Volume 4: Issue 6
May/June 2000
Suffering
Table Of Contents
Cover Story: Suffering:
None of us are called to be "Messiahs" for no matter how great our
need (either subconscious or conscious) for self-sacrifice, or how
obsessive this belief may be. God's gift at Calvary provided healing,
forgiveness and wholeness for all of humanity. God needs no more
Messiahs.
While I do not
believe that God directly punishes anyone for their careless or deliberately
cruel actions towards another, I do believe that there are natural spiritual
Laws that God set into action when the Universe was created, and Jesus to me
spelled it out best: "What you sow, you will also reap."
Suffering has visited some of our heart-homes so often it feels like an old friend. Let it be a guest, learn from it all you can, it will often teach you more wisdom than the good times will.
If suffering was an indication that one was out of the will of God, one
could thereby conclude that every one of the heroes of faith in Scripture was
out of God's will. It is a spiritual fact that suffering that is brought
about by unGodly forces can not only be redemptive, but show us to be in
God's will, in that the closer one draws to God, the more he or she will be
called upon to suffer.
I was a transsexual! The Lord had dealt me yet another blow,
I thought!! ... My suffering was well deserved, I was a freak... a
perverted, twisted joke of a human being.
What the author hopes will happen for the reader is that this article will
give him or her hope that regardless of the pain they may be experiencing
because they have been rejected by family, former friends, the church or
society as a whole, peace can be experienced merely by a change in one's
attitude regarding their afflictions and there is a good reason for not
giving up on one's self.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
And why are you so far away from my distress?
After several weeks of receiving this answer, I understood that I was not to
ask any more, but to accept that God desired to keep me as I was, a gay man.
God had said "NO!" and I had to start learning how to live with that.
If you're so damned good, why all this suffering?!?! Why have the past ten years of my life been so miserable? Oh sure, sometimes it's been okay, but please, please, give me joy! I want joy! I want thoroughgoing peace. Why can't I have it?
Before the foundation of the world, from eternity past, God has chosen us (believers) as "holy," which means we have been set apart, for Him, with an eternal purpose. There is an eternal purpose in everything we get involved in. Even on this earthly, temporal situation, there is an eternal purpose in it.
Homospirituality
God and sex. One, I learned about through very
intentional, formal instruction, the other, through hearsay
and secret books and brief, embarrassed sections in health
class. The connection between the two was implicit and
vague but strong enough to stop conversation if one came
up in the discussion of the other.
The Bible is not, nor was it intended to be, a recipe book for the petty
concerns of daily life. It was intended to remind us to look up, when those
petty concerns become overwhelming.
Youth:
I am going to present several scriptures that will help on reconciling our homosexuality and also to prove that homosexuality isn't a sin.
Features:
"... the documentary profiles sixteen sons and
daughters-between the ages of four and twenty-three-in five families
who are facing the usual highs and lows of growing up while
encountering varied reactions from extended family, classmates,
teachers, neighbors, and public officials."
Rev. Thornburg hopes those who do take time to read the book will come away with a better understanding of the issue facing the church and why homosexuals should be welcomed.
The Union United Church, a 125-member institution led by Rev. Theodore L.
Lockhart, voted to become a "reconciling and inclusive" church - a term that
essentially means a church that accepts and affirms gay and lesbian people.
From The Pulpit:
Why does God permit testing of our faith? Because such tests
stretch our faith to its outer limits.
Bible Study and Inspiration:
Jesus remains at the door, pleading with us to open. His love is
nothing to play games with. In a world where true love is in short supply,
none of us can afford to let him, who is love itself, stay outside, bathed in
the dew of our indifference.
Despite the fact that God has repeatedly saved the people and blessed them, the people remain clueless about what God truly wants of them. They have sacrificed and still have practiced injustice, oppression and evil and have displayed haughtiness. God tells them their sacrifices are not what God requires of them.
Having studied the whole debate from all sides, I can only
conclude that the attraction itself is that desire, that stretching out after, that
longing, described in Genesis 3:16. Thus, it is there that we see the origin of
sexual orientation.
Let us be honest for a minute: how many of us, as gay, bisexual, or
transgendered men and women following Christ, have not at some point
understood Jeremiah's prayer in chapter 20? How many of us have not wished
never to have been born rather than to struggle with our sexuality on the
one side and our church on the other?
Holy Humor!
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