The title of the blog, as I indicated yesterday, comes from the personal ad I placed that eventually brought Russ and I together. It was the beginning of 2000 and I was new to email and computer etiquette - I wrote the entire ad in capital letters. Russ' then roommate thought that the ad was intriguing but wondered why I was shouting. I placed the ad in the personals of the now defunct gayseattle.com.
The journey to embracing myself as both gay and Christian was long and complicated. I grew up in an environment (northern Michigan) in which being gay automatically excluded one from being a Christian. I then moved to South Dakota to attend seminary, which only reinforced the idea that a gay Christian was indeed an oxymoron. The best decision I ever made was to leave South Dakota - and that seminary - and move to Seattle. I want to clarify at this juncture that I made many wonderful friends in South Dakota who were and are an important part of who I am today. Some have come to accept me fully; others still care deeply about me but have a hard time concluding that gay and Christian are not oxymorons. All are carried within me as precious parts of who I have become.
Even when I came to Seattle, it took me some time to find Christians with a different message. I thought that I had to give up the church to embrace my unchanging sexual orientation. (Believe me people - I prayed and prayed and prayed - and then I prayed some more.) I had come to the realization that God still loved me and embraced me through an amazing encounter one stunningly beautiful fall day when I was driving along US 2 as it wanders along the Lake Michigan shoreline in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I literally heard God say - all else is grace - you are loved. However, I thought I lost the sense of community of that I had always found in belonging to a particular gathered worshiping body. Imagine my delight when I found a welcoming community - and my astonishment that the community was Baptist!
As I reclaimed my identity as Christian, I began to reclaim the other dreams that I thought were forsaken - marriage, children, seminary, ordination and ministry. God is faithful - all have come true. A gay Christian may still seem oxymoronic to many - but God is bigger than all of our labels and can embrace that which we might not understand given our limited vision. And God can take these unlikely juxtapositions and create something unexpected and beautiful.
Examine the seeming oxymorons in your lives and perhaps you will see God doing a new and unexpected thing - as God is very want to do.
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