This is for all the people who have been told their love is a sin. Be brave. It does get better.
It took me years to figure out that the God that cast me out was created by man.
When I could finally see past the followers of that man made God, I saw the real God, the One that was love and didn’t need to be defended with hate by any human.
It took me awhile to gain the courage to come all the way back, to decipher the truth from the burn marks left by the flaming arrows shot by the the pulpit messengers who played God with scripture, to finally forgive the sting of the welts left by the Bible Belt that to this day, remain on my heart as scars.
They remind me never to judge.
Eventually, I would find clarity from the very thing that hurt so much – losing my community. I was outcast by a community of earnest, yet misguided people who thought God required their hatred and judgment of others in order to show how Godly they could be. Anyone who says it’s God’s love and not hate to judge or discriminate holds an unkind definition of love and an even unkinder view of God. Those who disagree have never been on the receiving end of this version of “love”. Hate is hate if it seeks to separate or tear another down, even if it hides behind words that sound like love.
God is so much bigger than us, than this world, than these petty issues we see as being worth sacrificing our neighbor’s hearts over. What matters is love and kindness. It’s the only thing that saves lives and changes hearts. God does not care about which gender you fall in love with; God cares whether or not you love. So many people who swear by the blood of their Christ that they have it right have it so incredibly wrong; loving the same gender was never a sin. Jesus never said a word about same sex love, but He said a great deal about judging others.
Love is the great equalizer, the thing that drives us to serve one another, to hold eachother up, to hold sacred all that we do not yet understand and all that is different. Love embraces mystery, trusts enough to say “I don’t know” instead of creating or clinging to stories that resonate with only the familiar and hating those we do not understand. Love requires free will and therefore, love must think for itself. Love is not intimidated by the hard questions. Love is not always popular but it is the safest answer when life is filled with confusion and competing agendas. Humans are fallible. God is God. And this is why our good intentions and personal experiences are not enough to live a divinely inspired life.
We will only succeed in living Godly lives when we can live in a way that says “love is all that matters.”
If you are reading this and the first thing that enters your mind is “yeah, but…” I’ve been there. I can look back now and see that this response was based in fear of a God I didn’t totally trust. “God is love” is not an airy fairy feel good response. It does not excuse wrong doing. Rather, it calls us to back to our humanness and to stop acting like God. It is this very edict that requires me to love and forgive those who tell me I’m going to hell or that my romantic relationship is “less than” theirs. This is no easy task. But it is the answer I have found to be truer than all others; love is all that matters. Everything else simply misses the mark.
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