Men's Group

I have been fortunate to be a part of a men's discipleship group for the past several months.  The group also has a component of it which focuses more on accountability, and I will likely write about that aspect of this in the near future.  This larger discipleship group currently is comprised of 10 men.  We meet every Saturday and it is organized through the church I attend.  We have been working through the Men With No Regrets workbook series.  I was very reluctant to participate in this group, however I was encouraged to make the commitment to it by my pastor, who was organizing the group, and by a good friend who would also be participating.

Looking back, I think my reluctance to jump into this group was brought on by a couple of factors.  One of them was certainly my past experiences when in groups of heterosexual men (church or otherwise); be it a group of 3 or 50.  When I find myself in some type of group or gathering of men, I have a tendency to focus on the ways that I am different from them rather than seeing all of the ways that we are similar.  This usually leaves me with a sense of feeling that I don't really fit in or belong with them.  In all honesty, I don't really have an interest in many of the things that these guys tend to talk about.  I like sports, especially football, but I don't feel the need to be up on every aspect of it or to know every stat.  I enjoy participating in sports such as football, softball, etc., but I'm really not all that good so I tend to shy away from them.  I like family and kids, however not having a spouse or children, I feel like their is only so much that I can add to conversations of this type.  In addition, I just get a sense of not being considered "one of the guys" on some level.

Fight the Good Fight

"Fight the good fight of faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called..."

(1 Timothy 6:12 NASB)

A hard lesson learned over this past few weeks:

• Faith is something we must constantly fight for
• It is a good fight

After a period of several months of very real transformation, I let down my guard.  In a sense, I became comfortable with where I was at and even overly confident in ways.  Things seemed to be going real well.  I felt that I was growing in my love of God, as well as my love of other people.  I spent time in the Word, in prayer, and in service to others.  But something was lacking.  I certainly wasn't as thankful as I should have been for the great things that God was doing in my life.  Pride crept in and rather than giving all of the glory to God, I think in some ways I was reserving some for myself.  I felt that I had things under control.

"Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like 

a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour."

(1 Peter 5:8 NASB)

Sin can creep in unnoticed.  It can spread like an infection.  In my complacency and attitude of having everything under control, I was not as quick to address things occurring in my thought life as I should have been.  After all, I had everything under control.

Love & Partiality

Over the past couple of years, I have spent a great deal of time working out what it means to love others as a follower of Christ.  It has benefited me greatly in so many areas to understand this real love; the love that Jesus demonstrated and spoke of.  As someone who was most frequently led by my emotional, gut feelings of love, this understanding has helped me tremendously.  It has given me a standard which I can use to compare what I felt was loving to what God says really is loving.  I have often found that my motives were less then selfless, kind, or from a place of being long-suffering.

As I have been seeking this understanding of love, it has bothered me that I have had a greater love toward some people, and conversely, a lesser love toward others.  I've felt pressured to decrease my love for some, while building it up for others for whom it came less naturally to me.  I thought that loving everyone equally was the Christian ideal that I should live up to; and perhaps it is, but it is not necessarily the place from which I can start my journey.  I have been rethinking things lately, not in a way that I shouldn't strive to be loving toward all people, but just in the sense that it isn't necessarily un-Christian or sinful to love some people more than you love others.  I think the greatest example of favoritism or partiality in love would include the love of Jesus for the Apostle John, as discussed below.

I guess I am at a place now where I feel some freedom to pursue loving those whom God puts before me and not getting so wrapped up in defining every thought, labeling and comparing every relationship, and analyzing every word and action.  Essentially, just because someone is "easy" or comfortable for me to love, doesn't mean that the love is a bad thing or something to be avoided or downplayed in favor of seeking to increasingly love the less "desirable".  While I will continue to strive toward greater love for all of my brothers and sisters, perhaps right at this moment in time, it is the people that God has put before me as friends with whom I can best put into practice and learn from about Christian love; both what it is and what it isn't.

I came across this sermon from John Henry Newman (1801-1890).  I think it is worth a read:

Dissatisfaction With Friendships

For the majority of my life, I have had a general sense of dissatisfaction with my friendships.  I am speaking more to close friendships, not the every day type of friendship that wouldn't fall under the category of good or close friend.  I don't, nor have I ever felt like my friends, the close ones, are able to truly relate to me or understand me; my loves, my fears, my motivations, etc.  Often I feel disappointed in them, in so much as it really doesn't even seem like they want to understand me - or if they do seek to understand me, it is only with the intent of proving there fears about me right or wrong, or to use the knowledge to manipulate me.  Sure, most ask questions of me at times to perhaps gain some insight, but it generally seems to be a curiosity prefaced by their thought that I am somehow not normal in my thoughts and emotions.  Certainly I have my areas of "unusualness", but this difference they experience between me and themselves does not necessarily indicate that my thoughts and emotions are somehow wrong.

I think in many ways, when I initially started attending my church in January 2010, the men there who knew of my past were very reluctant to be open to friendship with me.  I certainly felt, and still feel, that I have to prove myself to them in some way.  This is not at all the case with all men, but it is a reality with many of them.  It is somewhat in line with the prevalent feeling of many homosexuals seeking Christ in the church in that it sometimes seems like Christians expect you to fix this sin of homosexuality before  the church will embrace you - rather than the church embracing the homosexual and walking alongside him while God transforms him and "fixes" the problem.

Friendship: Part 1

Greater love has no one than this, that
one lay down his life for his friends.

