This song was inspired by a small event, an almost chance meeting, twelve years ago. “John and Josie – a true story” was written about an intimate interaction, a moment I seemingly stumbled into, which had such a deep impact on my heart’s thinking – the ways in which I understand God’s love – that its ripples still echo in all my relationships, even to this day.

This song … this story … is one for all the mommas, the grandmoms and dads, the brothers and cousins who perhaps have a loved one who is celebrating Pride month this year as an emerging member of the LGBTQ+ community. I want to share it with you now because I know how difficult it can be, especially for those of us raised in church, to allow new perspectives, new understandings to rise into our hearts and minds.

The religious rules, taught to many of us in childhood, can be so hardwired, so set in stone, so rigid and absolute, that to allow them to shift or differ in any way can truly feel like a crisis of faith and a betrayal of all the deepest truths we’ve held so dear.

Such is the tectonic shift which many of us feel when it comes to issues of faith and sexuality. Especially, homosexuality.

Even if – as was the case for me in my much younger years – we have friends or loved ones who are gay, queer, trans or non-binary, we perhaps just allow those paradoxical pieces of our lives to sit separately in our hearts: religious doctrine on one side and family on the other. Not really rejecting our queer loved ones, but not truly realizing that perhaps we haven’t worked to understand, engage with, and love them for who they are, either.

We all know that any large paradigm shift, any big change of heart and mind, only really arrives in our spiritual thinking when we are deeply met; our hearts truly impacted by the love of another human being, or the love of our Creator.

In my case it was both.

In 2013, I was living just outside of Boulder, Colorado, working during the day as a full-time mom of three, and in the evenings as a part-time musician. Those particular years, during the fallout from the great recession, were a famished time for me and my family, in which we’d seen many losses, including our home to foreclosure, our savings to survival, close friends to cancer and suicide, and – almost – our sanity to the grief and pain of it all.

My husband and I were like two washed-out survivors aboard a limping liferaft, clinging to one another and paddling toward any visible shore-line, desperately trying to save our family – financially, emotionally and even spiritually.

The miraculous God of provision who I had known so deeply during my childhood as a pastors’ kid was now missing in action. Instead, it seemed, I was learning – slowly and painfully – about the intimate mystery of invisible, secret love. Love which doesn’t alter with our outer circumstance, but which stays with you in the darkness and calms your fears. Love that holds you and doesn’t let go. Love you can’t see, you can only stumble blindly behind, holding onto for dear life. This was the God of the dark places that I now knew in these unfamiliar paths of suffering and loss.

On this particular Sunday in 2013, I drove down to Denver from Boulder to buy some sound equipment from a fellow local musician. My small business – performing in bars and breweries four nights a week – had grown busy and lucrative enough to meet the grocery budget of our struggling family, and I could now afford some badly needed new sound equipment; and fortunately, a fellow musician had some for sale.

We’d never actually met before in person, this fellow female musician – let’s call her Josie – and I, but she’d kindly hooked me up with a few gigs and we’d messaged back and forth enough to have a friendly rapport.

When I arrived at her apartment, she asked me in, introduced me to her partner and began to show me the equipment I’d come to buy. But in moments, the topic of conversation moved from lighthearted to serious as it quickly became evident from their hushed tones and wide-eyed expressions that something much deeper and of much more importance was going on for this couple, on this particular Sunday afternoon.

Both their faces were pale, distracted, almost a little shell-shocked. There was a stillness in the air, like I had walked in on a very private, sacred conversation. And as it turned out, I had.

In a voice which felt strained, but was choosing courage over fear, Josie explained to me that she and her partner – who was now her fiancé – had just “come out”, via an email to their friends and family. And, as if this event wasn’t daunting enough, Josie shared that she had been raised in the conservative Christian community and had herself attended seminary and studied to be a member of the clergy.

And so, in their “coming out” email, this brave couple had explained to family, to friends, to church folk, and even to colleagues from seminary, that they were gay, that they were in love and engaged to be married and spend their lives together.

Josie confessed that she had struggled with this decision for many years but had finally decided she had to be honest with her family and community of origin about the true nature of her deepest self. It was evident from all she said that she had come to the belief that God accepted and loved her just as she was, and that in order to accept and love herself in the same way, she must decide to release herself to openness, and be true to herself, no matter the risk.

Listening to their story – swiftly, yet so reverently shared – I felt myself deeply moved by their courage. Their co-choice to trust that they were completely loved, no matter what circumstances of rejection, pain or isolation might come their way. These ladies – who didn’t know me at all – could not possibly have known that I too was born and bred in Christianity, the child of pastors, the grandchild of missionaries. They could not possibly have known that I too was struggling with painful questions about the love of God; wrestling within, trying to reconcile myself and my broken heart with the circumstances of my seeming abandonment by God.

They could not have known, that I had also reached a season in life where all the usual boundaries and guidelines of “faith” and “spirituality”, the seemingly safe container of religious belief in which my life was formed, was now crumbling away, and I needed to choose to let go of my small beliefs about God, to forgive my vast disappointments with Life, in order to truly find a deeper, more authentic journey with God.

It was a case of losing my life to find it, and the reality of the crisis within felt like it was splitting me in two.

A lump, like a knife, rose in my throat as I listened to their courage, their choice to trust, not in societal conventions, or the well-trodden paths of uniformity, but in the Love of a Maker who surely knows us deeper than we know ourselves. My faith had been wearing very thin through the years of loss – and more loss – but I too desperately wanted to bank on this incredible love, to claim it as my own. I could feel its call on my heart resounding louder and louder as I listened to their story.

It was like I had been allowed – almost accidentally invited – into a sacred space, to observe, to witness, maybe even to understand. The sacred space of two people, full of fears and inhibitions, but still, choosing to trust, no matter the consequences, in love. Their love for one another, but also, in the ineffable, undoable, inscrutable love of the Infinite.

Their “coming out” email had been sent the night before and they had awoken to responses from friends and family. I asked how that had been. Not too bad, Josie replied. One close friend from seminary had written that he was happy for her, but that he was “worried about her salvation”.

She almost laughed as she said it. As if all the doctrine, wrung out, poured over and over into our young minds, about Heaven and Hell and the finality of those destinations could possibly just be forgotten. As if this question of salvation or damnation wasn’t one that had occurred to her a hundred, thousand times over the years. As if she hadn’t had to believe … doubt … lose faith … trust … find new faith again and again, her belief growing and widening out over the years of struggle; choosing to trust that God’s love for her was something from which there could be no separation. Gambling with her very life, banking on the hope that church doctrine could be fallible, and love is stronger than death.

As the conversation came to a close, I paid her for the sound system, and we packed it into my car. I gave Josie a hug and wished them both the best; and just as I was walking out the door, her fiancé, who had remained mostly silent throughout the conversation – shocked, I assumed by the reality that their secret was finally out – spoke up, and her words, just one simple sentence, rocked me to my core.

“You see,” she said, “We know the love of God so much deeper than most people. We’ve had to work so much harder to believe in it because we were told all our lives that it wasn’t for us.”

Her words, so simply put, so forthright and true were like lightning in my heart. They broke through me with the clarity of a thunder roll, speaking life and freedom to my own doubts and washing away any remnant of doctrine that remained rooted in conditional love, or good circumstances being the evidence of God’s so called “favor”.

The Mystery of Breaking the Rules to Keep Them:

Often, after that day, I would reflect on the story of Christ from the gospel of Mark – the one where he healed a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath – breaking the most sacred societal rule of his day and causing upset with the religious leaders of his community. It was because he cared more for the wholeness of a person, than he did about following the rules; even the rules which had been given to Moses by God!

“Sir, which is the most important command in the laws of Moses?”

Jesus replied, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. The second most important is similar: ‘Love your neighbor as much as you love yourself.’ All the other commandments and all the demands of the prophets stem from these two laws and are fulfilled if you obey them. Keep only these and you will find that you are obeying all the others.”

