Category: Love

A couple weeks before Christmas my husband Reed and I parked our car across town and took a stroll. It was one of those nice days right before Christmas and before the below freezing temperatures that forced everyone into hibernation. We were revelling in the warmth as we walked about looking at houses, dreaming about the day we’ll own one ourselves. It was in the midst of this nice day, this nice walk, this nice dreaming with my hubby, that a car drove by, about a half a block away and shouted out the window “Fags!” And drove away. It happened so quickly and they were so far away that it took a couple seconds for me to even process what happened.

We weren’t holding hands. We weren’t walking so that we were touching. How did they know? Should we walk further apart from each other so they don’t come back and harass us? Or worse? Why did it feel so threatening when they were so far away? These were the things that immediately ran through my head. I felt immediately conscious of my body language, of how I was in relation to my husband walking along the side of the road. One single word shouted from halfway down the street made me angry and afraid all in a millisecond.

About a block or two later, Reed grabbed my hand and we held hands for a while. It felt daunting and hard. It felt courageous. Holding hands with my spouse felt courageous. Doesn’t that sound silly? But that’s what hate can do to us. It can force us back into ourselves, into the closets we hide ourselves, into the corners of our minds. It can make us rethink that which we thought was safe. A single word can cause a torrent of emotions and thoughts and wondering if this place really is as great as you thought it was. Hate induces fear. And when love and courage are not chosen responses, fear simply breeds more hate. It’s a vicious cycle.

It’s when we decide to hold hands in the face of fear that courage is born. It’s when we decide to hold hands in the face of hate that love wins. It’s when we decide to show up and march for women everywhere that love trumps hate. It’s when we decide to listen to our black and brown neighbors and their experiences in our towns and cities and country that empathy and courage win. It’s when we welcome the stranger, the immigrant into our land and our backyard that courage and peace win out. When we choose courage in the face of fear, the world cannot stop us. Courage and love are far stronger allies than fear and hate ever will be.

When I fell in love, it didn’t happen in one fell swoop. It took three years of a deepening friendship and numerous people asking if we were interested in each other for the eyes of my heart to open. And when they did, it was a floodgate that opened. I fell hard, and it took me at least two months before I could admit to myself what was happening. At first, I would berate myself for thinking of my best friend in that way, but eventually I learned to accept it, to embrace it, no matter how weird it seemed. Then at some point senior year of college I was able to admit it to myself, to say, “I like him. And it hurts so bad that no one knows.” So, I told one of my best friends at the time, and she could hardly handle her excitement and not freak out at the same time. I cautiously began opening myself up to a few other trusted friends during that time and told them that I liked my best friend and not soon enough, I told him on a chilly February night on our way back from our regular shopping trip/doing homework at Starbucks routine that we had come to love that year. (Basically, we were going on dates before we were going on dates.)

At that time, he told me that he didn’t like me, but that nothing would change about our friendship. And it didn’t. It was wonderful, and it led him down the path of questioning whether or not he liked me, which he found that he did and that he couldn’t imagine his life without me. We started dating the summer after college, right before I went to seminary in New Jersey. He spent the summer in Colorado and then Bolivia. We saw each other only a few times after we started dating before I moved to NJ.  We delved right into a long distance relationship. I don’t think we could have managed it if we hadn’t had four years of friendship under our belts.

That first year of our relationship, though, was magical. He’d come visit me in Princeton, or I’d visit him in Illinois, and we’d get to hang out, play games, talk about life and bask in being in each other’s presence. Oh, and we’d make out like crazy.  Our mental/emotional relationship was growing steadily over phone conversations, texting, and skyping, but our physical relationship had to grow in spurts when we saw each other, attempting to catch up for the all the time our hearts and minds were growing closer to one another, but our bodies weren’t. It was a dizzying time, falling in love and learning about another person’s body.

Beginning my seminary journey in the midst of my first relationship changed the way I viewed life, theology, God, the Church, the way we’re supposed to be as Christians. Looking back, I can see a continuation from college concerning my theological education. I continued to take an interest in the Old Testament, wrapping myself up in the rich stories like a blanket on a bonfire night in late October. I wanted to learn the stories, learn the meaning of the stories, and figure out how they are stories that transcend time (usually, but not always). In falling in love with the Old Testament and falling in love with another man, I found the two to make sense together. The Old Testament is a lot about body, a lot about feeling our bodies and viscerally responding to God and to our situations through bodily actions. The Old Testament contains less piety than the New Testament; the people in the OT often only deny themselves, their bodies, of sustenance and nourishment when there is a point to be made. They rip their clothes and cry out when richer, bigger nations are marching on their borders. They are full of life, of party, of vitality that I find lacking in the NT (besides Jesus’ parties, of course.)

