* * *
The e-mails kept coming. More often. Longer. Before logging into
my Gmail account every morning, I played a little game in my mind. No messages today meant there
was hope they’d change their mind. Unread e-mail sitting in my inbox indicated
a chance to explain myself. Make them see the good in my intentions.
The little bold black
number alerted me to a new message. My
heart raced and I held my breath.
“I’m sorry if you’re offended, but I’m not sorry for what I
wrote...yes, I’m concerned for your spiritual health and those you are trying
to witness to.”
I let out a long, exasperated breath and shook my head. Rolled the
button to scroll down the page.
“Did you hear me say, ‘I hate gays?’ Never said that. God hates
them if they continue to live in sin, as he does any unrepentant sinner. You
can't disagree with Scripture, or can you? There is no such thing as a
Christian homosexual, neither are there Christian fornicators/adulterers or
Christian drug abusers/alcoholics.”
My fingers hovered over the keyboard, itching to type a reply. Hit
the “delete” button instead. Wasn’t worth another angry phone call, like the
one received after my last attempt to “explain.” Went to check my blog instead.
The “new comment” alert sent my stomach into an unpleasant flip.
The commenter and e-mailer were one and the same. A
new-to-the-family aunt who just married my divorced Uncle. She had met me
twice. We clashed over politics, like I did with most of my family, but other
than a few small arguments, the meeting had been uneventful. Her frequent,
long, heated responses baffled me. They started shortly after my family found
out my plans to attend the city’s upcoming gay pride festival.
Leaning closer to the screen, my eyes scanned her words.
“What is wrong with standing up for what the Bible teaches? It
seems Emily is more quick to judge biblical Christians than haters of the
gospel. If we really have a love for the lost souls of this world, we would at
some point confront them regarding their sin, so they could repent and have
eternal life.”
“Confront them regarding their sin” stuck out. The “them”
referred to the gay and lesbian people she so feared and despised. Friends of
mine. People I’d laughed, cried, and shared meals with. They weren’t a “them”, they
were Chris, Greg, Tyler. My aunt didn’t know, or care, that Chris was my best
friend for sixteen years, since we were ten. Or that Greg’s mother told him at
least once a week how disgusted his sexuality made her. She had no idea church
brought Tyler and I together, and we’d spent hours discussing our faith.
I turned off the computer, put on my sneakers and went for a walk,
determined not to let the messages make my cry. Passing my old elementary school with a brisk
pace, my mind played back to the events of the past year since Chris came out
to me. All the conversations. Experiences. He, and Tyler and Greg, telling me
they prayed for years for God to take away their feelings and change them. The
more we talked, the more the doubt grew in my mind that being gay was a choice.
I’d been raised to believe that sexuality was something God didn’t “mess up.” But,
if it wasn’t a choice, that meant God, whose existence I never doubted, created
people who were gay. That changed everything.
The words from a previous e-mail flashed across my mind,
stinging me as I plodded along the sidewalk.
“Remember that many members of the LGBT have
an agenda and they want to legalize their lifestyle on all of us. They want
affirmation. They want the rest of us to embrace them and accept them
regardless of our Christian principles.”
I wanted to accomplish
the exact thing my Aunt cautioned me against. Affirmation. Acceptance.
Embracing, like the night I tightly hugged Tyler, after he told me when he came
out to his mother, she threw up. Attending Pride wasn’t an act of disobedience
to God. It was my understanding of what God is – love – that motivated me to
reach out into this unfamiliar territory. It was doing what Christ commanded,
loving the people that had been hurt and abused. Showing them that God loved
them too, despite what the people who hated them said. What made it hard, was the
people behind the hate, were the very ones who have been commanded to love. The
ones I grew up attending church with. The ones that grew up with me, my family.
Exhausted, mentally and
physically, I stopped walking, and bent over to rest my hands on my knees. Without
noticing where I was going, I’d come to the park that Chris and I had spent
every day after school in, when we were little. The smell of mulch filled my
nose, and the sound of the decades old rusty swings creaking filled me with
remembrance. I walked over and sat down on the swing that Chris used to push me
on, underneath the tree that provided the perfect amount of shade. Slowly, my
toes pushed off the ground, rocking me back and forth. My legs dangled. Closing
my eyes, and tilting my face up to feel the sun peeking through the leaves, I
started to pray.
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