Chapter 20

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Friday, February 13, 2009

Dear journal,

Thoughts about today: Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day. I threw the card I bought for Shelly in the trash after I saw her and “Mr. God of Lacrosse” slobbering over each other at the library. It sure didn’t look like she was trying to beat him off with a stick. I guess I’ll ask Elijah to help me eat the chocolate covered cherries I bought for her. I don’t even like chocolate covered cherries, but I hate to waste the twelve bucks I spent on them. Maybe if I let them sit on the windowsill all day, they’ll ferment so I can at least get a buzz for my efforts.

Honesty time: I can’t believe I just wrote that. I’ve got to get my life back together before I fall off into the deep end like I did in ninth grade.

What I learned: Life sucks sometimes. I’ve still never gotten to give someone I love a Valentine.

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“Lord,” I prayed silently after closing my journal. “Help me to have fun with Elijah tomorrow. I don’t want to cry on his shoulder all night thinking about Shelly.”

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Saturday, February 14, 2009

Dear journal,

Thoughts about today: God answered my prayer about having fun with Elijah tonight. We had a race to see who could eat the most cherries. It was his idea that we had to unwrap the things and pop them into our mouth using only our toes. I couldn’t believe it when he suggested that. It wasn’t until we counted the wrappers and found out that I beat him, twenty-three to seventeen, that he asked me if I had washed my feet first. I’m not sure if it was the thought of that, or all the cherries, but I just made it to the bathroom in time.

We scarfed down an entire pizza after that, and he asked me what had happened three weeks ago when he saw me with those other guys. After I told him I had been so depressed that I tried to drown my sorrows in booze and pot, he insisted that I get some counseling. I told him about meeting Austin at the church I had gone to, and that he told me I should talk to Pastor Wallace. He made me call the church from Romano’s to set up an appointment. Elijah gave me a strange look when I mentioned over the phone it was concern for a friend that had prompted me to call. He asked me if I thought my friend needed immediate intervention. I’m guessing he thought my friend might be suicidal. I assured him he wasn’t.

Honesty time: I am so nervous about meeting the guy tomorrow afternoon before church.

What I learned: You don’t need a mushy card to celebrate Valentine’s Day when you’ve got a friend like Elijah.

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 “Hi, …er, Phillip?” the guy, who didn’t look to be much older than me, asked as I tentatively pushed open the door to his office.

“Pastor Wallace?”

“Actually, I’ll be Father Wallace after I complete my internship in a few months.” His eyes brightening as he said it. “…but please, just call me Tim. Have a seat,” he continued, motioning to one of two chairs in front of his desk.

He got up and moved to the other chair, I suppose to put us on a level plane as peers rather than remain behind his desk.

“So tell me about your friend. You said he was struggling over an issue you didn’t feel you were being very insightful in helping him to resolve. He must be a fortunate person to have a friend like you.”

I felt my ears burning hot, but evidently no one had given him the memo, and so he didn’t know the significance of it.

“It’s his ‘preferences’ that I can’t really understand, I told him, choosing my words carefully. “I’m actually just trying to figure out where he’s coming from. …and I’m not really sure I agree with him.”

“Is there significance to you using the word preference? Should I assume your friend is gay?”

I saw him looking at my ears. “Maybe he did get the memo.”

“Yeah. Only problem is, he’s a Christian, and I just don’t see how a person could claim to be a Christian and think that God’s fine with him being like that.”

“First off… er, do you prefer I call you Phillip or Phil?”

“Phil’s fine.”

“Well, first off, Phil, becoming a Christian has little to do with the things a person feels. It’s more a case of having a heart attitude that is sensitive to being obedient to God.”

“That’s kind of what I told him: that he needs to obey God.”

“And what was your friend’s response to you saying that?”

“He said I was preaching to the choir.”

Tim chuckled. “So he’s maybe more aware that it’s ‘relationship’ God’s after, and not adherence to a strict religious code?”