In falling in love with the OT and my future husband, I found myself using the name ‘God’ more than the name ‘Jesus’ while praying. I found myself speaking less about a personal relationship with Jesus and more about loving God and loving others (and this eventually came to mean other humans and animals and the earth). I found my evangelical tendencies slipping, becoming less pronounced. There used to be a time in high school and a part of college when I had come back to faith where I’d talk about Jesus almost as a lover, “lover of my soul,” etc. Now I look back on it and realize that through my faith and my friendships with girls, I had been looking for a significant other. I had been yearning for someone to share my whole self with; body, mind, and heart. I deeply needed to be known and to know, and in part, I sought this through my faith. I sought this through believing that Jesus lived in my heart and that He knew me unlike anyone else.

Granted, I still believe God knows me in a way that I cannot even know myself (I think? Maybe not.) And my theology has been shaped by a knowledge that God enters into friendship with us, that Jesus chose to be friends with humans, as well as the animals and the earth. So, a part of me experiences friendship with God, but more of me experiences awe, incomprehensibility, and wholly otherness when I think about God. I cannot fathom the Creator of all that is. I cannot understand the righteousness, the pure love God has for all  of us when I so easily dislike people and am disgusted with the way humans often behave (including myself at times). I cannot understand the benevolence of an Artist that paints such stunning sunsets and sunrises for those able to appreciate them. I cannot understand the sheer love of an Entity that would allow freedom of choice when it far too often results in pain for someone or something else. I cannot understand a God who would love me just as much as Donald Trump (because clearly I believe I’m a saint in comparison). God is more unfathomable than the darkest depths of the sea and the greatest galaxies of the universe.

And now that I’m in an intimate relationship with another human, my faith has shifted to fit my understanding of life. It doesn’t mean God is any different, but the ways in which I need God are different, the ways in which I experience God are different. Because of the love that I feel for my husband and the love that we grew over four years of friendship and four years of dating before marriage I can understand better the ways in which God might love that which God has created. The love between two people is complex, filled with easy love and difficult love. It is filled with love that bubbles to the surface when looking into one another’s eyes and it is filled with love that is chosen when there is frustration, annoyance, and hurt. Being in love with and choosing to love another person has so shaped my relationship to God that I cannot help but be both in awe and grateful for the love that God has and the love that God chooses for the whole of creation.

I recently read The God Box. It’s about a young man in his senior year of high school coming to terms with his sexuality in the context of his evangelical Christian faith. My husband has been wanting me to read this book for a few months now, and he finally got it from our library so that I could read it. I loved it. Besides the main character’s identity issues as a Mexican American, I resonated with other aspects of his story, like his struggle to reconcile faith and sexuality and his inability to tell anyone about his same-sex attraction. It felt both healing and jarring to enter back into that particular way of thinking, of thinking that I’d go to hell for accepting the “homosexual lifestyle,” of thinking that all gay people did was sleep around with each other, of thinking that my attraction would never go away so that I could fully be with a woman.

I remember nights writing in my journal, angst strewn about the pages: angst about my sexuality, angst about the boy I liked, angst about my looks, my weight, my hair color, angst because teenagers are already full of angst. Throw an evangelical Christian boy in a small, Midwestern town and the recipe for angst is overwhelmingly potent. I remember too many tears, too many fears, too many nights wondering how I could go on praying for change and yet continuing to feel the same attraction over and over. I remember two different people living inside of me throughout high school.

I remember being preached about or talked about at church when no one knew they were talking about that good little Christian boy who was a leader in the youth group. Gay people were always somewhere else. They were always somebody else. And they were always infringing upon the sanctity of marriage, the greatest threat to the family in the U.S. (No, we never talked about adultery or physical abuse or rape within a marital context or a crippling notion of masculinity or femininity as the greatest threat to the family.) I remember the derogatory names whispered and coughed at me in school from the select few who couldn’t deal properly with their own masculinity, so they took it out on others. I remember trying so hard and fighting my attraction with fervor only to find it growing stronger in response to my prayers and petitions. It’s as if God was saying, “You say, ‘Take this away.’ But I say, ‘Love yourself for who I created you to be.'”

I have also been reading Rachel Held Evans’ Searching for Sunday in which she talks about leaving the evangelical Church. It’s continuing to heal me from the hurt and pain inflicted upon me by my faith growing up. She also talks about loving what evangelicalism gave her. While I’m still trying to figure out what I love about evangelicalism, I do know that I’m thankful for growing up in the Christian faith. While I have deconstructed that childhood faith, I wouldn’t have the pieces to begin constructing a faith life now if I didn’t first have it given to me from my parents.

