Day Eighteen

Day 18

Experiencing Life Together

Jesus’ commandment to Love GOD and love others as we love ourselves is where everything starts. Well for a long time loving myself was where everything stopped. One reason why I treated others so badly was I never learned how to treat myself with respect. I spent years, the formative years misusing myself in so many ways, allowing others to misuse and mistreat me, how could I ever learn to treat others with respect or with the kind of love they disserved? I spent so much time trying to take what I wanted from others or to fill my own needs without realizing that there were others that had feelings too. As long as I was temporally happy at the expense of someone else, life for me was good. I wasn’t concerned about LIFE WITH OTHERS; it was about LIFE in my own little world. You were allowed in it only as long as I wanted you to be in it. When I was tired of the space you took up it was like an old car in the driveway, I traded you in for a newer model, a better model, a faster model, and there were always plenty to choose from. One reason for my way of thinking was before I get hurt was to get rid of even the possibility of letting you get near me that close. I had been hurt too many times in the past and didn’t like it. I remember the first time I was in the bars and went home with someone. He was someone I knew from High School. Then we made a date to see each other again on Friday night around eleven at the same club we met in. But when he came in he was with someone else on his shoulder and I walked right up to him and said “Hello What’s Up?” He pretended like he had never met me. He didn’t want the guy he was with to even know that just two nights prior we had spent the night together. MY FIRST NIGHT WITH ANYONE and he was playing it off as it never happened to my face. In front of everyone to save HIS FACE. I honestly didn’t understand why he would or was doing this to me. I was as innocent as a child about these things at the time. I left the bar in tears, started the car and began driving somewhere but had to pull over because I couldn’t even see the road because there were so many tears and I couldn’t control the car. I had never felt this much or this kind of pain before ever in my life. HOW could someone do something like this to another human being? To someone they had slept with and given everything like that to? Right to their face, in public? When I stopped the car I was right in front of a big tall metal box on the side of the road, they called it a phone booth, remember those? This was in August of 1981 and I was still only 20 years old. I got out of the car and the only person I could think to call in this state of being at midnight was my old girlfriend from high school Joyce. I remember waking her up and through my tears saying “something terrible just happened and I need to come over can you be up and ready to talk?” Of course she said yes come on over. Boy was she in for a shock that night. I told her after I stopped crying that I had a date and got stood up. She said “Is that what all the tears are for? Who stood you up? Do I know HER?” “Nope” I said “His name is Kenny” “What did you say” I said “HIS NAME IS KENNY and I went to HS with him” “OMG”. And I said this just as her mom was walking through the hallway on her way to the bathroom. So the conversation from there was me explaining that fact that this was why we never had sex, why I never went for any of her advances and why I thought or knew that I was gay. AND then what happened with Kenny and why I was crying and so hurt.

Pain came very early in my experiences in my new lifestyle as a young man. Whether it was a gay lifestyle or a straight lifestyle, I am sure they are pretty much all the same, people can be hurtful no matter who they are. I am sure MEN ALONE do not have the MARKET in cheating, lying, and backstabbing. But I will admit something men are not as tough at taking the pain as they try portraying themselves to be that is for sure. As fast as they can dish out the pain, they fall on their face just as fast in their pain too. So I learned very quickly many ways of preventing that pain. Seem cold? It was. Hurt before you get hurt, sometimes, most of the time. It soon became a way of life for me. But here is where the guilt started to creep in. Being raised as a Christian and taught to love and care for all people, the GAME of doing unto others BEFORE they do unto you was all new and different interpretation of an old saying. This is like when the devil said to Eve, “Surely you won’t die”. Well I felt like I was dying inside alright. One emotion, one feeling, one thought at a time. It was all disappearing slowly. It was like trading in something and getting nothing but a lemon in return, trading in my values for false hopes of satisfaction that lasted only a minute. So when I say the old but ever so true saying my pastor quoted this morning, “I may not be where I want to be, but thank God I am not where I used to be.” Look where I used to be. I can’t even imagine ever being there ever again. Some things in life seem like only yesterday, but the story I just wrote about, that was so long ago. I really feel my age when I think of how I have grown since the days of Kenny and the feelings of the pain of the WONDER YEARS.

Today I am in a different place. First of all I have spent so much time wrestling with God in my room and alone with myself over my conflicts. Allowing God to speak through the pain, the tears, the frequent putting my thumb in the Bible to just the right place he places it to hear just what He needs me to read to get His message across to me. Hours, days, weeks, months, and years of fighting the same demons over and over again expecting different results and getting tired of the same results that I have finally surrendered to Him everything I was holding onto. I thank him that He was patient in allowing me to let go slowly while still keeping His promise to Love and protect me in the mean time, and in that Mean Time preparing a place for me to discover the true meaning of fellowship with other believers. It didn’t happen all at once, but over a period of time while I was still letting go of the last things I was holding onto. It was the help and prayers of this faithful few that were the ones that brought me to the point of surrender so as a friend of mine told me in my last moments of depression, “Michael. What if your healing is just around the corner? What if the other side is so close to end your life now would really be the biggest loss of all?” I told her I was so tired of hearing that. That it was the same old cliché that you tell every person who gets suicidal and it never is, JUST AROUND THE CORNER. But you know what? Leslie was right this time. Jamal Bryant was right when he prophesied last August when he said “This is going to be the last episode of the last season of your life with this depression” Everything has been different in my life since then. There are and have been many things I can not explain. But the one thing I can explain, the fellowship at Johnson Chapel has changed me. The people I have met have made a difference in my life. They all have helped make me a changed man. I see the Lord in them and I hope it has worn off on me. From my Sunday school class with the five or six men that are regular in attendance, to the same on Wednesday nights for bible study, I have learned to expect them there, depend on them being there, and seek their wisdom and input. Today I just sort of sat back and soaked in the sharing that was going on. There is one man in his 80’s that even when he just prays, I am blessed. I have been there on Saturday mornings for intercessory prayer and he was singing alone in the sanctuary worshiping and it was the most blessed thing I had ever heard. God did not choose a church close to my home by any means, but He gave me a ministry and a way to get there that blesses me in the process that prepares me so when I get there I am ready to worship and when I leave I am ready to minister all the way home. Romans 12:11 as my pastor pointed out today says Never Lag in Zeal. Or in Earnest Endeavor: be AGLOW and burning with the Spirit Serving the Lord. Be Passionate and Excited about Telling Others of What’s Inside of ME. This is the Spirit I leave with when I go from a day of fellowshipping with my family. This is what I want to live with all the time. This is why when I am at home I am burning up the telephone lines in prayer with them, talking with them, seeing how they are doing, staying in touch, developing a relationship as friends outside of the four walls of the sanctuary. I need them, they need me, we all need each other. I especially like again what my pastor said last week, just because I may not feel like going one week ( not likely but I will play along) others may miss me and need to see me and know that I am there and all right. It matters to them if I am there. So you see it is not just all about me for me. It’s about me for them and vice versa. When someone I know and love isn’t there, I miss them and make a phone call when I get home and say, “Hey where were you today, I missed seeing you because I did.”

My biological family may not have been that close for many reasons and I missed that greatly and sought after it for many years. Still to this day it is a big hole in my heart that is still aching. But God is filling that hole up with a new family, my church family of brothers and sister, moms and dads, grandparents too. I love each and every one of them, including my little brothers and sisters that chase me around trying to toot my horn. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN WAYMOND !!