Filtered Love.

Filtered Love.

What am I to you
A thing of disgust
An object to avoid
To you, am I just wanton lust?

What do you see when
I embrace my beloved
Is it vile in your eyes
Are they blinkered
or covered

Did God turn you this way
A bigot to the label you gave me of gay?
Did he infuse your intolerance
Did he get you all fired up
Or is it the monochrome image
Of your unique rebirth
That matters so much?

I am as you are
A son of a father
I have a mother
I embrace my Lord
As do you
You are my sister
I am your brother

Did he really condemn my passion,
My peace
Did he filter your love in a way to restrict its release?

The greatest commandment or so it is said
Is to love one another
Perhaps you misread?

Open your eyes,
I am no different to you
My passion for God is both
Faithful and true
but where you reject me
I will embrace
Where you turn your back
I will offer my place

For our God does not falter
Nor is he swayed
For both me and for you
It was his Son that paid

copyright Wayne Dwyer

A Dad’s View ...

It’s the summer of 2014, I’ve been retired from being a country vicar for 9 months, and I’m struggling to come to terms with my new circumstances.  I’d heard the Lord say:  ‘I’ve trained you as an architect, worship leader, Sunday school teacher, church warden, lay reader, curate and vicar for what’s coming next.  This is not the end.’

It just felt like it.

The end of July arrived and my wife and I set off for our annual New Wine ‘experience’ hoping to seek an answer to the question ‘what next?’… and we got one!   Not the whole story, of course, He doesn’t work that way, but the next phase.  Sitting at the feet of Karl Martin as he taught from the gospel of John we felt called to respond to a bit of training the Lord has been putting us through since 2001.  In that year our son told his mum he was pretty sure he was gay.

When teenagers pluck up the courage to confess to anything it’s important as parents to supress our immediate ‘knee jerk’ reactions in favour of a casual:  ‘Oh yes? ’ When what one is feeling is quite other.  The initial reaction was one of shock, that ‘can’t think straight’ numbness of brain coupled with a draining of blood to the feet and a sense that someone has stuffed a lump of lead in your stomach.  Your rational side is saying:  ‘Keep cool, keep smiling’ because you want to talk about this calmly.  But that’s not how teenagers work.  They just drop bombshells and think:  ‘job done’.  They’re certainly not interested in how you are feeling.

So I was left all at sea to come to terms with the situation.  It felt almost like a bereavement – feelings of pain and loss, questions as to whether it was my fault, was it something I’d done to him, all wrapped up in a blanket of not understanding.  It’s not something a parent prepares themselves for.  So I shut it all away, and so did he.  He’s never talked to me about it.  For a dad, that hurts.

I love my son to bits and so does God and that will never change.  The trouble has been that’s not what he’s been hearing from most of the church.  And, frankly, the attitudes of the Christian Church to a sexuality other than heterosexuality haven’t helped me much either … fingers pointing at the printed black and white words of scripture and drawing a black and white conclusions. Which is odd when you think that the original symbol of God’s love for his creation is a rainbow – all inclusive colours in an over-arching all inclusive shape.

Over the years I’ve come to recognise the multi-coloured multi-faceted one true God rather than the man-made black and white one.  His creation is full of diversity so it shouldn’t be a surprise when we find the same in his creation of our sexuality.  We’re all somewhere on the sexual spectrum and very few are 100% one way or the other.

So anyway, to get to the point, my wife and I came away from New Wine with a strong call to reach out to parents who find themselves in the same situation as we did and to journey with them, and also to offer Jesus’ love to those who have felt rejected by God because of what the Church has said, or appeared to have said.  We had two opportunities to share this with people during that week and both times confirmed the call.  In fact the person we shared with gave our ministry its name – Joelministries, from the Old Testament prophet who proclaimed that God wanted to restore the ‘lost years’.  Later we realised it was also an acronym for Jesus Offers Everyone Love.  We’ve also adopted the slogan ‘God loves YOU to bits’ because he does, whether you feel he does or want him to or not.  We’ve got a facebook page and now a blog but don’t really know what to do so we’re relying entirely on the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  We have no idea how to create a website but I’m sure God will sort that out.  In the meantime I’ve got a pile of books on the subject of Christianity and sexuality unread on the study floor.  If I can be disciplined enough I’ll post insights, questions, conundrums and quotes on the blog as I go along.

Please pray for us!

A Mum’s View...

It’s 13 years since my son took the brave step of coming out to me.  It came as a total surprise and I’m ashamed to say my views at that time were very black and white.  I saw homosexuality as wrong, but thought ‘it’ could be healed.

After the initial shock I suppose I fell into a kind of grief.   Very selfishly grieving for the grandchildren I wouldn’t have and I suppose fear of what others would think.  I felt nauseous in my grief and had to force myself to eat, wishing I could just hide away while I coped with the situation.  I also had to deal with the guilt, thinking I’d caused this to happen somehow.  Had I been a dominant mother?  I then moved onto fears for my son, entering into a world I knew nothing about and was therefore unable to advise or protect him. 

 

One thing I do know is that right from the start it made me love him even more. 

My son broke it to me gently by telling me he thought he might be gay, but in my heart I knew he’d made up his mind.  As we’re a Christian family, I did ask him if he’d prayed about it and he said when he did he was given a sense of peace.  This more than anything else sustained me.   

I now accept my son is gay, he was born this way and he’s made in the image of God the same as everyone else.

It has however been a long journey.  I told a very few trusted friends early on and couldn’t even speak about it for some time without crying.  During this time my husband had been training to become a Vicar and as we moved for his first post as a Curate we didn’t feel we should broadcast this intimate information about our family.  We said it was to protect our son’s privacy, but I suspect the truth was fear of the reaction we may receive from parishioners.  The same applied when we moved on when my husband was appointed Vicar of some rural parishes.  However the more time we spent there the more we shared.  It is only since my husband retired that we have both felt comfortable talking about it.  It’s as we look back on our parish ministry we realise we also found ourselves ministering to men and women of the LGBT community within our rural churches. 

Presumably this was all part of our training and preparation for hearing the Lord call us to start Joel Ministries while at New Wine last summer.  My husband heard the call first to share Jesus’ love with the gay community and I readily supported him in this.  As our week at New Wine continued we then met two mums with gay children and realised we were perhaps also to offer a listening ear to those coming to terms with a loved one coming out.  It was one of these mums who suggested the name Joel (restoring the years the locusts have stolen*).  We then saw the acronym:

 

Jesus Offers Everyone Love

 and knew it was right.

I love both my children very dearly.  I am proud of all they have already achieved in their lives.  I accept them both just as they are, after all God created them in His image.

 

*Joel 2:25  'The Lord says, "I will give you back what you lost..." '