I looked at him with enough confusion in my eyes to get him to elaborate.

“Everyone who comes to faith through belief in Jesus is faced with the challenge of deciding whether they should make personal sacrifices to try and please God, or if they should take life as it presents itself and trust God to unfold his will for them as they step into the unknown. Which do you think is the best route to take?”

“That’s kind of obvious isn’t it?” I asked, wondering if I had missed something.

“Not as obvious as you might think. Which choice would you make?”

“I want to please God in all that I do. The bible says we have to take up our cross daily, and follow him. That sounds like he wants us to make some sacrifices to me.”

“So you think God asks us to lay aside our natural desires to prove to him that we love him?”

“What do you mean? …I guess so. I mean if what we naturally want to do is against his will, then yeah.”

“What do think it means to pick up your cross and follow him, Phil?”

“To lay down your own aspirations in life and do what God wants you to do.”

“And how do you know what God wants you to do?”

“You read it in the bible.”

“Did God want you to wear blue jeans today?”

“Huh?”

“If picking up our cross daily, in order to follow him, means laying down all of our personal preferences, don’t you think that what we wear would be important to him too? What if we were to meet someone who would be put off by our dress, and they would never come to know Jesus because of something we were wearing? If God intended the bible to be used as our daily guide for every detail in our lives, don’t you think he would have included a dress code?”

“I guess so.”

“And what about choosing an occupation? You’re studying…”

“Geology,” I answered filling in his blank.

“You found that direction for your life within the scriptures?”

“Not really.”

“That’s what I’m meaning when I say that it’s a relationship with God which directs a person’s actions more so than him acting as a direct result of something that he read in the bible that morning.

“Your friend, does he find that he’s at all attracted to girls?”

“That’s kind of the issue with him. He really wants to marry his girlfriend.”

“What makes him think he might be gay, then?”

“I guess because his girlfriend thinks she saw him staring at a certain guy a couple of times.”

“And was he?”

“I suppose so,” I sighed.

“Phil, why do you think you’re drawn to look at that person? …I mean why do you think your friend is drawn to look at that person?”

I felt my face grow hot, sure that he hadn’t just made a slip of his tongue.

“Elijah, my friend, says he doesn’t try it. It just kind of happens to him.”

“Does your friend Elijah look at his girlfriend with the same desire he has when he looks at that certain guy?”

He used the right names, but there was something in the way he was looking at me that caused me to suddenly feel a need to come clean with this man. Looking at his feet, I whispered, “Can I be honest with you?”

“By all means, Phil.” I felt his arm drape across my shoulder as a tear dropped from my chin.

“Well… you know the guy I’ve been talking about… Elijah?”

“Yes?”

“Well, actually, he’s the guy my girlfriend noticed me looking at. I asked my girlfriend to marry me last Christmas, and she told me that while she loved me, she was afraid things wouldn’t work out on account of what she saw.”

“You were trying to follow what you believed the bible told you to do, rather than follow your heart and take a step into the unknown? You didn’t trust that it might be God who was leading you?”

“Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do: try to follow the bible?”

“That’s a very complicated question to answer, Phil. Some well-meaning believers within God’s church would have you think that every answer to life is found explicitly within the bible’s text. Others believe simply that the bible is a holy composition of various human’s understanding and recollection of God. Here,” Father Tim said as he handed me a bible and a tissue. “Open it up to the book of Galatians, chapter three. Do you know where that is?”

“After Corinthians, in the New Testament,” I told him as I wiped my eyes dry.

“Very good. Read verses ten through twelve aloud.”

I began reading the text aloud.

“A curse is on all people who are trying to become good by obeying the law. The holy writings say, `Everyone is cursed who does not always obey everything that is written in the book of the law and do it.' Now, you can see this. No man is called a good man by God because he obeys the law. The holy writings say, `Those who are right with God shall live by faith.' The law does not ask people to believe. It says, `He who obeys the laws will live because of them.'

