Who on earth could I possibly send this to? I mean, seriously! Or—good Lord!—this?
(And if it's you, let me know cuz I am dying for an excuse to buy them.)
So I recently saw a commercial for a GPS device for your car with a map and soothing female voice feeding you directions as you drive. And I thought, Wow, that's pretty cool. You don't ever have to be lost; you can see everything around you. I wonder how long it will be before technology I marvel at becomes ordinary. I thought about cell phones and how they have become ubiquitous and universal. If someone is not reachable anywhere anytime, it is seen as a great inconvenience. Sometimes I think about what it must have been like before, when people had plans to meet, but couldn't let each other know when they were late or lost or not coming. We are evolving as a species by virtue of technology, becoming omniocular and omniaural. Is our children's generation going to look back on our parents' generation as walking the earth blind and deaf?
Ron put me onto this site on Sunday. People create and send in postcards with their secrets on them. Reading them, I couldn't help wanting to be a part of it, wanting to send in my own secret. So I thought about my most glaringly heinous mistakes, the things I wouldn't ever want to come out in a job interview or a political race, but I can't use any of them. One of the rules is that the secret has to be previously unshared with anyone. For every one of my scandals, I've told at least one person, for shock value if nothing else. I kept thinking and eventually I found it—that place where you bury things so deep, you don't care if you can ever recover them. On the verge of forgetting. My secret was almost gone—lost over the edge of the abyss—but I snagged it before it slid into oblivion. Just so I could make a postcard. But it's a really good secret.
What's your secret?
I have learned that you can decide how you are going to love people, but you have absolutely no control over how people are going to love you. And thinking you have uncovered the most excellent way makes it that much more frustrating when those around you don't follow it.
I promise never to become set in my ways.
Unless they're good ways.
Love is not trying to change people.
Love is affording them the freedom to change.
What does it mean to love?
The best I can come up with is that love is equal parts grace and truth. I heard a speaker once say that truth without grace is legalism, and grace without truth is license. If our love is going to do anybody any good, we have to strike a balance between the two.
Love is not rejection. That sounds like a stupid thing to say, but it is something I have been discovering little by little as of late. Not that I previously thought love was rejection. What has dawned on me recently is that if something can get in the way of love, then that love is flawed. And can it even be called love after that? Our love for others should be tenacious, especially if it is modeled after God's own love for us. Paul said, "I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39). And I am convinced that our love should take after His.
Sin makes it hard to love people sometimes. We live in a fallen creation; sin is everywhere. Humanity lies rotting all around us. We know we are supposed to avoid sin, to repent of it, to rebuke it. But what happens when the object of our rebuke and the object of our love take up residence in the same soul? Once I thought to myself that God was a master at taking the bad with the good. Then I realized it was the opposite: God is a master at separating out the bad, even to the subatomic level, and dying for it.
But the redemption of creation is a process not yet complete. And so we find ourselves in lives that will never be completely perfect, with people who will never be completely perfect. Perfection, or holiness, is the goal, but our Christian lives trace a parabolic curve. We could go on for infinity, coming ever closer, and never touch that line. Knowing this, shouldn't our aim be to get, and help others to get, as close as we can? I am less concerned that my loved ones live sinless lives as I am that they meet Jesus before they die.
Homosexuality does not send people to hell. Overindulgence in alcohol does not send people to hell. Murder does not even send people to hell. The only sin by which people relegate themselves to eternal damnation is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12:31), in other words, rejection of Jesus Christ as Savior. Everyone begins spiritual life in a state of rejection against God. We have to choose, each of us as individuals, to cross over into a relationship with Him. What precipitates this choice? People catch a glimpse of something attractive about God. His love. The Holy Spirit is a free agent, without need of help from believers, but He allows us to share in the process by being conduits of that love.
For a conduit to work it has to be open on both ends. We miss the extraordinary opportunity to see God work through us when we let our actions be dictated by the faults of others. Jesus loved the sinners, and rebuked the ones who thought they were doing everything right.
My interpretation of the Bible describes homosexuality as contrary to God's intention for human relationships. As, to be blunt, sin. I believe the Bible to be true in its entirety. Therefore, I cannot condone the practice of homosexuality and still maintain integrity in what I believe.
But many people, including homosexuals, don't share this interpretation of Scripture. Some even believe God made them that way.
I don't know what causes homosexuality. I don't know if God wove it into certain people's makeup, or if it is a repercussion of the fall of mankind. Since I don't know, I feel I need to err on the side of caution, to take a conservative stance, to align myself with what I believe God says rather than what I know the world says. I have to proceed on the premise that homosexuality is sin.
But sin is sin. The Bible teaches that no sin is any worse or better than another.
True. But there is a difference between incidental and habitual sin. Between the sins committed unintentionally, confessed immediately, and those that pervade our thoughts and actions and become lifestyle. The difference is willfulness.
Even so, no sin—incidental or habitual—is outside God's redemptive power. The tide of Jesus' blood does not stop short of willful disobedience. And He is the only One who can effect change within a person. Not the church.
Ah, the church. Failing to minister to homosexuals everyday. The church's message seems to be, "You are welcome within our walls. But you are not welcome to remain homosexual." With that caveat, how can the first statement be true? If we as a church don't welcome people as Jesus did—just as they are—then what are we saying about Christ? That you have to get your life straight before He will accept you? If He is the only One who can effect change, then that implied message is completely backward. You can't get your life straight until He's in it. So first things first. If the church believes homosexuality is sin, and that Jesus is the only cure for sin, then the church should be in the business of introducing homosexuals to Jesus, not standing in the way of that meeting. As it is now, the greatest barrier to homosexuals coming to know God is not their homosexuality, but judgmentalism on the part of the church.
What if the church were to take this kind of stance on other lifestyle sins like gossip, or gluttony, or pride? Churches would split over whether to allow someone who was overweight to take a position of leadership. If homosexuality is a sin, it is a sin like every other sin in every other person's life.
God responded to sin with mercy; He came to earth Himself to accept the punishment every person deserves. And He is still in the business of setting people free from sin. We as the church think this responsibility falls on our shoulders, but it doesn't. Jesus says in John 13:35, "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" not "...if you take a hard line on homosexuality."
And what if homosexuality is not a sin?
In either case, love is the only correct response.