He can't believe all they're saying about his kind. He never believed it could come to this. That they would be debating "his" life was just too much for him to handle.
He has been this way nearly all his life. He hid it for a long, long time. But when a friend of his came out and said he wasn't hiding any longer, well, he decided it was time.
So he showed everyone who he was, what he had done, what he thought and felt.
Next thing you know, he was shunted, even in the church he had gone to all his life. Maybe especially at the church he had gone to all his life.
Then one day he met someone just like him. There was a spark, a magic, a something that is inexplicable. They went out. They fell deeply in love. They want to marry. But the church he goes to say he can't, or rather the pastor there says he won't.
What can he do?
Is he supposed to hid what he is, how God made him? Really. Was that what God wanted? I know the church says love the sinner and hate the sin, but he hasn't seen a whole lot of that going on when he sees people holding signs condemning him. Him. His life. His lifestyle.
He will grant you he doesn't know whether the way he feels is a lifestyle or a choice. All he knows is the way he feels when it happens. The way it has always felt when it happens.
Then the fight began. Churches splitting. Denominations fighting and some splitting. Heck, political parties taking sides. Even fast-food companies taking a stand for what they believe, the inkless are the only ones who can be married in a church. He doesn't mind the company's president believing that. That's his right. But he would just as soon not be part of a national debate. That's not what he is about. He just wants to be able to be himself, and he can't be the way things are. He understands that there are people who don't believe he should be able to be the way he is. That's their right, too, he figures.
And all because of that sentence in the Bible that condemns him, and Rachel, who is just like him.
If he could just take Deuteronomy 19:28b-c out of scripture: "Don't tattoo yourselves. I am God." That one sentence has black-listed him, made him different, made things terrible at times in his life.
If he could just take back that moment when he got that Iron Man tattoo and it felt so good to him. He even puts up with Rachel's Batman logo. But then came that big Captain America one on his shoulder. Then the one that gets him in trouble the most. He got a big cross tattooed on his lower arm because he loves Christ so much.
But when people in the church see that cross, they think only of the sin, not the sinner, and certainly not the Savior.
If they could just sit down and talk about it. Just talk. Maybe they could begin to understand each other, the tattoeed and the inkless.
After all, Jesus said love your enemy. He can't understand why tattoos undermine that. But clearly it does to some. He loves them anyway.
If he never has another tattoo put on his body, if he admitted it was sin, would he then be accepted back into the fold? Or would everyone remember him by what he's already done? Or is it just his sin they can't accept because they don't have the same issue or problem?
He doesn't know, because no one has ever talked to him about it. Everyone he knows who is like him keeps shouting at the ones who aren't. And most of them don't go to church at all. If he could just get others like him to understand it's not Jesus who is doing the shouting.
He doesn't really have a solution, one that will work for everyone. But he thinks that talk, a little discussion, a little loving of neighbors will start things on the right track.
Maybe tomorrow.
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