the lie of nonexistent intimate friendships (part two)

This is the fifth entry in a series of posts on friendship. To find the others once they’ve been published, find the menu button in the upper right corner of the blog and see “Summer Friendship Series.”

 

Something that I’ve noticed about American relational culture recently, and perhaps especially so with Christian American relational culture, is that we really like to have lines clearly drawn. I see this as the reason why we have phenomena in Christian colleges like DTRs (defining the relationship). There seems to be an increasing neediness to always know what the status of your relationship with another person, and it doesn’t necessarily come from within ourselves. More often than not, it comes as an external question, when we may or may not have been thinking about it.

 

I think most of us have probably found ourselves in a situation, or at least observed a situation in which two people have begun spending significant amounts of time with each other, prompting some or all of their friends to probe them on whether they’re “just friends” or something more than friends. This can be an incredibly awkward or frustrating experience for everyone involved, regardless of whether the two people actually might have feelings for each other and are trying to navigate that or whether they are close friends who enjoy spending a lot of time together.

 

Either way, I think this fascination with needing to define relationships has begun hurting our conceptions of friendship, because along with a desire to know exactly what status a relationship has, there also exists an assumption that the relationship will also fit neatly within the preconceived assumptions of what “just friends” or something more than friends might look like. (That being said, I’ve really grown to hate the term “just friends” as I’ve been learning more about friendship and working through this series, because I’ve come to realize it’s a rather derogatory way to refer to a relationship as beautiful as friendship.) If we really think about it, friendships already tend to exist in the middle ground of a Venn diagram, but our attitudes toward them skew towards trying to keep them cleanly isolated to only their safe extremes on a gradient spectrum and this severely limits our ability to understand and have healthy friendships in my opinion.

 

I’ve really grown to hate the term “just friends,” because I’ve come to realize it’s such a derogatory way to refer to a relationship as beautiful as friendship.

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Christian Priorities as of May 27, 2015

A better, less angry post will follow, but this is what I have to say regarding all the stories that have come out in the past couple weeks, namely, the recent events surrounding the Duggar Family and The Village Church.

I’m straight up pissed about it, and most people will tell you that I don’t get angry very often.

First of all, who ever said that criticizing the church or church leadership is tantamount to attacking it? That’s ridiculous. The church is an imperfect institution run by imperfect people. There are going to be missteps and there will need to be people who point out those missteps. It’s not un-glorifying to God when people have the guts to do it. They’re not creating tension or division in the church. They’re saying what the heck needs to be said.

Second, someone tell me since when Christians are allowed to be above the law. I don’t care who you are. You could be John Calvin or Charles Spurgeon or C.S. Lewis. If you commit a serious crime, you should be going to prison. The church has no business running damage control or PR for people just because they are a little higher profile than the rest of us. That’s nowhere in the Bible.

Third, along the same lines, grace and repentance do not eliminate the consequences of your actions. Grace should be extended where there is repentance and even when there is not, but that doesn’t magically dissolve the consequences of your actions. Actions. Have. Consequences.

Finally, and this one is a little more personal. Someone better be able to tell me why, in the United States of America, we have situations in which churches are protecting child molesters and child porn addicts while there are LGBT Christians committing suicide because they feel unloved and worthless and have internalized a message from the church that they are dirtier and more sinful than everyone else. Someone give me a valid explanation to this, stat. How is that glorifying to God? How is that reflecting Jesus?

This is unacceptable, disgusting, and makes me sick.

But evidently, these are Christian priorities as of May 27, 2015, a time when we prioritize the well-being of people who are in sticky situations, as a result of their own actions, and defend them when there are far bigger problems in the world.

I mean, someone give me a halfway decent reason that child porn is any different than sex trafficking, seeing as most of those girls are only children.

This is part of the reason that young people (myself included) are growing increasingly skeptical of the formal church. Because it seems to be more interested in outward appearances and damage control than actual people.

After all, it hurts when child porn users are granted asylum in the church while people like us are given an ultimatum. Because it implies that we’re beneath even that. Where’s our grace? Where’s our unconditional acceptance?

And people wonder why we’re on our way out.

sometimes christians surprise me…and i’m a christian too

So I’m not even really sure how I’m supposed to categorize today’s post/reflection. It’s a weird jumble of feelings that are currently swirling around in my head, mostly related to some of the interactions that I’ve had with people the last few weeks, and those interactions have been extremely positive. So, I’m conflicted. Also minor confession: I wrote this post a few weeks ago and forgot to post it. So…I don’t know why I just told you that.

