blue door you had to crawl through and a rudimentary fireplace made from some red bricks and mud we’d scraped up with our hands.
We also hoped to boost a few Playboys from the liquor store next to Ronnie’s house so we could paper the walls of our fort. It was really pretty easy—someone had found out the year before that the store owner kept a stash of stroke books next to the toilet in the little bathroom to the back of the store. One guy would ask to use the toilet while the other talked to him and distracted him enough we could sneak by with the magazines down our pants or stuffed into a backpack.
The day we hung out with David, we decided to use him as the decoy. I would stand out front and Ronnie would be the bathroom user. Everything worked out according to plan, and a few minutes later, we had two Playboy Magazines (one featuring the actress Suzanne Somers’ famous pictorial) and another called Hot Cherries, or something to that effect. We immediately adjourned to the backyard to start decorating.
Suzanne got the place of honor next to the door, and we decided that the following evening would be a good night for a sleepover.
There were four of us in the fort that night. We’d managed to procure several dozen carpet samples—I can’t remember where—and had covered the hard dirt with them so we didn’t have to unroll sleeping bags on the ground. Robbie brought in a cassette player and we listened to the soundtrack from the movie Heavy Metal. I hadn’t yet seen the movie—it was rated R and I hadn’t had the chance. The soundtrack was good, though. It featured artists like Sammy Hagar, and Don Felder from The Eagles.
So the four of us—me, Robbie, Shit Stains and David—listened to music and talked about movies, and at first the fort was filled with the sounds of laughter and excited conversation. Then a time came when it got quiet for a minute or so and David decided he was going to tell us something.
He muttered a few words that sounded a lot like “kite thighs,” and Robbie said “Say that again?”
“I like guys,” he whispered.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.
He said it again, followed by “I’m a ‘faggot.’”
We were silent for a minute, and then the three of us burst into laughter. He was having us on.
“No, really,” he said. “It’s OK.”
“Seriously?” asked Shit Stains.
David swore it was true, and then offered to prove it by performing a certain act upon the three of us.
We were all silent and then one of the brothers looked at him and slowly said “Get the fuck out of here.”
“Come on, guys…” David said, and looked at each of us in turn. “It’s no big deal. Lots of people are.”
“Get. The. Fuck. Out of here.”
Robbie literally kicked David in the ass and then shoved him toward the door. We then laid into him with a chorus of “go home, fag,” and things of that nature. He dropped to his knees and crawled out the door. I could hear a short bark of either tears or laughter as he ran across the lawn. It never occurred to me that what I had just been part of was just as bad as what the little punk asses had done who had made such sport of me in the shower.
The following Monday when we got to school, we somehow got the idea it would be great fun to tell everyone we possibly could what David had told us, and had offered to do. It eventually got back to the Vice Principal, and we were made to apologize. David just stood there and listened, but didn’t say much of anything. It didn’t really matter, anyway. The damage was done. That kid was a pariah for the rest of the 8th grade. No one wanted to spend any time with him, and to my knowledge, he was pretty much a loner for the rest of the year. On the 8th grade trip to Disneyland, he walked around by himself with one of the chaperones because no one wanted to hang out with him. It wasn’t until then I started to really feel shitty about what we had done to him. I never really thought about his motives in telling us what he had. Maybe he’d just wanted to get it off his chest and thought he could trust us—he didn’t really have any friends after all. None of us knew him the way we knew each other.
A couple days after the Disneyland trip, I decided I was going to go over to his house and try to talk to him. He lived a mile or so from the brothers, and they lived less than that from me, so I just walked over. I knew where his house was, but had not actually been there. His family lived in a large, old-fashioned looking white house with a large front yard. Parked kitty-corner to the house was a silver Airstream trailer with a couple lawn chairs in front of it.
When I knocked on the door, David came out and stood on the front porch.
“Hey, man…” I said, and then my voice just trailed off. I didn’t really know what to say. “Nice house. It’s big—looks like something out of a movie.”
He pointed over at the Airstream. “My parents stay in there. My sister and brother and me live in the house. They come in to eat, though.”
It was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard, and I had no idea how to respond. So I got to the point.
“I just wanted to tell you…about Saturday night—“
“Forget it,” he interrupted. We stood there awkwardly for a minute, and I realized he’d let me off the hook. I didn’t want to be. I felt like a dick.
“I’m sorry, man.” I said. “Not because Mr Caldwell told me to say it. I just am.”
“Yeah, well…” he said. “I’m studying.”
“OK, well, I’ll let you get back to it.”
I walked away without saying goodbye, and that was the last time I can remember talking to him. He was a ghost the last month or so of school. I don’t know if anyone else talked to him, either. I think I’ll regret that weekend for the rest of my life.