“You consider yourself to be a believer, right?”

I nodded my head up and down.

“According to what you just read, is a believer someone who follows a written rulebook so God sees him as being a good person?”

“I guess not.”

“No, we have to live by faith. …especially when it comes to areas in our life which are not clearly defined by God’s word.”

“But that’s my point. The bible does define homosexuality as sin.”

“Show me,” Father Tim unassumingly said.

“I guess Romans chapter one is the most obvious,” I told him, and without turning to it, I rattled off the Apostle Paul’s assertion that homosexuals didn’t honor God with their bodies, so he gave them over to their lust and perversion, and then left them alone, presumably to burn in hell.

“Okay,” Tim said. “Turn there, and read the last part of verse seventeen.”

“A person who is put right because he believes, will live forever.”

“So if a person is put right with God by believing in Jesus, he’ll live forever?”

“Ye-ah”

“So in the next verse, who do you think God’s angry at, Phil?”

“People that don’t believe?”

“Seems so. Verse twenty-three says ‘they didn’t worship a God who couldn’t die, but rather images made to look like a man, who does die.’ Sound like a believer to you?”

“No”

“The rest of the chapter seems to tell about the lives of those given to idol worship, not about things that God curses someone with if they have a natural affinity towards members, or a certain member, of their own gender.”

“But couldn’t it mean that if you lust after a guy, God will curse you with those things?”

“Let me ask you a question. You’ve found yourself battling against feelings you have toward another man,” he said as a statement of fact. “Since you’ve had those feelings, have you also found yourself struggling with an unusual amount of greed, jealousy, and hatred? Do you find yourself getting into fights and wanting to kill people? Maybe you suddenly can’t stop lying and gossiping, or being arrogant. It would surprise me if you told me that you did whatever you could to tick off your parents, too.”

“No”

“Do you hate God, Phillip?”

“No sir”

“But you’re afraid God may hate you if you follow your heart and allow yourself to build a healthy relationship with another man?”

“I guess so.”

“Page back, in the book of Romans, to chapter eight, and read the first two verses out loud.”

I closed the bible I was holding and recited the verses to him from memory.

“Therefore there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death.”

“Very good, Phillip. …and you even exchanged the pronoun you, in the text, with me. Do you believe what you just told me?”

“Yeah… but… well, it would be like planning to sin if we ever…” I could feel my ears turning red, and saw that Father Tim was looking at them again.

“…consummated your relationship through a sex act?” he finished for me.

“We could never get married.”

“Don’t say never. What is marriage in God’s eyes? A piece of paper recognized by the state?”

“I never really thought about it that way. Do pastors ever do things like marriages that aren’t really legal?”

“If it’s right in God’s eyes, then you’ll find clergy willing to take on a little heat from the authorities in order to do what their convictions lead them to do.”

“Would you marry two guys to each other?”

“That depends on the situation. Mostly it depends on whether or not they love and honor God with their lives, and if they had first developed a healthy supportive relationship with each other.

“Would you like to make an appointment with me to get to know you and your friend Elijah?”

“He’s not a Christian. I mean he loves God. …it’s just that he’s of the Orthodox faith. His last name’s Cohen.”

“Do you think that would be a major obstacle for the two of you to overcome?”

“I’m not sure… ah, may I call you Pastor Tim? I kind of feel funny calling you Father.”

“Call me anything but late to dinner,” he laughed as he patted his belly.

“Anyway, Pastor Tim, do you see our different faiths being an issue?”

“Not one that couldn’t be overcome, Phil. Meantime,” he said as he stood up, indicating that we’d better draw our conversation to a close, “I’d recommend that if you’re not already doing so, you begin to learn about his faith. You should also make time, when the two of you are together, to share the things of your faith which are important to you.”

“We’ve kind of already started doing that. He almost freaked when my pepperoni touched his side of the pizza.”