Then and Now

I have been having trouble sleeping at night for a while now.  Instead of just laying there tossing and turning, I usually get up and read.  

Last night when I was looking on our bookshelf in the bedroom for something to read the other night I came across some of my journals.  I used to keep a daily journal of the events of my life and I love reading back through them on occasion.  I randomly grabbed two of them and started reading.  

The first one was written in the year that I was so sick with Hodgkin’s and believed that death was imminent.  There is a lot of poetry in that one, a lot of talk of wanting it to be over with, of wishing I had the courage to walk out into the woods and shoot myself so that my friends and family would not have to watch me die.  Pretty self-absorbed melodramatic fare.  

The other one was from 1988 to 1989.  I was in my junior and senior year of college and coming to grips with the fact that I was gay, even though I had spent the last few years in and out of reparative therapy, counseling and having been in the prayers of everyone I knew, I was still gay.  I wrote about the death of my mother in August of 1988 and how much guilt I felt by feeling somewhat relieved that I would not have to deal with her mental illness and the effect that it had on me anymore.  I wrote about walking away from God in September of 1989.  I not only stopped believing in Him, I actively cursed and hated Him.  There is a lot of anger in the writings of 1989. 

Yet here I am 24 years later alive and once again a person of deep faith.  All of this I owe to God.  The thing is, although I gave up on Him, walked away, actively cursed His name, He was still there walking beside me, loving me and caring for me.  That is how great God’s love for us is.  I am living in a state of gratitude now for that abiding, constant love.  God loved me back to faith and to life.  How lucky am I!

The past couple of months have seen a time of a deepening of my soul.  I find myself walking further away from self-absorption towards living in the self- less image of Jesus.  Not that it has been easy.  I have spent to much of my life being self-absorbed and egocentric for it to be a smooth transition.  Yet I see God’s work of transformation in me. 

The less I am - the more He is. 

Love abounds.  I feel more love in my life now than I ever have.  I am hopelessly devoted to my family and the close friends I have.  My walk with God is deeper than I can even fully understand and I am experiencing a newness of spirit.  The more I am able to put God and others before me the happier I am.  The less I think about myself the more at peace I feel.  I find that I am smiling a lot these days. 

There is a great song that I find myself singing in my head almost constantly and I want to finish this post by sharing the lyrics of just the chorus with you:

Indescribable, uncontainable,
You placed the stars in the sky and You know them by name.
You are amazing God
All powerful, untamable,
Awestruck we fall to our knees as we humbly proclaim
You are amazing God

God's Timing

God’s timing often surprises me but His message is always just what I need to hear at the time I most need to hear it.

Lately I have been struggling with my relationship with my wife’s best friend. Her friendship with Meghen has been strained the last couple of years and when Meghen finally asked her why, she replied that it was due to me and how, since I have returned to faith, I have changed and she does not like being around me. At first I was defensive, stating that I had not changed. But how could that be true as God’s love is so transformative, I had changed. So I accepted that I had changed but I could not figure out how those obviously good changes could make her not like me. I am used to people not liking me or not wanting to hang out with me but it is generally because I am too intense, too self-absorbed, etc. I have even had people not like me because I am gay.  But I am not sure I have ever had someone not like me based on my following Jesus. 

Over the last few months I have accepted her not liking me. I still had love in my heart for her and I was basically indifferent to the whole situation. But knowing how it is affecting my wife is starting to get to me. Meghen misses their friendship and she is entirely blameless in its demise. Seeing her sense of loss and sadness is starting to make me hate this person. That coupled with the fact that she will not even put her disdain for me aside to come to my wife’s 40th birthday party. I feel my heart hardening towards her and this seed of hate growing. I have felt completely justified in what I feel is a rationale reason to hate this person.

This is where God’s perfect timing comes in.

I have been reading a book about the Apostle Paul but put it aside to start this book on God’s Love - If God Is Love: Rediscovering Grace In An Ungracious World. Not sure why, I was enjoying the Paul book but for some reason I decided to throw the other one in my backpack to read on my commute. I am only about half way through the book and it is challenging me. Not that it is presenting a premise that I don’t wholeheartedly agree with but is challenging me to LOVE and to do in my own life the same things I am always encouraging others to do in theirs. 

In the chapter titled - Being Gracious it states: “Most people talk more radically than they live. The challenge is to live more radically than your talk.” I accept and believe in God’s universal grace and I believe and accept that Jesus told us to love our neighbor as ourselves. I know that Jesus was all about loving the unlovable, the marginalized, those that society had discarded. 

In the gospel of Luke we read the story of the lawyer who tests Jesus by asking; “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all of your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live” 

(Luke 10:25-28)

This was a simple message but a daunting challenge. Is not the person that I am starting to have feelings of hatred towards my neighbor? I am humbled by the fact that I am struggling with the most basic and yet most important instruction that Jesus gave us. I think loving the Lord your God AND loving your neighbor as yourself are tied together in a way that if you don’t do the latter you are certainly not really doing the first. I think we have to be able to love our fellow man in order to love God with ALL of our heart.

My prayer is that God will soften my heart and continue His work in me to help me to love as He so loves us. And that I might live more radically and truly walk the talk.