Looking back on the friendships of my past, they were often marked by great happiness and conversely, great sadness and pain; sometimes in rapid succession.  The happiness was in spending time with a friend who's mere presence can brighten my mood and give me a sense of being loved and accepted.  Sadness and pain upon the realization that the label "close friend" or "good friend" seems to have a totally different meaning to me than it does for so many others.

"Love does not give up on people when they are struggling. It does not give in to despair in the face of extreme difficulty. It does not declare that someone’s heart can never change or that a broken community can never be healed. Love hopes all things. Understand that whenever we give up hope, this is really a failure to love, because love hopes."

I suppose it would help if I clarified my ideas of what types of friendships I have experienced.  First, "friend" is not a label that I throw around loosely.   I try to be realistic in identifying the type of relationships I have with people.  For the most part, I don't consider co-workers to be friends.  With few exceptions, I always look at them as acquaintances.  I would also apply the acquaintance label to most people I socialized with at certain places such as bars.  These were people with whom my contact was limited to certain times or places.  If I removed myself from those places, whether it be the bar, work, or even church, I would not necessarily maintain contact with them or continue on in any type of relationship.  They are all relationships that are conditional on some factor other than a mutual, voluntary choice to have someone be a part of your life.

Encouragement For Struggling Friends

In many ways, my first year of following Christ seemed (to me) to be marked by a lack of encouragement from other Christians around me.  Not that encouragement was non-existent; more-so just muted, conditional, or somewhat reserved.  I think several factors played into this, one of which was the unfamiliarity of many at my church with homosexuality and how it looks to transition from the "gay lifestyle" to that of committed follower of Jesus.  At times I felt that it was up to me to prove to my brothers and sisters in Christ that I was serious about my new life.  While never outright told this, I sensed they felt I had to first "fix" certain aspects of my character, attractions, and sexuality in order to prove myself worthy of their encouragement and praise.  This deficit of encouragement that I perceived often contributed to a lack of hope on my part and caused me to question whether any of this transformation was even possible.  Rather than being pursued by my bothers and sisters at the church, I felt that I was always in a struggle to stay connected to the Body.  I often wanted to leave the church and find one where I would be embraced on terms equal to the embrace of sinners who struggled in more "comfortable" ways.  It was often a struggle to stay a part of this community of believers.  It was as if I had to constantly remind them "Hey, there is hope for me too! I am not beyond God's power to save and heal!".  Being a new believer, I was perplexed by this as I thought that these statements were ones they should have been loudly proclaiming to me, not the other way around!

Love

All of my life I remember periods of falling in and out of "love" with other guys.  I thought highly of myself for these feelings of love I had for others; that I was somehow superior in my caring for others due to this "love".  What I wasn't so conscious of at the time, though, was just how self-seeking my love was. Sure, I was a nice guy in many respects.  A certain aspect of my love was geared toward helping the person I was loving.  However, I have more recently come to see that the ugly side of this love was a desire to get something from the other person.  I had that powerful "feeling" of loving someone, but unfortunately this "love" was not what is spoken of in the Bible in the following text:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Un-Biblical Labels

I'm thinking about a workshop at a conference I recently attended.  It dealt with the labels and images we have of ourselves.  Some of these labels we create for ourselves, and other labels we internalize from the thoughtless words directed at us from friends, family, coworkers, others, or just the world in general.  Some of the labels that have stuck to me in the past and became a part of how I identified myself include: ugly, lazy, weird, gay, fag, homo, pervert, failure, unlovable, unworthy, and un-redeemable.  What labels have you attached to yourself that are inconsistent with what Christ tells us we are?  The beauty and truth of our status as Christians means that all of those labels are nothing more than a lie of the devil; a method he uses to gain access to us by causing cracks in our faith.  Do you believe that he can gain a foothold in our lives by using the world around us to cause doubt about what Christ says we are?  A goal of the devil is to separate us from Christ by lying to us about our true identity and giving us a false sense of ourselves.  Let me urge you to study the things that God says of us.  Once we put our trust in Him, He is the only one that can label us.  We are sinners who have been redeemed by God and we are His alone.  Our identity is something that we can not rightly get from any other source.  God has declared it and no one can overrule Him!

I think it is good to reflect on what God says we are in His son Jesus.  Don't transfer to anyone else God's right to tell you who you are!

Here are some things that God says about us in His word:

Change...

For those of you who, like me, sometimes get down on yourselves when thinking about the ongoing battles we have with the flesh, I thought the following quote I heard at the conference was very relevant. Sometimes it is demoralizing to continue to battle the same temptations and weaknesses and we think that healing or improvement can only occur through change and the complete removal of these temptations. That is not always God's answer though. Personally I think the continued presence of some of my temptations, although in many ways certainly having improved over the past couple of years, serve to keep me humble and continually seeking Christ. They continually remind me that I need Him as Savior and Healer and that the answer is always more of Him and less of me.

"Change is not the absence of struggles, but change is the freedom to choose holiness in the midst of our struggles."

Every time we choose not to give in to our temptations, we gain victory in Christ through that struggle and that is what leads us to holiness, not necessarily the complete removal of the temptation or struggle.

How have your own personal struggles and temptations drawn you closer and more dependent on Christ? I never thought I would say this, but I am grateful for my struggles with living out holiness in the face of my fleshly desires and same sex attractions. Thank you God for using my sin to convict me of my need for a Savior and drawing me to You.