That Saturday night would be a weight for years to come, and the cool kids at my school never really did stop giving me shit at every opportunity. It didn’t bother me as much now—maybe because it seemed like a deserved some ridicule after what had happened with David. Yet even with that, I was still able to survive junior high, and looked forward to high school because I figured there I would be able to start over again, in a place where only a few people would know me. I would be an even littler fish than I had been in junior high, and I was OK with that. It would be a lot easier, I figured.
A friend witnessed the aftermath of what seemed to be an attempted suicide yesterday, and did her best to help, but the situation seemed very dire, and she is unaware of the ultimate outcome. Both the situation as she described it as well as the apathy of people who also had to have seen what happened made me think of something similar that happened back in 2006, I think, when I worked at the Regal Cinema in Parkway Plaza.
You could walk from the upstairs lobby down a wide walkway leading to the back doors. From the doors, you went across a walking bridge to the top level of the three story parking structure. I was parked on the top level one night, and was walking across the bridge to get something out of my car—I don’t remember what. I saw red and blue lights, and happened to look down just in time to see a gurney with a body bag on it next to a large pool of bright blood on the ground.
I stood there for a moment and watched a few people walking by the scene, while others took pictures on their cell phones. It looked as if they were excited rather than disturbed.
Just as the bag was zipped the rest of the way up, I caught a glimpse of a woman’s pale face and stringy blonde hair plastered with blood. I went back to work, and later talked to a few people in the mall who’d seen what happened. The stories were all mostly the same, so there had to have been some truth to them.
Apparently, the young woman had sat backward on the railing surrounding the second floor of the parking structure, and just pushed herself off backwards, with her head striking the hard asphalt two stories below.
This one gentleman I spoke to had ran out to see if anything could be done and was very shaken. “She had a tattoo on her shoulder,” he said, looking down. “It was a butterfly.”
I didn’t know what to say.
The next day, I combed the newspaper and online to see if there was any more information about this woman. Her obituary—such as it was—ended up as little more than a few sentences in the newspaper, with a bolded title of something like “Woman jumps from parking structure.”
She didn’t jump, I thought. And it occurred to me to wonder about the woman with the pale face and the butterfly tattoo.
What could it have been that caused such an extreme reaction to something that was likely a temporary problem?
I never found out.
I remember her face, though. I stood there on the bridge and looked down as they zipped the bag up and slid it into an ambulance with the lights off. After the ambulance left they hosed the blood away.
The thing that struck me most about the whole situation is that so many people—with the exception of the sandwich shop guy—seemed unaffected by what happened. Someone had died, but after a brief pause, we all just went back to work.
It occurred to me then—and it occurs to me now—that it sucks we’ve arrived at a place where the value of a human life means so little.
It’s my prayer that we can get to a place where young women don’t have to push themselves off parking structures.
Where there are people to talk to, and cry with, and pray with.
And now, every time I see a butterfly tattoo on a woman, I think of that night, and that woman with the pale face.
I think it’s great that I live in a country where an African-American man can be elected president. Especially considering we are not yet two centuries removed from legally being able to own other human beings. It’s about time, really.
I think the President has done some good, and gone a long way toward advancing civil rights, and given people the opportunity to be judged not on the color of their skin, but the content of their character.
But.
I also think the President is a little bit screwed, because none of that is what he will be remembered for. He will be remembered for getting the entire country’s panties in a bunch by stumping for (and ultimately getting passed) the Affordable Healthcare Act, or whatever the heck it’s actually called.
He will be remembered for clearly acting on the tip of his advisors in steamrolling this (now) clearly flawed legislation with a great deal of hidden language through the process. He will be remembered for remarks he made that if people did not want to participate in his great agenda and keep their current health plans, they could (millions of cancellations later, they still can’t).
He will be remembered for gently petting the back of Iran with one hand, while holding Israel back with another.
He will be remembered for getting the Nobel Peace Price for not really doing anything.
Clearly, I am not a fan, but that’s OK. Just because I do not agree with you and did not vote for the President, does not mean I hate him, his party, or you.
I don’t.
I just think people are soon going to be jumping from the bandwagon they were clinging so tightly to.
Or maybe they won’t. Maybe the country really has finally screwed the pooch badly enough it cannot recover. Maybe this country is being pulled in so many different directions in the name of tolerance and an unashamedly liberal agenda that is no longer the greatest country on earth, No longer the most powerful nation in the world.
Maybe change will come, finally.
It probably will. But no one said it would be change for the better.
For the past two weeks, I’ve been doing physical therapy for my shoulder, and though it has usually been exquisitely painful the day after, I have been seeing results–the increase in my range of motion has been worth the pain. I can see that it is making a difference, and when we get to the strengthening portion of the rehab, it will really start bearing fruit.
The two PTs introduce a few new things each time I go, and today they had me sort of pedaling what looked like an upside down stationary bike with my hands, and literally climbing the walls with my right arm. I suppose it was more like “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” but it felt like I was climbing Mount Everest. After that, the male PT had me go over to the training table where he’d placed a piece of foam about the width of half a coffee can and roughly four feet long.
