Preacher, Anonymous2

JOY

When I thought about what I wanted to say I thought back to the debate that started this progress of joy.  When we ended the debate Glenn Johnson made a statement that I had heard many times before “We make God in our image.”  The only thing that I would add to that statement is “we make God in the image of what we need.”  For my friends who are conservative Christians they need a God of rules and standards, because if they can live up to a majority of those standards then they can feel good about their faith, sure of their salvation and, consequently, look down on those of us who don’t live up to their standards.  Yet for me I needed a Father, you see my dad wasn’t around much during my childhood.  My parents never divorced or even separated, basically my dad went to work in the morning before I got up and didn’t return home until I had gone to bed.  So there were literally weeks that I didn’t see my dad when I was a child. 

 

Therefore I was surer of God’s of love and presence in my life than my dad.  I talked to God everyday, but I didn’t talk to my dad everyday.  There was never a question in my young mind of whether or not God was real; the important thing for me was the fact that I was real to God. In a home that was sometimes ruled by chaos, when it seemed that my parents didn’t hear me, I knew with the faith of a child that God did hear me.  Not that God answered all of my prayers, when I was seven and prayed that fire would fall out of heaven on someone even I knew that wasn’t going to happen, but was sure that my heavenly Father could beat up my earthly father. 

 

Once I was out on my own and had a few years of therapy I realized that if I wanted peace with my parents I was going to have to find a way to get past the anger I had toward my dad and deal with the hurt.  So I spent a several years coaxing a relationship out of my dad by telling him that I loved him when ever I saw him.  I can tell you that one of my most precious memories was the day I called home and my dad said “when are you coming home?  I can’t wait to see you…. I miss you” and, because I was speechless, he said “I love you” first when we ended the call.  When you hear, really hear, those words for the first time it is an incredible feeling.

 

But that isn’t the greatest joy that I wanted to tell you about, the greatest joy for me was when I realized that God still loved me regardless of who I dated. When I was a senior in high school I started dating my first girlfriend.  Now you need to know that my senior year of high school was the worst year of my life.  I spent the year trying to hide my relationship from my family, trying to recover from two serious car accidents, and trying to deal with all of the heartache and drama of a high school romance.  Yet the hardest thing that I had to do that year was to stop praying.  There had never been a day in my life that I hadn’t prayed; there had never been a time that I couldn’t call out to God.  I had always been taught that you couldn’t be a Christian and be gay.  If you have never known the despair of having no one to call out to when you are in a hopeless situation then consider yourself blessed.  There were times that year when I would begin to pray and then remind myself “you can’t do that.”  The day I realized that God wasn’t merely a God of rules and regulations, a God of guilt, but a God of love, and a love that I didn’t have to coax, was the most precious of days.

 

Regardless of how many other religions I study, or what I learn, when times are difficult, and I am worried, or afraid I find that I’m still like that seven year old girl who just needs to know her Father hears her.  Now fire is still not falling out of heaven, but I know that my Father hears me, and more importantly that my Father loves me, and that is the joy of my salvation.

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