I wanted to share with you all a brief journal entry from this past Spring.  My heart was heavy and I wrote some things down that I have carried with me for years.  I thought I would share with you all…in the hope that if any of you have experienced familiar things you would know that you’re not alone:

 I have to trust that as every year recycles, spring brings new life to us.  This spring, however, has been a puzzling one.  Within its early presence, loss of life has come to pass.  The idea of losing those dear to me and those around me is contrary to what has characteristically been a time of new growth and regeneration.  For me, winter is my usual time for reflection and writing but unexpectedly, I have been consumed with introspection.  As my Mom would say, “a quiet hush” has come over me.

For the families that lost loved ones these past few weeks, their loss is insurmountable.  For the rest of us, we die a little each day.  We lose little pieces of ourselves.  Sometimes, we give those pieces up.  Sometimes, they are taken from us.  As for now, my attention has been focused on those who are living. I try to grasp the perspective and the mindset of the ones who take.

I don’t typically step into the arena of politics.  I am amused by most people who fervently “discuss” their belief systems.  It has been my determination that the “far right” and the “far left” could in fact be the very same people.  Sometimes, I think that they have gone so extreme that they have gone full circle and bumped into each other, standing side by side with their fists in the air.

In my experience, people who vehemently profess “open-mindedness” are usually the most close-minded.  My eyes were widely opened to the “left” during a trip to NYC.  I was in a room full of liberal, lesbian, feminists…surely THEY would be open-minded…or at least appreciate diversity enough to allow for multiple belief systems and opinions.  This however was not the case.  I was told to “step out of my little Oklahoma box and look around to see the real world”.  Now, I got quiet in this situation because I quickly resolved the fact that despite their preaching of open arms and individuality, I was not safe to share my thoughts or opinions.  I also resolved that this person who quickly shut me down, did not deserve to know the “whys” of what brought me to my place of thinking.  Nor did she deserve to know me.  More importantly, I don’t deserve to be mistreated based on who I am.  Unbeknownst to this girl, I had stepped out of my “little Oklahoma box”.  At the time, I had lived out of the country longer than I had lived in the country.  I had served communities of the diseased and downtrodden.  I fed the hungry, clothed the poor, treated the sick, built shelters for the homeless, comforted the orphaned, consoled the lonely and befriended the elderly.  I’ve seen humanity at its worst.  I saw with my own eyes what politics can do and for that matter, what it can’t do. 

As far as the extreme right goes, my experience had been unsurprisingly the same.  Instant judgment without knowing me or where I’ve come from.  Love is what most of the extreme right, conservative preach.  Love.  I learned my lesson in love years ago.  I was seventeen. I had dated boys…but I had developed close relationships with girls and at 17 was involved in my first same sex relationship.  After being castigated and sent through my first gay to straight program, the lesson I learned was that something was wrong with me and I was incapable of love.  By the standards of the modern church, “Homosexuals can’t have loving relationships”.  I am gay = I can’t have a loving relationship. Because I am incapable of loving, I can’t be loved.  I have had preachers call me an animal, tell me that I’m going to hell, tell me that my life will lead to nothing if it hasn’t already.  To them, there is no such thing as a Christian who is also Gay.  I have spent MANY years studying and deliberating the Bible and my life and where I’m at in my relationship with God.  “Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).  What has been my discovery?  History holds the key and sometimes the answer to so many of humanity’s questions.  I have studied and I have my answer.  Does this mean that I have stopped seeking?  No.  I continue to press on and draw from the Solomons of our day, scholars, my God and my Savior.  Quite honestly, my struggle has never been with God.  He seemed to be the only one to constantly surround me.  My struggle has always been with other people…the church.  After going through 3 different gay to straight programs, being humiliated in front of my peers and asked to quit my “calling” of helping others I have come to learn that there has been a chasm created to separate God’s children.  God didn’t create it.  His children did.  God never intended this for us.  Love is love is love is love.   

I’m not saying that ALL liberals nor ALL Christians are this way but the people I described here are what I call the “takers”.  They have taken little pieces of me.  They take pieces of others.  They steal our humanity, our joy and our life experiences. I don’t have the capacity to understand why they do what they do.  I don’t understand how they have lost sight of compassion.

I am learning. I am learning to speak up for myself.  I am learning to speak out for myself.  I am learning to speak up for others.  I am learning to speak out for others.  I am learning.

Thanks for reading and allowing me to share some of my deeper self.  I so much appreciate all of you and your strength and bravery for living out loud. 

This is a younger version of myself from 1993. I had traveled to Belarus and spent a few months with children who had been left ill and orphaned by the Chernobyl disaster.

~Angel