God is always teaching me...

Recently I took a train out to St Louis to meet up with my wife and her family for a graduation, and while on the train I had the privilege of sitting next to this really cool guy named Bian. He was a botanist from Asia who worked and traveled the country and abroad on behalf of the Botanical Gardens.

We talked the entire 6 hour ride out to St Louis, about everything and anything from music, to politics, to the environment, to world travel and food. He even showed me a few hundred pictures from his travels all across the world. He actually stood at the base of Mt. Everest. Way cool! Anyways, about 4 hours into the train ride, we got onto the topic of religion. We both shared our faith to each other, and he shared with me he was a Zen Buddhist, but that he had a lot of respect for other faith perspectives and saw universal truths in each of them.

We began talking about Christianity and I began to share my faith with him and my take on faith's importance in the world. I shared with him my personal journey, my relationship with Christ, but also spent much time talking about my frustrations with modern day American Christianity as well as my negative experiences growing up in the church. Somehow we eventually got onto the topic of homosexuality.

I expressed with him my frustrations with how the church as a whole had really shunned the homosexual community, and that these sad representations of the church in fact were not a true expression of Jesus' love. I shared with him that we need to do more to build relationships with them, talk with this community, that we need to LISTEN to them and find commonality and ways to share our faith in a way that uplifts rather than condemns, and that through our loving relationship, we can then discuss more personal matters like sexual orientation choices. I was obviously trying to be firm but diplomatic.

All of the sudden, I noticed tears welling up in his eyes. He then responded to my words by first saying he had never known that Christians had such love about them, and that he had always seen Christianity as sort of a judgmental and hateful religion. He then proceeded to tell me that he was in fact gay. Wow! It blew me away. Here I was talking about my faith to this guy I had come to really enjoy in our 4 hours of talking, and God gave me the exact words to say in the exact way to have an impact on some random guy who's life story I was redeeming through my personal faith in Christ.

Now I have no clue if that guy made any life changing decisions that day or the days that followed, but I planted a seed through love, and now that's the only way I want to do it the rest of my life.

I write this because right now I have a great love and desire to engage the homosexual community, and I have recently had the privilege to make several genuine friendships with members of that community, and it has been eye-opening and has challenged me in the way I live out my faith around these good friends as well as everyone else I encounter in my life.

It is amazing that when you engage communities in which Christians are notoriously known to keep at arms length and to shun from the outside, you begin to see issues with people's names and livelihoods attached to them. It is no longer about issues that are right and wrong, but it becomes flesh and blood people that identify with those issues, and it becomes more about loving them and showing them what Christ-like love is all about.

I believe that God takes care of the rest!