God so loved

So much to write about, so little time to do it.

Saturday evening my youngest daughter, Carrie, will be married. She will be married to a young man I've come to know and love, Blaine. Blaine is the kind of guy you would want your daughter's to fall in love with. He's responsible, mature, caring and oh, yeah, he's a die-hard who dat. What more could one ask for? No, really.

They have a child already. Despite my longing and what passed for my teaching, my girls have had it backward for a while. They have children, then they are married. At least the second part comes. I can't complain too awfully much because their children (little Emma, brilliant Gabriel and funny Gavin) are the joys of my life. No, really.

But I want to be serious for a moment. If there are readers out there, even those rare beings called new readers, let me say serious and me don't stay together long. But I must take the joking down a notch for a moment.

Let's begin slowly: Recently there have been a number of gay suicides that have resulted, apparently, from bullying that has gone on before the suicide.

Let's be clear: I believe from scripture that homosexuality is sin. I also believe suicide is sin. I do not condone either.

But...

Neither do I condone the horrific bullying that goes on in younger people from straight to gay ...or straight to straight or even gay to gay.

Most of the talk we're having stems from the suicide of Tyler Cleminti, who jumped from a bridge as the result of continual bullying by his college roommate and others.

Clementi's death was one of a string of suicides last month involving teens believed to have been victims of anti-gay bullying. Just days after Clementi's body was recovered, more than 500 people attended a memorial service for a 13-year-old central California boy, Seth Walsh, who hanged himself after enduring taunts from classmates about being gay.

I can't help but think that if someone in some church close to any of them had shown the love of God for those kids, maybe a difference might have been made.

Instead, we seem to make it a duty and a right for those of us who have chosen to accept Jesus as our savior to prove just how right we are. In other words, I don't do this particular act (and you can fill in the blank with what you dislike more than the next act), so I am better than you.

Perhaps it's being homosexual or trangendered or whatever the heck is the next deviant act to come along. Maybe it's having children out of wedlock. Maybe it's smoking, cussing, drinking or you name it as the last thing we tried to get rid of and couldn't.

No one is saying these are not sins. But I'm saying they do not, the performance of those sins, have anything to do with whether God loves them or not. That seems elemental. It is not. There are billions who roam the planet not understanding that God loves them and so do billions of his followers.

We are so ate up with the desire to be right, even in our religion, that we fight over them. How amazingly stupid is that?

I don't have all the answers. I've proven to be something of a deviant in the use of my money (deviant meaning being an exception to the norm), in the use of my time, in the use of my skills. Who on earth am I to question what someone does?

But this I know: God loves us. God wants us to get along. God wants the least of these to be treasured like the best of these. If the least of these are gay, that doesn't extinguish God's love. If the least of these is alcoholic, or a hater or a whatever, God still wants them to come to him and work things out.

We so desperately want rules to go by that we latch onto them, even in scripture, and we say, "well, that's clearly a sin."

But we forget so easily that Jesus came not to condemn, but to save. Jesus didn't mention one word about homosexuality, but he spent volumes speaking about judging and hate and so many other things.

Bottom line is this: No one should feel they are unloved. No one. Because no one is. No one.

We'll work out all the details later. But till then, "God so loved the world that he gave..."

That's enough to start on. In America's youth, in Palestine, in South Korea and elsewhere. "God so loved the world." Not a part, but the whole thing.

"God so loved," not judged or ruled against or condemned.

"God"

That's all I need at the moment to carry me through these exceptionally difficult days.