The road to love

Whether it is teaching that the Bible is a scrapbook or that water expresses emotions, professors and speakers at Point Loma make an effort to help us question things, inviting us to know things for ourselves, rather than regurgitate a worldview that isn’t necessarily our own.

In the spring semester of my second year at Point Loma, I experienced grueling challenges in my faith. I remember my prior beliefs—cultivated by my small private fundamentalist Christian high school in Boring, Oregon (yes, Boring is the name of the town)—constantly being called into question as I was challenged in discussions, both in the classroom and by a friend. But the real icing on the cake was when the ASB Director of Spiritual life came out.

By the end of the semester, my beliefs had been sufficiently and effectively called into question. Unfortunately, that’s where it left me: faithless, godless, and broken. Challenges arose from all directions, but there was no hospitable environment for me to wrestle with beliefs.

Being gay on Point Loma’s campus made this process exceptionally difficult. How am I to reconcile my faith when a key contributor to my belief system is the “hush-hush” topic on the campus? It’s like Point Loma seems to think everyone else is living in less sin than I am, making my sexuality a fault. When I was eight-years-old, it wasn’t a fault that I liked the shirtless men in the movies instead of busty women. When I was twelve-years-old, it wasn’t a fault that while holding Hayley’s hand, I secretly wanted to kiss Jake instead.

When something—a truth—is discovered to be applicable to one’s life beyond a superficial level, people grow as individuals. Those experiences allow the questions of our hearts—wrought out of who we are—to be directly addressed. Without them, these central questions of our lives remain ignored. And as Christians, we are called to be without ignorance.

Point Loma is neglecting to foster a community where our experiences can be shared fully and without censorship. I fear we have preached so much that Jesus is the Way but have disregarded that there are many roads.

What is making that unbelieving student want to learn about our faith? Or that struggling gay Christian to say, “I still want in on this thing you call Christianity”? Where can our experiences be heard without the questionable smirk on her face or the reprimanding glare in his eyes?

Fostering the areas in which we already believe ignores the importance of investigating the areas in which we doubt. Too often Point Loma leaves its students where it left me, broken and aimlessly wandering a road; hoping that in the end, we find something that brings us back to the faith, back to the church, back to God. Until then, we walk.

Gift of Life

She and I had just enough room to sit and talk. We were in the nook of the stairway of the coffee shop, the spot where the stairs go up mid-level and then switchback-like the trails I hiked back home in Oregon during the summer. A few days ago, she emailed me about some research and needed some friends' influence for her social work, and ironically, sharing my story excites the once fearful child inside me. She pressed the record button on her iPhone, and our conversation rolled.

“When did you first know?"

“Why did you decide to come out?”

“What has changed since then?”

These were fundamental questions which, to my surprise, rarely come my direction, causing the answers I spouted out to be insufficient. Consequently, our conversation neared an end, but she made one last request, “So tell me about the most recent date you’ve been on…” the interest and eagerness in her voice booming.

“Well, I haven’t really been on a date,” I responded, “… but here’s the closest thing I’ve had…” She stops the recording, and I began describing my day with that I-definitely-wouldn’t-hate-bringing-you-home-to-momma-Lewis-but-let’s-be-real-I-have-no-idea-what’s-going-on friend, who strikes my fancy just a little too much.

“Do you like him?” she playfully interrupts.

Pausing, “I think so…” I said reluctantly, fearful of the truth I was admitting to her yet more importantly myself.

She peered into the chapters of my life – both past and present – that passed like a freight train blowing through a railroad crossing, leaving one oblivious as to what was just seen. The barriers go up, and we cross the tracks to continue down the road.

Her questions brought me back to that train, where I noticed that the blur of a passing train was composed of countless carts with different colors and signs of graffiti, along with that one with the transient sleeping in that open door.

Moreover, the most important change since coming out became evident moments after our conversation: the newfound affirmation that never existed in my life. My life is my life. What shame do I have for my life and all the authentic beauty that accompanies it?

Up until a few months ago, I rummaged around for someone that I believed could bear the weight of my story, and to muffle my actual story, I filled conversations with heavy words dancing around spirituality – never giving my old friendships justice. I turned our moments together into a test of having them prove themselves worthy in my eyes. We deem individuals unworthy by holding onto presuppositions based upon the few who treated us poorly.

