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!
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