Monday, March 3, 2008

Coming Out

Some of you will find this very strange, so I hope you'll just bear with me. The fact is, I've been hooking up lately with a lot of old friends who I haven't seen in AGES, and I've started to realize that I may have been somewhat guarded with them, even dishonest.

I grew up in the church and always stayed pretty involved all the way through high school, but I was never very verbal about my faith. In college I experienced my rebellious period, so those friends wouldn't know a thing about my walk with the Lord. So now that I've started reconnecting with some of these old friends, I think I need to come out of the closet and let them know that I am a Jesus freak. There, I said it. You were probably already pretty suspicious.

Not to get completely of track, but I've had several friends come out of the closet and tell me they were gay. This makes me very uncomfortable, and they know it does. The truth is, it even sometimes makes me angry. However, it doesn't stop me from being their friend. In fact, I'm somewhat honored that they trust our friendship enough to tell me. Here's where I'm going with this - I know my being a Jesus freak makes some of my old friends uncomfortable. Some of the things I talk about even make them angry. But I sincerely hope it won't stop us from being friends. I love you guys, and I love hearing about your lives.

I find it interesting that when a life-changing diet or book or recipe or cleaning product comes into my life, it's easy to tell my friends - in fact, I can hardly wait to tell everyone. But when Jesus turned my life upside down, there were actually people I was afraid to tell. Why is that?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really don't like using Jesus as an adjective for anything, especially "freak". That's as bad as saying you are a Christian athlete. No, you are an athletic Christian.

Gena said...

My apologies. I did not mean to offend. I am a person who freaks over Jesus. Or, if you don't like the word "freaks", I am an exuberant follower of Christ!