Loudly

This isn't the beginning, and this isn't the end. 

"So...he's gay. The whole school knows now." 

I was stirring a foaming pot of raviolis on the stove. My sister had been talking about a mutual acquaintance who had recently "come out of the closet" during his senior year of high school. 

Part of me wasn't surprised by this news. But another part of me felt something akin to doubt, sadness, and wariness. My memory skipped back to my own senior year, which also happened to be the year that one of my guy friends announced that he was gay. I can easily recall talking about it with him. His decision to date his boyfriend didn't damage our friendship, our conversations, or our good times that year. I thought of him as a quality person even though I questioned the quality of his choices. I sometimes wondered if his being gay was some kind of misguided gimmick.

When the Day of Silence (during which "students across the country vow to take a form of silence to call attention to the silencing effect of anti-LGBT bullying and harassment in schools") rolled around and many of my friends participated, I pointedly did not. Quite frankly, there didn't seem to be a whole lot of bullying and harassment of self-professed young homosexuals in our high school. In fact, many of them were popular, well-liked by students and teachers alike, and highly active in school activities and student leadership. I would even go so far as to make the statement that "being gay" was trendy in the way toting around a backpack woven from 100% recycled materials or eating local vegan produce was trendy.

I'm not trying to trivialize homosexuality. My dad has a PhD in clinical psychology and works with a depth of experience, knowledge, and wisdom in dealing with this issue...I'm aware of its complexity and controversiality and how incompetent I am in tackling this subject. 

But I do have my thoughts, and these are a few of the ones I'm sharing with you. 

My introduction to the Day of Silence event in high school made me more keenly aware of how passionate young people can be about causes they see as socially significant and just. Unfortunately, the Day of Silence was lobbying for a certain brand of ideology with which I did not agree. I longed to be part of a united front under one banner, a banner that called out a different message. But the Christians at our high school had no such school-approved alternative, no room at the "tolerant" table of "dialogue." So we were the ones to sit in unsettling silence. 

Several days ago I read a follow up to Rachel Held Evans' controversial "How To Win a Culture War and Lose a Generation". In it she claimed that her previous post spoke to a "growing desire, among both young and old, for radical change in how we treat one another as Christians and as citizens. Ready or not, a movement is afoot—a movement toward reconciliation, healing, grace, and love."  

This time I do not want to stand by in silence. 

I am ready for this kind of movement...but not toward the end that Evans has in mind. Like Evans, it saddens me that young Americans associate Christianity almost immediately with the "negative image" of being "antihomosexual" and that the Church is perceived primarily as being "judgmental, bigoted...hypocritical, insincere, and uncaring." But unlike Evans, it saddens me that many Christians have been seeking to dispel this "image" with their outspoken support of homosexuality.

There are other ways for Christianity to make an impression. 

Maybe I'm wary of jumping on the socially-acceptable bandwagon. Man, that would sure be easier. It would have made high school easier too. 

But I don't want my faith to be about being politically correct. I don't desire for my faith to accept a convincing untruth that has seeped into many of our churches and the way we think. I don't want my faith to be about following the trendy crowd. And I don't think it should.

What does it really mean to truly care about someone? In this context, what do sincerity and conviction look like in a Christian? When and how can reconciliation take place? And what does it mean to recognize the "plank in your own eye" before you try to remove that "speck that is in your brother's eye"? 

My dad once asked me, "If you're allowing someone to continue in a behavior that is harmful to them, is that love? If someone is hurting themselves and all you do is make them feel okay about doing it, are you really helping them heal?" 

So it is here that I'm wondering what it means to love and love loudly. To care for and respect a person but not his choices. To remember and stay rooted in what the Bible tells us about sin. To speak up for truth even when it's unpopular. And to do all these things not in silence, but in loud love. 

I recently delved into, like many before me, C.S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain. And as I thirsted for a better understanding of love, I drank deeply from the chalice of his words.

When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some 'disinterested', because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect', is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.... To ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must...be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable....What we would here and now call our 'happiness' is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.

Paul once wrote to the Philippian church, "Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, and not frightened in anything by your opponents...For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake..." 

This was just a reminder, to me as much as to anyone else, to love and love loudly, even if it means standing under a solitary banner.  

This isn't the beginning, and this isn't the end.