This article won’t make you feel good. It won’t make you feel shimmery and like you’ve done everything right as a Christian and it won’t make me look perfect and like a theological star. I realize as I write it that the Christian camps won’t like it. But I’m still writing it down anyways, because when I am moved like this, it usually means something. I wrote the two friends tonight who would get it, told them just that, and one wrote back immediately and said “I think that means you have to write it.” 

… and deal with the unlikeness of it all to reach towards what I want to be true of me and  seeking to look more like Jesus in all the parts of me that need Him most.

Our open sins aren’t worse than our hidden ones

I’m deeply sinful. Incredibly. More than you even know. I haven’t always approached this subject with grace nor have I loved like I should and I definitely haven’t loved as Jesus would have loved. I jumped on a political train and gave the groups that didn’t look like me a very wide berth. Some days I still struggle to overcome the old feelings of awkwardness and wanting to be oh so very very comfortable with how superior I am with my hidden sins.

Then I saw myself in them the night #Pulse happened. And I heard Jesus speaking to me that He loved me.

And I saw my Pharisee heart for what it was. Ugly and full of sin that no one could see and how I had been blind to those hurting all around me. It broke me. Since then, despite  my awkwardness in feeling completely not knowing how to approach those in this group but I was darned if I wasn’t going to give it a go anyways.

Identities shouldn’t define worth

I’ll never forget the moment I realize how tremendous a shift #Pulse had been for me until that day in the Trader Joe’s grocery line. I was absentmindedly people-watching those around me while I waited for my turn to check out. It wasn’t that busy, and my mind was on other things but I noticed the piercings and the tattoos of the cashier man. He was carrying on a normal day conversation with the lady in front of me; he laughingly waved his hands in a feminine gesture and a faked lisp, and wore a rainbow #Pulse pin, if I remember correctly. Everything about him projected “gay” and “proud”.

I checked behind me sensing there was someone there, and when I turned, my smile faded. There was a lady with a large cross hanging around her neck and a stern glare on her face, aimed directly at the cashier. Her face was furious judgement, and my mind raced trying to figure out how on earth she could be so angry when she hadn’t even interacted with him yet. She huffed and glared at him and fingered her cross and muttered about finding “someone ELSE to check me out”.

If you know me at all, you know that I can go from 0 to 900 in under 2 seconds. My blood pressure shot through the roof and my eyes widened as I tried to process how to react. Tears filled my eyes in an emotion that before Pulse would never have crossed my heart.

Instant. Sisterly. Protection.

I didn’t have a cross around my neck but that didn’t mean Jesus didn’t see this moment. Right now. The whole world could have been watching but all I saw was someone who was going to be hurt in the next 5 minutes and I wasn’t going to have any of it.

I don’t even remember what I said to him, I’m pretty sure it was something about liking his shirt, and maybe something about how much I loved the cookies I was buying. He may as well have been my long lost cousin for my shining eyes that screamed “Remember this not the look in the eyes of the woman coming after me”. He was gentle and sweet and I left with a grateful heart that I’d met him.

He was important to me. I saw a man who could be my brother and I wanted the very best love I could find for him, and it wasn’t the cross fiddling judgement behind me but the bleeding Savior Jesus that hung on that cross for that cashier to know a God who could save Him and who saved me, and maybe who saved her too.

Jesus, the One Who makes blinded eyes to see.

I’m always amazed by the ways that God continues to show me how to love deeper, better, more like Himself, and how it doesn’t look at all like me. Why is it so hard to love like Jesus? Well, I will tell you. Because it goes against all our pride. Tonight as a gay barista made my coffee and extended a good evening wish as I waved out the door, this all came to my mind:

The LBGTQ among us need extra kindness because they’re blind to a deep sin in their lives that we aren’t struggling with and we can pray for them better than they can themselves. 

We aren’t in the thick of fighting against who God made us to be. Or maybe we are, and we know how deep and conflicting and interwoven those sins are in the dead of night. Maybe we are Christians and struggle deeply with our LBGTQ feelings and are weeping from loneliness.

Certainly we know how dark our sin went as we fought to be the king of our lives without Jesus before we surrendered and how some days we see the product of that in the most awful ways. Maybe we’re just hoping to be on the right side of history or the right side of our political party or don’t want to “give too much grace” because then they’ll think it’s just fine.

None of our sin is just fine. Beginning with mine. 

Do I think they are struggling with unrepentant sin? Do I think they are blind to how deep and dark it goes? Yes and yes. I also believe those describe me. If we’re honest with ourselves, we all know we have sins that run deeper than anyone knows and look to Jesus to save us from them. My hidden sins and their hidden sins are both exposed to the eyes of the God that sees everything.

And so I pray that God will open their blinded eyes to see. And that as He does so, that He will open my eyes too. I pray with grieved tears in my eyes that when those who see my open sins that I’m blind to will pray deeply for me with the same fervent Jesus-given-sibling-love that I feel when I see them.

We are family living in a broken world of sin. We are none of us righteous. We have no stage to stand upon. The ground is level at the foot of the cross. So how can I be different? How can I stand on the truth and also stand against the angry hatred that they go through so often?

I can let go of all my pride, remember the Savior Who leads me, and reach out with a compassionate and kind heart that sees them for who they are: an aching soul just like me who needs Jesus just as much as me.

And that’s a lot. Oh, Jesus, how we need You. Make the blinded eyes to see.

Remind us of who we are and who we aren’t. We aren’t You, because only You could die in agony on a cross to make us Yours and only You could teach us our identity lies in You. 

Only You could tell us our worth can’t ever change because we are Your image-bearers.

Only You could create us perfectly in the womb, and Only You could open our eyes to believe in You.

Only You could be the best Love we could ever find from the start to the end of time.

Only You.