Here is the testimony of Philip Spooner, an 86 year old veteran of WWII who spoke on behalf of Maine’s marriage equality bill on April 22, 2009. Just try and convince me that listening to this dear man doesn’t make your eyes spring a leak.

Kathy Baldock is a evangelical Christian and a straight ally of GLBTQ people. I’ve been saying all along that being gay and Christian isn’t a contradiction and neither is being an evangelical and an ally.

This captures the moment from a few weeks ago when marriage equality passed in Argentina. You don’t have to understand Spanish to experience the joy of the moment. It’s pure goosebumps in any language.

Four days. Four days ago I offered you the idea that we are who we are and that we love who we love, because it’s by God’s design and for God’s purpose. Being GLBTQ is our divine calling. This is the very way in which God wants us to live in the world and engage with the world, to be queer folks living out the Good News of Christ in wholeness and truth. I encouraged you to lay aside the other voices inside your head and give yourself permission for four days to believe that it’s not by mistake or by sin that you’re gay, but by the will of God for God’s good pleasure.

The four days are over. As much as I believe in the possibility of miracles, I didn’t expect all doubt would be erased and all the old messages silenced with a few words and a few days. Four days isn’t a holy number and the words of affirmation aren’t a magical mantra. But maybe, just maybe, during the last four days you had a little window of time in those 96 hours where everything but God’s assurance and love faded away into the distance. Did you have a moment like that? Were you able to breathe a little deeper while it lasted? Did the weight of self-doubt feel a little lighter? Whatever experience you had remember it, and when you remember it take the time to imagine walking in that assurance and freedom every moment of every day of your life, because whatever that time was like for you dear sister or brother, it’s only a taste of all that God has in store for you.

My schedule is a little weird while I’m still out of town but my intention is to spend a few more posts on transforming the old messages before moving into the unique gifts we bring to the church and world as GLBTQ Christians.

I was lurching through an eleven mile training walk yesterday when this song began playing on my iPod, and I knew I had to share it with you. It says far more than all my words above combined. Listen and know.

The One Thing I Know by Sara Groves

The One Thing I Know is from Sara Groves album, The Other Side of Something.

D and I met in 1999. In the summer of 2001 we registered as legal domestic partners in the State of California. Six years ago today D and I were married. In the photographic images above D is the radiant dark-haired beauty. I’m the dewy-eyed, bottle-enhanced blond with the goofy grin stuck on her face. My cheeks were sore for three days.

On our wedding day I held more love in my heart for D than I even thought I had the capacity to hold. I loved her with all I had within me to love, but love’s an amazing thing. Amazing because where I once loved her with all my heart, the more time I spend loving this dear soul the more my heart opens to holding even more love than it could once contain, not only for her but for the God who brought her to me. Every day I fall one notch deeper in love with D and with every new plunge I put my hands to my heart and say “Thank you God.”

There are a whole lot of folks who attempt to diminish our relationships and offer a wide range of replacement words and Paul Cameron inspired explanations for our love. Lust. Unnatural affections. Perverse desires. Lesbians bonding with each other to replace the maternal nurturing their mothers failed to give them. Gay men bonding with each other as a substitute for an absent or emotionally unavailable father. Only two weeks ago while visiting the evangelical church where I served for a number of years, I was approached by someone who had been a close friend and ministry colleague who dismissed my relationship with D by saying with a smirk, “Unless you have a penis you can’t have a wife. Do you have a penis now?” Just so you know, I had a dozen random one-liners that zoomed immediately through my head but went unspoken. Deep breathing, lip biting and gnashing of teeth helped. Obviously I was offended by her comment but then I think straight couples should be equally offended if the main validation of a marriage boils down to possessing defined anatomical equipment rather than oh, I don’t know, let’s say love, commitment, fidelity, kindness, and mutual respect for a start.

In my reading the other day I came across these words of St. John of the Cross:

Some will spiritually acquire a liking for other individuals, which often arises from lust rather than from the spirit. This lustful origin will be recognized if, on recalling that affection, there is not an increase in the remembrance and love of God, but remorse of conscience. The affection is purely spiritual if the love of God grows when it grows, or if the love of God is remembered as often as the affection is remembered, or if the affection gives the soul a desire for God – if by growing in one the soul grows also in the other. -The Dark Night

This is what defines the rightness of a relationship, the presence of God’s love, not an appendage, and this is the very thing that’s blown me away from my first days of falling in love in D. I find my thoughts often turning to God and my heart filling with reflections on God’s love for me even in the midst of being so loved by D. As I grow deeper in love with D I grow deeper in love with God and while they’re two separate relationships, they’re bound together by Spirit, the love in my heart and the love in her heart born out of the same source, the love of God. I don’t know my marriage with D is good because it feels good, but because it is good and blessed and holy.

To D I say Happy Anniversary my love, my wife. May you know every moment you live that there’s someone who cherishes you beyond measure and considers you one of the finest jewels of all God’s creation. Thank you for saying “Yes.”