Many years ago I had a friend, I always call him "Ryan" though Ryan is not his name.  When I met him we were both closeted gay men.   We were both in the closet for very different reasons.  I was in the closet because I wasn't ready to simply throw myself at something, just because some feeling I had.  I'd had lots of feelings and they'd often been wrong.   My plan had always been to carefully study the matter of human sexuality and find the proof I was simply born gay.   I never found any proof that people are born gay.  In fact people are not born gay, and what's more people aren't even born straight.   Some of us, due to temperament, may find homosexuality more easily than others.   Still biology cannot account for sexual preference in human beings.  It's not a matter of ideology or scientific approach.   It is a simple matter of  capacity.    Will a 16oz glass hold the liquid content of a five gallon bucket filled to the brim with water?   It's a no brainer 16oz. doesn't have the same capacity as a five gallon bucket.   Biology cannot account for all the matters, issues, social and family environment, and experiences which become forces which work together to form and channel what biology has given us.

Anyway, Ryan had very different reasons for being in the closet.  His family was large and Catholic.  Ryan was the youngest and the oldest was about 15 when he was born.   Ryan's parents were older than most parents, and I used to think he simply didn't want to burden or shame his parents.    I would learn from his sister, many years after Ryan was dead from AIDS, that he'd been molested by his brother, who was the oldest in the family.  Evidently Ryan's mother had walked in on he and his oldest brother "messing around".  She walked out, and as she did she said, "Boys will be boys."  I remember Ryan saying, "boys will be boys," but it never made any sense to me.   Ryan's mother saw her young son being molested, but left him to his abuser.     I think Ryan stayed in the closet because he didn't want to deal with any kind of response from his parents.   Deep down Ryan knew he'd been abandoned to his abuser.  Ryan didn't want to learn that his parents absolutely didn't care anything about him.  He wasn't protecting his parents, he was protecting himself.

People who are deeply and profoundly sexually broken have been badly wounded by the relationships which should have been life giving.   For very wounded people sex is actually safer than trying to connect deeply with other people.   What Ryan needed was for someone to reach into his life and lead him out of the dark hole he was thrown into by the people who should have loved him, but abandoned him instead.

True relationship with God, through Jesus Christ, is the safest possible relationship.  The problem is it really takes someone who knows the truth about relationship with God to reach into the darkness Ryan had been plunged into.   It takes a constant and consistent faith that God can and will overcome the damage, and show people like Ryan that God gives worth to people who've been robbed of their humanity because they've been used as a mere object.    When was the last time a thing reached out to you for help?   Things can't reach out, they are things.   Is it little wonder that gay people, hooker people, porn addicted people don't reach out for help?   A thing is a thing and people who've been made objects don't know to aspire to anything higher.  Cursing their darkness, and their objectified sense of self, hasn't worked when the Church has done it.

It's too late for Ryan, but there are lot's of Ryans and Lonnies who need a real life Christ follower to show the way to personhood and the freedom of true relationship with Christ and his children.   If you are a believer perhaps you will consider the plight of sexually broken people, and maybe you'll think of a new way to confront sexual brokenness.   What do you think?   Can Christians change the way they view sinners and find a better way to bring the world overcoming savior to the growing group of human objects who have settled for their "thingness?"

In the Bible Lot, we are told, is Abraham's nephew.   Abraham and Lot are both shepherds .  God so prospers both Abraham's and Lot's flocks that the two men split up and move their families and flocks in different directions.  Abraham stays on the open plain, and Lot moves to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Holy Spirit, speaking through St. Peter says:

"and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)." 2 Peter 2:7-9

The whole story of Lot is found beginning in Genesis 13 and ends in Genesis 19.   Lot has always been held up as a righteous man, and I certainly believe the Holy Spirit when he calls Lot a righteous man.   Righteous or not the man lost everything he had when God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.   The great irony is that though Lot is righteous, everyone  in his life has been utterly corrupted by the sin sick culture of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Lot is a righteous man, but in the end his wife is swept away by the very force which destroys Sodom and Gomorrah.   Lot's wife takes only a moment to look back and is destroyed.   Lot is left with his two daughters, and little else.   Being a righteous man means that Lot and his two daughters live happily ever after, right??   No, Lot's two daughters, on different nights, get their grief stricken father drunk and rape him.  Each young woman has a child.  One child is named Moab, and from him came the Moabites.  The other child born to Lot and one of his daughters is named Ben-Ammi, and is the father of the Ammonites.

When Joshua leads the Israelites into the land God promised  Israel, the Moabites and Ammonites are two of Israel's enemies which cause horrific problems for centuries.   How could such evil come from a man as righteous as Lot??