Okay, none of that probably made any sense. That’s just sort of how my brain works, so apologies in advance (…retrospect?). These are some of the things that have been churning around in my head the past few days: since coming out, I’ve gotten basically only positive responses from the people in my life. People have been so supportive, and I’m so thankful for that. Even with the things that I’ve written on here and in the real talk conversations I’ve had with people the responses have been so encouraging. And the weird thing is that I’ve been surprised by all of it.

friendship is a tricky thing for gay Christians

That title isn’t even totally accurate. I could remove the “for gay Christians” part and that title would still be as true as ever, but I also just want to talk about how friendship can be even more inherently complicated for gay Christians. Sometimes it just adds so many more layers of awkward that you wouldn’t think would ever come up or be a problem. Also, contrary to popular belief, I’ve been feeling lately that for the majority of people “being satisfied by friends and family” isn’t a suitable way of coping with a call to singleness (post on what I think about singleness coming in the future, I promise!).

Since most of my posts tend to come with some sort of random disclaimer, the disclaimer for this post is that these are simply reflections on my own emotions as well as the emotions of some of my friends who have discussed this topic with me. If any of these things make sense to you or you’ve felt the same way, awesome! If they don’t, feel free to comment and let me know why, but I mostly want to present a perspective from this side of things, because I think that it’s something that gets talked about a lot, but also doesn’t get talked about a lot at the same time. I’ll explain as we get further.

making sense of the seemingly insensible (on same-sex relationships)

This post will conclude what is, in my mind, a three part series on what I believe about and what God has been teaching me about celibacy and relationships in regards to LGBT Christians. Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’m done talking about those things. I just feel like all three of these posts are intricately tied together, which is why I’ll link to them here as well in case you haven’t read them.

Part One: when the church talks about celibacy

Part Two: what celibacy really means (for same-sex relationships)

So take a look at those two posts if you haven’t read them yet. Hopefully you’ll see that they all sort of flow together.

Finally, one last thing before I get started on this post. Don’t forget that at the bottom of every page on this blog there’s a button you can press to subscribe via email. That way, you’ll get an email every time I post something new. So go and do that if you care to follow along with what I’m writing. I always love to connect with new people, share thoughts, and see what they have to say.

it is well

I haven’t been around recently, just reblogging something here or there, and the reason for that is that I’ve been really stressed. It’s been really bad. It just seems like everything is happening all at once and I can’t really catch a break. So, I don’t have a whole lot to share right now, but I do feel like God has been putting this on my heart to share with a few people recently, so I thought I would share it here as well.

No matter what happens (and that can be a very wide spectrum of things for people like us), God has got us and we can say, “It is well with my soul.”

I hope this is an encouragement to anyone who sees it. I just know that I’ve been going through a lot of stuff right now and that God has been trying to tell me to trust Him, because no matter what happens, it is well.

good intentions

I think that most of us would agree and can relate to situations in which our well-meaning straight friends say something or point us to something, whether it’s a book, online sermon, article, or anything else that unintentionally hurts us, sometimes a lot. Something like that happened to me earlier this week, which is what I want to share with you for this post.

Now, I typically like to say that I don’t get offended very easily, and I still hold to that as I’m writing, but what I experienced earlier this week was something that was a rather unique experience in a really uncomfortable way. I can’t remember the last time (if ever), I’ve ever experienced anything like it before, but I’m sure that perhaps some of you have encountered something like this:

w i s t f u l

Not to post something really melancholy again, but the whole situation surrounding Valentine’s Day got me in a really pensive mood last night, and the way that I always remedy that is by writing. It’s something that I love to do, whether it’s short stories, (attempts at) poems, letters to no one, or just a stream of my consciousness directed onto a page. It always helps me sort through the whirlwind of emotions that I’m constantly bombarded with, and a lot of the time it will give me some perspective on life while also giving me a good chance to just reflect and turn some less ideal situations into more wistful ones, in a good way. Plus, I just really enjoy the act of writing, the sensation of the ink or pencil lead flowing onto the page so smoothly. It’s therapuetic to me.

So that’s what I’ve got for you again today: a piece of writing and a song: