Place: A small, rural town in the backwoods of South Georgia, infested
with mosquitoes, kudzu, and UGA Bulldogs fans.
He’s sixteen, if my memory serves me, and he’s a sophomore at Americus
High School. Artistically inclined and intelligent, Phillip is already dance
captain of the high school’s show choir and is in bitter competition for the
rank of first in his entire class. 4.0 GPA, with plenty of extra curriculars
for his college applications, this kid has everything going for him.
Seem too good to be true? It was. It couldn’t last. See, no one’s story
is perfect. Some people are better at hiding their problems, but the deeper
they’re hidden, the more they eat at the soul. A secret you have to keep is
the deadliest poison. My brother had a secret. Phillip had a secret.
I say Phillip because I want him to be a person to you. He was 6’2" with
close-cropped dark brown hair and a scar on his chin from a tricycle
accident as a toddler. He rode the cycle down a flight of stairs. Phillip
was a kid like any other. He laughed and cried, had friends and fights. He
was a devout Christian; a member of the Flint River Presbytery’s Youth
Council. But that changed. If you haven’t forgotten, Phillip had a secret.
I was twelve or thirteen when I found out my brother was gay. I say found
out because he never told me. I only knew then because I found and read the
letter he wrote to tell our parents. To this day I remember sitting on the
floor in soccer shorts and a t-shirt, reading a two page letter written on
yellow stationary. Phillip was in love with a boy named Chester.
My parents, and in fact, my entire family, sided with Phillip
immediately. We kids had always been taught tolerance by our parents and I
had no problem with the fact that Chip, my God-father, was a gay man. It was
lucky we supported him because soon almost the entire community turned on my
brother, including, to my great shock and disappointment, our church.
Phillip was forced to give up his position on the Youth Council because
gay men cannot hold leadership positions in the Presbyterian Church. At
church he was shunned by people who had once called him friend and in youth
group one Sunday night, he was openly called a faggot in front of a room of
kids. Years later at the dinner for graduating seniors, there were gifts
left by the congregation for everyone but Phillip. The pastor’s advice to
our family on such occasions was that it might be best for us to find
another church.
As you might imagine, these events seriously affected me as a young
teenager. I didn’t understand how a "loving organization" could be so cruel
to a child they had sworn to love and raise in a Christian atmosphere as a
child of God. I asked myself often, "When did my brother stop being a child
of God in their eyes?"
Growing older didn’t make the questions go away; quite the opposite, in
fact. The questions grew in size and multiplied many times over to the point
that I could think of little else. I began to ask myself more often if I was
strong enough in my faith to overcome the answerless questions. Eventually,
for the sake of being unhypocritical, I decided that I could not call myself
a Christian.
I made that decision for this reason: because my old church family denied
my brother (and therefore, me) love, I could not bring myself to love, or
even forgive, them. Until the day that I can do that, a day which has yet to
come, I cannot, in good conscious, call myself a follower of Christ.
In Matthew 22:35, Jesus says that the second most important commandment
is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. I criticized my church for
not being able to love my brother, but soon realized my hypocrisy. You see,
by criticizing them, I myself was failing to live up to the expectations of
this commandment. By despising them for not following Christ, I
was not following Christ.
I have talked much about the problems this has caused me but I realize
that I am not the only one in this kind of situation. Every day, youth,
young adults, and even fully grown-up adults have moments that, if nothing
else, make them question God’s plan. I encourage you all not to lose sight
of the love of God and not to let your faith be stripped from you. There is
little that is more painful than sitting in an auditorium full of people who
feel God’s presence and not feeling the faith you once had.
So, in closing, I would like to remind you to see God where you can.
Maybe you see Him in the sense of accomplishment you get when you finally
kick that bad habit. Maybe you see Him during your hike in the mountains or
in the praise songs during worship.
Or maybe, just maybe, you see Him in an eighteen year old kid, the
average kind of guy who never really stuck out from the crowd, who one day
managed to get over his fear, to cross a boundary, and to tell a story he
wasn’t sure he could ever tell.