Lot stood for righteousness, but standing for righteousness and/or standing against evil doesn't defeat evil.   Jesus tells us, "In this world you will have trouble.   But take heart!  I have overcome the world."   John 16:33.    The problem for Lot is he didn't have Jesus to overcome the world.  All Lot could do was try to stand, and he did stand.  But standing against evil didn't change Lot's lot in life.   Remember Jesus taught that if  what he preached to Israel had been preached in Sodom and Gomorrah the two cities would not only have been saved from destruction in Abraham and Lot's day, but the cities would remain even to Jesus' own day.

What the world needs is a Church with a savior that overcomes the world.   If Jesus doesn't overcome the world in and through the Church, then the world will overcome the Church.   The sad and horrible thing about the culture overcoming the righteous is that if the world overcomes the righteous, then the evil will arise out of our own houses to consume us.   If all  Christians can muster is a stand against sin then the same terrible lot left to Lot will also be our lot as well.

No more politics.  No more laws made by mere men, like DOMA (Defense Of Marriage Act), which cannot change hearts, and cannot overcome the sin.   Let us repent of stooping to use "flesh" weapons!   The world's weapons are special interest activism, the creation of endless laws, marching and unrest in the streets.   Feminist activists, LGBT activists and pro-abortion activists  use flesh weapons.  Let the Church turn from empty activism which cannot change hearts or set people free from enslavement to sin!   Let us cry out to God and plead for grace and truth!  Let us cry out to God for true Holy Spirit revival,  and let us plead for God to revive the Church first and foremost.   Either Christ will overcome the world in and through us, or the world will overcome us, by infecting our own households with it's terrible and great evil.

Been hanging out at church.

i'm STRUGGLING!

I'm not doing too well.  That is really a relative admission.  I can be going along very well, and then I have a day or even a week that goes bad.  I'm so flippin tired, and when I'm tired  my attitude always goes wrong.   Even as I say that I've got some good things going on.

Wolf Bit:  My friend Shawn has been having a terrible time with a wolf who'd been in leadership, at the church he pastors.   The things this guy did and said were truly awful.   Just when I don't think anything evil people do in the name of God can shock me, and BAM someone kicks the evil up a notch.  Honestly this is one of the things I'm most down about.   Why does God throw us to wolves?  I know that isn't precisely true.  All God does is good, but you have to be insane to be in ministry.   I don't have any delusions that all who claim to be believers actually love God or  want to serve his purposes, ends, and ways.  I have to admit I've been pushing away from God's call, and he has been pushing back at me.  I'm tempted to say that God is pushing back way to hard, but I am a bear when I start kicking against God.  When I kick I aim to harm.   Now what was I saying about wolves and evil.  When I kick at God I am probably the match for any wolf.   I'm no more loving of God than Shawn's wolf was loving of him.

I'm looking for a way out.  I don't care about power, I don't want to lead, I don't want to tell the  Church to "get on the hook."   I worked on the book today, but the more work I put in the more I see the rightness and necessity of God's call and the message.   I've been calling the both the call and the message, "THE VALUE ADDED TOUR."   Sounds like the name of a rock band's tour, but there''s no band and there won't be a cheering crowd.   But giving value is what Jesus came to do.  Jesus came to restore the broken relationship between humans and God.   God literally takes our brokenness and worthlessness and drops it on Jesus hanging on a cross.   And God takes the worth, perfection, beauty, and love of Christ and offers it to us.   What God offers should be enough for believers, but we've lost sight and settled for so much less.   So many of us, especially American believers, have sold ourselves the delusion that we live in, or have the right to demand that America is a Christian nation.  I know we never meant to do it, but our religious version of the "American dream," is just as idolatrous as the American heathen's version of the American dream.   I know that reads like an attack but it isn't.  What we need is a Holy Spirit revival in the Church.    I'm not the Holy Spirit so I'd rather not be thrown to the wolves.

In the past I've been able to hold God and his call off, but the more I write this book the more I realize how real and important the call and the message are.   Before the book I could simply chalk up the thoughts as just something going on in my own mind, but when I  see the words written on the page I am suddenly terrified.  The message is so clear, and so powerful.   I know with absolute certainty:  I am dog food; wolf fodder; the mouse  wearing the vest made of Little Friskies.   That doesn't have anything to do with God, his call, or the message.  There have always been wolves, Jesus promised they'd come.  But Jesus only mentions wolves once, but he talks about the kingdom, the good news, salvation, life, hope, peace and eternal relationship with God.   "This then is eternal life: to know the one true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent."   (John 16:3).    My butt may be made of doggie biscuits, but the message and call lead to greater and deeper relationships with God.  Even in my deepest fears and doubts I know that God cannot fail to overcome the world.  I'd much prefer a call to hookers and homos, but my call is to the most terrible pack of wolves in the world: religious wolves.   I just hope I don't loose too much of my keister.