The most important part of my journey in faith and sexuality has been to love myself. I walked away from faith in high school and began learning how to love myself, how to say “no” to destructive forces in my life. It was my first lesson in saying “no,” and thank God I did. As I learned to love myself, I came to find God again. And I found God where God had always been, right beside me loving me for all that I am and smiling that I was finally on the road to accepting myself for who I was created to be. For anyone struggling with understanding and accepting their sexuality, their gender identity, who they feel they are on the inside, especially in the context of faith or particularly evangelical faith, the best advice I can give is learn to love yourself for who you are. You are deeply and fiercely loved by the God of the universe just as you are.

Thank God I’m no longer where I was in high school. Thank God for the saints in my life who led me down a Christian walk that allowed me to find my identity as a Christian and as a gay man compatible. Thank God for the people who have loved me through my faith journey, who have loved me through coming out and coming to terms with my orientation. Thank God for the people who have stuck with me every step of the way. Thank God for changing hearts and minds and opening up people to love me better. Thank God for my husband and for our story of friendship and love. Thank God for young adult fiction with gay characters who tell our children that it’s okay to be different, that it’s okay to be gay or transgender or anywhere on the spectrum of sexual orientation and gender identity. Thank God that people are starting to pay attention and that LGBTQ people’s lives are being rescued from suicide. Thank God for love that wins out at the end of the day. Simply, thank God.

Dear 15 year old Timmy,

I just read a book that you would love and hate. Morally, you would be so utterly opposed to this young adult novel that I just read. You’re so young and naive and you think you’ve been wired incorrectly, that God did something wrong to you in the womb. You think you know how you’re supposed to be, to live, to act. But, you’re wrong. You’re attempting to live out a lie, a falsehood. You are, in fact, rejecting God’s good creation when you keep trying to change yourself, make yourself different than the way you were created. Oh Timmy, how can I make you understand?

Read this book. I know, two young men fall in love, and you’re going to be so intrigued and turned on by it, and at the same time you’re going to be disgusted with yourself for feeling that way and therefore, hate the book. But please, read it. Give it a chance. Give love a chance. Give yourself a chance to be a normal teenage boy. You’re growing up too quickly because you’re dealing with pain even grown people shouldn’t have to deal with. You’re trying to ignore and change and tamper with the very fundamentals of who you are. Please stop hurting yourself in the name of God.

I want you to know that there is hope. There is hope when love is shared. There is hope when you learn to love yourself. There is hope when you learn to let that love flow through your freckled face that hates the way the sun kisses you, through your strong legs that run your pain away, through your wrist that you try to keep strong and straight. There is hope when you learn to love the things about yourself of which you are so ashamed. There is hope when you learn to let out those things which are hidden, when you usher them out of the closet no matter what anyone else might say or think.

I want you to know how brave you are. You’ve got more bravery than you know. Let me tell you about all the times you will tell a family member, a friend, a professor, a complete stranger about your sexuality, about your future husband. Let me tell you about the hard conversations that you plow through in the name of love, because that’s what God does, plow through in the name of love. Let me tell you about all the change and growth and goodness that are in store for you. Let me tell you about how it will be so much easier and so much harder than you think. Let me tell you about how beautiful your wedding is going to be, and that you’ll marry a handsome, funny, charming man that you grew to love as more than just a college friend. Let me tell you about how hard it will be to introduce him to your extended family who only knew you as a ‘good little Christian boy’ (implying that Christian and gay don’t go together, which I have now come to believe they most definitely do). Let me tell you how you’ll read this book I’m giving you and it will give you courage to be more yourself than ever before.

You have it in you. And you have it all around you, little Timmy. You have love and compassion and passion and courage and bravery all bottled up inside you for everyone else. Drink deep from that bottle for yourself, for you’ll need it to face the world with all its love and hate. You have all that you need inside yourself and from those around you. You have some strong friends and family to lean on and you’ll find even more friends with an uncanny ability to love, ones that lift you up rather than tear you down. You have people who are going to celebrate with you and mourn with you like you’ve never imagined. Drink it up, because they are good, good people and they will love you well. You have a loving, passionate God who wants nothing more than to see you whole and well and it might hurt like hell sometimes, but cling to God, for God will give you strength. When you want to walk away, remember to always come back (I know you will, since I did), but just know that God loves and heals and mends and makes whole that which is broken. God won’t change your sexuality, because it’s not broken. But, God will mend your broken heart and will heal the hurt from the Church so much so that you’ll go to Seminary and hope to find leadership in a church some day.

I know high school is wonderful and shitty at the same time. That’s okay. I want you to know that it will take time, but life does get better. Just keep learning how to love all the parts of you that you’ve grown up learning to hate. It might take a lifetime to love yourself and be yourself fully, but it will be a life well spent.

I love you dearly,

25 year old Tim