The Past Few Hours

Feeling inexplicably lonely.

And so I open up Washed and Waiting and turn to its section on loneliness.
I expect to refer to this book for years to come.

Bolding is mine:

"What if the church were full of people who were loving and safe, willing to walk alongside people who struggle?  What if there were people in the church who kept confidences, who took the time to be Jesus to those who struggle with homosexuality?  What if the church were what God intended it to be?"
An anonymous Christian who struggles with homosexuality


Admittedly, entrusting our souls to the fellowship of the church, being open about our struggles with homosexuality and our longings for love, can seem to make loneliness worse, not better.

A heterosexual friend of mine, unaware of my sexual orientation, told me once about his friendship with a twentysomething Christian who was coming out of an "active" gay lifestyle.  "I'm trying to minister to this guy, to help him make this transition in his life, and he shows up to our one-on-one breakfast meeting one day with a bouquet of flowers for me, " my friend said, incredulous and embarrassed.  I winced inwardly at his story.  How many times have I made my heterosexual friends--the ones who know about my being gay and want to encourage me--uncomfortable in similar ways?  Asking questions like this, I recoil from intimate relationships, fearing the discomfort and uneasiness of the ones who, as I know in my saner moments, most want to encourage me.  [or do they?  So I struggle with even believing that they want to.  hm.]

As I recounted in an earlier chapter, I still vividly remember the first time I talked with a vocational counselor about my homosexuality.  I had just graduated from college a couple of months earlier and was entering a two-year ministerial apprenticeship program at a church in Minneapolis.  The counselor told me pointedly, "I would hate for you to get to the end of your two years with your fellow apprentices and feel like you haven't gone deep with any of them."  Then, in a question that has haunted me ever since, he asked, "Do you find yourself holding other males at arm's length for fear that if you come to know them deeply and intimately, it will somehow be inappropriate or dangerous or uncomfortable?"  Though I had never thought about it before, I found myself answering yes.  My very longing for loving, affectionate, yet nonsexual, relationships with persons of the same sex had paradoxically led me to shrink back from those relationships.
(pg. 113-114)

How this passage reminds me of my friendship with Chris is remarkable.  And yet it still applies so readily today. That question... "Do you find yourself holding other males at arm's length for fear that if you come to know them deeply and intimately, it will somehow be inappropriate or dangerous or uncomfortable?"
Sometimes it doesn't feel true.
Other times I am shocked at how the author could somehow peer into my soul and pull out what had always been ineffable.

Elsewhere,

All the people I love, I trust, I want to be around, all of them answer, with varying volume, "yes" to the following basic question:  "Will you be there for me?"  I've come to believe it's the question that houses all my other questions, fears, and longings.
Jeremy Clive Huggins
(pg. 98)
. . .

Over and over again, I come to friends and ask in a thousand direct and indirect ways, "Do you really love me?  Are you really committed to me?  Do you really like me?  Do you desire a relationship with me?"  I asked a close friend once if he would still love me after he gets married.  "Will I still be able to call you in the middle of the night to talk and pray?"  I wanted to know.
(pg. 117)

Insecurity.  When I initially read this book, at some points I'd think that the author sounded so incredibly needy, as he reached out for people in ways that I would never think to encroach upon them.
Cultural differences, perhaps.  Or maybe this level of desiring community, of desiring intimacy, will only grow stronger and more insatiable as I get older.  I may not even know the half of it yet.
Rereading the above passages, however, I can understand that drive to need to know.  I must know if you are committed to me.

I know I can't always bank on another fallible person's commitment, but still.