In this breaking of the rules, I realized, Jesus himself has demonstrated that Love is the utmost, the highest, and the most foundational rule of all. The rule which all other rules must be based on and supported by.

So, if our rules about homosexuality, our rules about marital relationships, or our rules about our religion get in the way of us fully loving our neighbor – or our kid, or our brother, or our sister, or our cousin – then Christ has given us permission to break them. In fact, I believe, we must break those rules in order to faithfully follow the highest rule of Love which lives at the very seat of our hearts, with God.

Scripture says that when Jesus healed that man and broke the Sabbath … “he looked around at them (the people in the synagogue) with anger and he was grieved at their hardness of heart” … Mark 3:5  Grieved that they couldn’t see past their rules and understand compassion. Grieved that even though their brother was in pain, they couldn’t push past their absolute worship of the rules and understand that the Sabbath was made to serve them, not the other way around.

The rules were made to benefit us, not to cripple us. If the rules are crippling our love for another, then let’s break past those rules and follow a higher one.

Let’s follow that most life-giving of rules: the rule of love. This rule has set our hearts free. How can we dare hold back, and not extend that freedom to all others, whatever their politics, religion or sexual orientation may be?

That was what I knew was being asked of me that day as I drove home from Denver to Boulder, sobbing great tears of relief, of thankfulness, of understanding. Sobbing because I felt myself invited, asked, my heart commanded by an irrefutable imperative to move past the hardwired knowledge of my old religion and invited to trust in my fellow human beings. To say “yes” to the witness of their story and the love of God they so deeply displayed. To accept, not only the validity, but also the beauty of the love I had just witnessed … a love which flowed freely and powerfully between these two women and their magnificent open-armed Creator.

A love which was willing to risk everything, even heartbreaking rejection or lifelong banishment from community or family. How many of us can say we have had to love so passionately or take such naked, vulnerable risk in order to be authentically true to ourselves, our life-partner or our union with the Creator?

Knowing a Love much larger than knowledge:

But for me personally, this experience, this chance meeting in a sacred moment, was about more than whether or not Josie and her fiancé were gay or straight. Homosexuality, I believe, was a theological hurdle I had left behind long before this experience. For me, the conversation mattered so much because of what Josie’s soon-to-be wife had confessed: that she knew the love of God!

Digging deep to find this knowledge in times of trouble, reaching high to attain this knowledge because my whole being longed to be enlightened and enlivened by it; this had been the goal of my whole adult life! How many, many times had I prayed the prayer from Ephesians 3? It had been the dearest prayer of my childhood and youth!

“That you may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

And now here was a woman telling me she’d found this treasure – even when others, perhaps even those in spiritual authority, had told her profusely that it wasn’t for her! My heart and mind were blown wide open. I wanted this.

I wanted this so badly and here it was meeting me face to face, not in church, not in the high or holy places, but in the courageous story of a gay couple who had just come out and committed themselves to love, to one another and to God.

To know the love of God! Growing up in a missionary family I had heard teacher after teacher preach on the wonders of the spiritual enlightenment that might be found for those who “knew the love of God”. It was like the Holy Grail of the charismatic movement … sacred, hidden and hard to find!

But, just as Christ had promised, in his paradoxical teaching about the true nature of “blessedness” it was this one, this person – one who might be considered poor in spirituality, because of her sexuality – that was actually rich, actually blessed.

Rich because … she knew the love of God. Rich because her seeming spiritual poverty, and the religious rejection that came with it, had caused her to seek out the love of God! She knew it deeply enough to bet everything on it: her reputation, her community, her relationships, even her eternal destination and “salvation”.

So, could I then? Me, who had never once been told – not once in my whole life – that I was unacceptable or rejected by God. Could I learn from this couple and somehow find that same incredible trust, despite the very real and painful circumstances of my life. Could I believe that I am loved by our infinite and incredibly intimate Creator?

Could I, would I, like Josie and her wife, bet my life on it?