“OK,” he said. “I want you to get on the table and lay down on this. You want one end right at your butt and the rest of it directly along your spine.”
“All right.” I said. It looked uncomfortable, but I supposed he knew more about that sort of thing than I did.
I got up on the table and laid down on the foam. It was quite uncomfortable, but didn’t quite get to pain. It was like laying on my back on a slightly padded, round balance beam. I was alarmed to notice right away that it also made my stomach and nether regions start rumbling in a sinister and terrifying manner.
Oh, no, I thought. Not now. Not here. There’s a room full of people here, five of them women. So I did what anyone did, and I clenched up my works with all my might. I probably could have produced a diamond if I’d been sitting on a lump of coal instead of a piece of uncomfortable white foam.
I got through the five minutes on the balance beam, and then it was time for my electroshock and ice therapy. They put these electrode things on my three surgical scars, and then give me some voltage while icing my shoulder. Supposedly it messes with a person’s pain sensors and throws up a road block between the injury and the brain. And it feels weird as hell, especially when taken with the ice.
Fifteen minutes of that, and the male PT removed the ice pack and electrodes from my arm, and the padded block from under my knees.
“You’re done,” he said. “Let’s go for twice next week, too. Maybe three times after that.”
“Ok,” I said, and began my struggle to get off the table (it’s tough when you can only push up with one arm). I swung my legs over the side of the table, and then pushed against the wall a little to help myself sit up.
And that was when it happened. It was like a burst from a minigun. BRAAAP!!!
“Dear GOD!” I cried. “Excuse me!”
“You’re good,” said the PT.
“No, man. That sounded like one of those mortar tube things they use to launch fireworks on the 4th of July…”
From directly behind me, the female PT said “Really, don’t worry about—“
“I’m just gonna go to the lobby and curl up in the fetal position.”
The other three older women getting worked on looked around the room, at the walls, the machines, the door.
“So see you next week, then” said the female PT.
“I don’t know if I can come back,” I said. Then I had to laugh, because life (and my guts) is just ridiculous sometimes.
“Some of the stuff that happens on these tables…” she said.
“Oh, God, don’t talk about it,” I cried. “I’m gonna be a dinner table conversation tonight.”
“Maybe after dinner,” she said.
I made my appointment and vowed to do anything to stay off that balance beam next week.
It’s only been a week and I’m at defcon 4 frustration level with the recovery process. Hating this sling:
Hating my damn repaired shoulder:
Hating the fact that the damned Percocet works, but makes me feel sick and gross.
Hating the fact that the damned shoulder exercises hurt like a m————, but probably works pretty well, too.
Frustrated, tired, uncomfortable, with my shoulder buzzing like a cloud of hornets.
But.
I trust in You to make something of this. Something you can use. Something I can use. Something worthwhile. The dr was not kidding when he said the recovery process would be painful. It has been on several levels.
I guess feeling this way is just part of maintaining faith in a world where faith doesn’t make sense. Where I can sit on my couch at 0344 and bitch, when some really hard stuff is going on in the world.
But in the interest of full disclosure, God doesn’t always take stuff away. Sometimes you just have to get through the bad stuff, and take comfort in the fact that no matter what your level of conviction, inspiration, or faith, Isaiah 42:3 is still true and you will get through it. I’ll get through it.
a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.
The thing about loss that’s tough for the people who remain is that they are left with little more than fading pictures clutched in desperate hands. Scents on a pillow. That last bit of conditioner in the bottle you don’t want to empty. We grip those memories with desperate fingers–so much so that it’s easy to get lost in the long ago “better times,” and drown yourself in a sea of sorrow.
You can’t really hold on that well, though, because pictures are made of paper, not the flesh we desperately long to hold. Their smell leaves. We remember what was, and don’t want to think about what is, which is getting on with things, which we also must do, even in the worst circumstances. Yet Ecclesiastes also assures us there is a time to mourn, so we need to do that, too.
This present loss of my niece is a little more remote for me, because we had not remained close over the years. Yet I remember times when we were–long ago summer evenings spinning out in gossamer threads of books, movies, laying in the living room watching TV, and time spent with my parents. I remember how much they loved her. she was really more like the little sister I never had. I think of what it felt like to be young and I remember that with wistfulness while I mourn.
When I remember you, I will remember what it felt like to be young, and strong, with little knowledge of the world to come. I will think of vacations, long days with many books, trips to Disneyland, rivers, and backyard pools.
I learned something really important from all this: love your family while you have them. You won’t always. Only God knows when the day and the hour will come. Forgive trespasses, and shortcomings. None of that shit matters in the end.
My niece would have been 45 today. I really wish she was here, even if we weren’t gonna celebrate together. She was a really important part of my childhood, and even though she had her moments (don’t we all, though), she will be missed terribly.
A Work in Progress 