JOURNEY!

I have so many things that I want…..NEED…..to say! Where to start, without boring you to death? HMMM!! I’ll go back to, somewhat, the beginning when we joined an Independent Fundamental Baptist Church. We remained members of this denomination for about 20 years (I promise I won’t relive all of those years), but for the most part it was good. We were a military family so it was important to find friends and “family” where Uncle Sam decided to place us. The church definitely provided that for us! We still love and treasure many of the friends we made during those years. My husband and I have 3 daughters that we felt should be raised in church, and while they were young life buzzed by with relative ease, and the church became a place to gather socially and spiritually. Mark and I were new Christians so we were trying to soak everything in and do everything “right”! Some day I will share some stories of how that looked to the girls….*insert winky emoji here*. Jumping forward a good number of years my heart began to question many things….not God….not the Bible….but how we were being taught and what we were being told, and most importantly how that was playing out in the lives of the young people that we were watching grow in this community. Without going into too much detail, there was a lot of confusion, questioning and pulling away among that group of young people. I watched that with sadness as I didn’t understand the issue….we were working so hard to do the “right” things! It was often blamed on problems within the home, spiritual issues within the teens themselves, and of course that good old sin nature. I’m sure sometimes those were the issues, but I began to think it was bigger than that….but at that time didn’t have a grasp on what that “bigger” was!?

Fast forward five years or so and I found myself privileged to attend a Pride Parade in Richmond Virginia. I went thinking I would change lives, not knowing that I was the one who most needed the change. In short I met beautiful adults, beautiful teens and beautiful couples whose love was genuine and kind and equally as valuable as the love I have for my husband of 30 years! How could this kindness, this compassion, this acceptance (which honestly I had never fully witnessed before) not be okay with God!?? Confusion overwhelmed me. Not to mention I had a 15 year old at that time who was asking every question in the book about what I believed and why! Now, are you still with me?? Two years later my oldest daughter, who is now 22, came out to us. What?? Still super confused, not really surprised honestly, but still….we did everything “right”!!?? Didn’t we?? My sweet girl had already torn into her Bible and her study on the issue, but that day I did too! I found so much that I had never heard or understood before! It was mind-boggling and eye opening, to say the least! I hope to blog about each verse I studied until my brain hurt, but until then let’s say I discovered what God really has to say about the LGBTQ community, and I discovered the God who loves, and who IS love!

Remember those young people I mentioned earlier?? Remember all the parents doing everything “right”? Well, I think sometimes when we sit in church and mostly just hear about rules, regulations, expectations and how we no doubt fall short of them, a mindset can creep in that we will never be good enough so why even try? I believe this to be especially true for young people who don’t come from the “typical” home with mom and dad and 2.5 children and the house with the white picket fence and the two cars in the garage. When we look around and see that those things appear to be what are genuinely valued, I can certainly understand feeling discouraged, dejected and most devastating of all, rejected! When that happens we have blindly walked through life missing the very best part of God’s story that, yes, while there might be some expectations placed upon us, nearly every one of those expectations is really about giving love to those who need it most!