Three Shades of Awesome

So, I finally had lunch with the guy from my Church who I’d told you I was gonna get together with earlier. I don’t want to so much report back (because really it’s between him and me so… really…) but over all lunch went really well. It was funny getting to know him the last little while, in a lot of ways our personalities are alike. There’s obvious differences, but we come from the same sort of Christian background. The kind where right is right, and wrong is wrong, and you better be able to tell the difference in a split second, preferably with a bible verse to back you up or we might need to have some church discipline. Now granted I’m not really like that any more, but I know teenage me would have probably looked up to him like nobody’s business.

We both kinda have that, we’ll say what we want to say, and everyone else really just needs to deal with it and not get so uptight about things. Now granted I think we were both reigning that in a lot today but yah. All in all it was a really great lunch.

We got to talk about a few things, one of the most important things I wanted to get across is that people who welcome gay people into the Church, and gay people who still choose to pursue zealous lives with God don’t have to throw out Scripture to believe what they do. In fact we both have the same sort of reverence for Scripture. I think that was something that caught him off guard a bit. I know one of the most awful things that Dobson and his ilk have done is convince a lot of good bible believing Christians, that they are profoundly different than people like me.

I mean, it’s not like he’s gonna be marching in next year’s Pride Parade. (actually I don’t even know if I’ll bother to show) But I think a lot of the adversarial stuff was actually pushed out of the way which is really nice. We’ve even tentatively agreed to have a time to actually talk about the scriptural stuff which we didn’t really get into today. Which is one of my most favourite things to do.

We also talked about perhaps having a day when some people from Church could get together and watch a documentary called “For the Bible Tells Me So” which for anyone who’s seen it, it’s brilliantly done and presents “The other side” better than almost any resource I’ve ever seen. I’m gonna run that by our pastor and see what he thinks about it. We’ll have to see. I think more than anything he wants to treat it like a non-issue. IE you can think whatever you want, but let’s just focus on Christ. Which is really how I’d prefer things but really everything’s been framed as an argument of sides, so I’m not really sure how well we’ll be able to agree to disagree until everyone understands that you really can think very deeply about this sort of thing and still not come to the same answers.

So… yah, that’s my little update on that, over all it was really good. I think we found a lot of common ground, and it’s always best to focus on how we’re similar than it is to focus on how we’re different.