Time Well Spent and Wasted

As I"m in a crunch period this week with a deadline and church committee meeting and foot-washing choreography all falling within one week---not to mention the usual 40-hour/week job---I find myself short-changing this blog, my lenten discipline. I'm also finding that I have really little to say about being gay and Lutheran other than what I've already said, sometimes more than once.

But as I feel all these other pressures on me these days and wondering what to write about here . . . I'm coming to the conclusion that there really are more important things than talking and talking and talking again about being gay in the church. All the time, energy, and resources we put into studying and discussing . . . is this really time well-spent?

Okay, so some think that the fact that I respond emotionally and physically to people of my sex is inherently sinful. I used to think that, too. Spent a few hours wailing and praying. A few hours? It was a few years, but I can't claim I spent all that time wailing. Some of it was spent just numb. But a lot of praying.

I suppose here is the irony, and one that I wish I could, as I said a couple of posts ago, download into a flash drive: it was all those years praying and listening for God that finally gave me rest about my sexuality. Maybe "rest" is too strong a word for it, but some measure of peace. I'm not going to recount it all now, and early on somewhere, I linked a Whosoever piece I wrote over 10 years ago that outlines that experience. What I mean to say is that after years of struggle and even some years of no struggle, but numbness, God intervened and said, basically, you have bigger things to worry about.

I honestly do believe the church has bigger things to worry about, too. We do some good things on the hunger front, but there are still hungry people. We do some good things on the caregiving front, but there are still people in need of care. We do some good things on the education, evangelism, and worship fronts---and we do a lot of dissemination of lies and half-truths about any number of things, not only in regard to homosexuality.

Is all this talk and talk and talk time well spent? Maybe. If it draws us close enough to God to hear that we have more important things to deal with. (I'd like to keep open the possibility that God does think all this wrangling over sexuality is worthwhile, but I just don't believe God does. But if we draw close enough to hear God, maybe we can know for sure on that, too. )

In an illustration from a 4th or 5th century preacher (I'll try to look up the name---I have it here somewhere, but I post it in a reply another time), we are told to think of God as in the center of a circle and we're all on the edge of the circle. As we move closer to God, we cannot help but move closer to each other, as the circle gets smaller and smaller.

I don't even know what that might mean for the decisions to be made this summer at Churchwide Assembly. I just believe it to be true. I'm clinging to the hope that all this talk and talk and talk might actually draw at least some of us closer to God and we'll all end up closer to each other.