Girls, not all guys are the same.

Gays, not all Christians are the same.

Friends, not all people are the same.

Truthfully, most people aren’t like those few who made us think otherwise. While the words and actions of the few are crippling, the general community understands your uniqueness with some of the best gifts to offer, questions and listening ears.

Our lives, whole lives, are like that brook – as the Creator inspired from the beginning – in enriching relationship with the creation, with the Creator, and with one another. If we continue to withhold the areas of our lives where God's grace is necessary, how can we be a testament to God's grace? The words of our lives are those waters that which sink deep into the soil and give life and beauty to the forest around us. Friends, each life is a gift of life to the other. Share It.

Illusions: Let's Be Real

The summer following my senior year of high school, my youth pastor invited me to be a counselor at a Bible camp located along a beach in Washington. My good friend (who had done it the year before) and I would be sharing a cabin of eight rowdy six to eight-year-old boys. This would be my first experience entertaining so many children that I didn’t know.

There was one boy I remember in particular, standing in the check-in line with his orange long-sleeve tee, camo pants, and crocs, rotating from swinging on his mother’s arm to bouncing in place. Jarred was a handful to say in the least.

The first evening at camp, the counselors take all the kids to play at the beach as the sun sets. My co-counselor took the batch of seven to the beach, while I lagged behind looking for Jarred. I arrive to the cabin to find Jarred sitting on a bunk, looking through the Pokémon book that he brought.

“Come on Jarred, let’s go to the beach,” I request, holding the door open with one hand and signaling with the other.

“I don’t want to go to the beach,” he whines, flipping over another page.

“Jarred, we have to meet everyone else at the beach.” I urge, naïve as to how to really handle the situation.

“I don’t want to go to the beach. Every time I go to the beach, my dad yells at me,” he moans, lowering his head and almost shoveling out a tear.

Dumbfounded, I could only walk up to him, give him a side hug, and reaffirm, “Jarred, we’re not going to yell at you. We just want to play.”

My first two years at Point Loma were much like Jarred’s experience at camp. So many people told me that they loved me, that they cared for me, but those statements weren’t enough. There was a single obstacle I still had to overcome, myself, always looking back on those words my friend said back in high school:

“I don't like the way you live and don’t feel like associating with you. I was just blind to the way you are I guess. Sorry man.”

As humans, we have a way of nurturing our imaginations, fostering them until they become deceptively real to us. We start perceiving reality through the lens of these paralyzing illusions,

acting cautiously,

speaking quietly,

and responding defensively.

Eventually, life becomes a game of control, where we are trying best to avoid pain and lead a safe life. We try to live in this reality that isn’t true, where our biggest fault is giving these fantasies the characterization of truth, as though they were indeed real.

These fantasies provide us with the illusion that we know what will happen. We feel we can control each outcome, and we begin ignorantly, yet unintentionally, shifting ourselves to the place of God and becoming God. Sadly, the God of reality does not live in these illusions, because God does not live in anything that is not real. God lives and works in reality, cultivating that which is.

As our own god of these imaginations, we leave only ourselves to deal with them. Once these fantasies collide with reality, where God exists, what we thought would happen actually doesn’t. Consequently, we try to take the reigns once more, moving ourselves back to the position of God.

At some point, the pressing pains of loneliness and the fantasy-given crying desires for truth become too much to bear:

That he wants to kill himself,

That she sees no way from that emotionally and physically abusive relationship,

And that no one can sympathize with a gay friend.

Until these imaginations become understood for what they are and these emotions are encountered, they will continue to torment us, hiding God’s presence from us.

My two-year-old idea of Point Loma – that honesty brought more heartache and that the quiet life is the better life – came crashing down when these emotions like thorns could no longer be suppressed. I reconstructed my Point Loma and discovered the presence of God that I prohibited from flourishing before. The friends, teammates, and professors, that I believed would turn away, welcomed me back in and came alongside me and said, “I still love you.” Everything that I though was real was proven otherwise. This place is not what I thought it was. It was what I thought it couldn’t be.

Without these people, God’s people, we can’t see the godlessness of living in illusions or that God only exists in reality. Without realizing the illusions of imaginations, these fantasies become the focal point and create a false reality. But once that realization arrives, the time comes to move beyond imagination into reality, advancing from the absence of God to the presence of God.