This speaker, Rosaria Butterfield, refers to her gradual dissolution into the LGBTQ culture ( after being raised in a Catholic tradition) through female social friendships (where she felt safe, connected, shared common justice interests, and felt understood) before it became a homosexual lifestyle and cause in her life and career.
That statement jarred something loose in my mind. I remembered how I longed for connection with “soul sisters” in my adolescence and young adulthood. I was discovering how crass and focused on sex and partying men often were and I wanted something more…. intellectual engagement and emotionally intimate conversations ….. To know and be known. It was in conversations with Bill that I found the spark of that and it drew us quickly into the next connection of loving and being loved. Life and family demands got in the way of much of what we’d first found attracting in one another. I still longed for deep and intimate emotional and intellectual connections while we both were seeking job success, raising children, and building a life. I sought it in women’s clubs, groups, causes and volunteering, all of which failed to bring such connections. I continued to feel a void, and an anger that accompanied it. The anger led to rebellion that also did not satisfy.
And then depression settled in when I came to believe I would live with that longing for deep connection for the rest of my life…. like an odd ugly duckling, an emotional orphan, or as I have described it, as a zebra in a herd of horses. Jesus finally filled that longing in me and, when Jesus drew close to Bill, too, our relationship was renewed in Christ. We both found satisfying connection together and connection within close and loving fellowship with other Bible-studying, Christ-following, church attending believers. But even within the denominational church, as biblical doctrine conflicts and sexuality issues became distractions within the UMC, we felt pushed aside by progressive “DEI” causes that mocked and even denied our evangelical understanding of Christianity.
We became more and more marginalized by the liberal enculturation of religion while we continued pursuing the biblical Christ and our lives became more insular.
Bill, an introvert, settled into the shrinking life we experienced. Retirement, aging, and eventually Covid seemed to diminish many of our ties with others, but not with Jesus, who only became stronger in our lives. “Church” identity became much tighter in a smaller circle, which seemed so opposite to what we’d previously experienced in our Christian journey.
Now, with Bill gone, I am increasingly content, too, with longer periods of insularity…… a handful of close, emotionally intimate relationships and lots of time spent with the Lord.
God has not signaled that He is done with me yet in neither refining nor serving. I am, however, experiencing a change in how I am being deployed in ministry….. again, within smaller, tighter circles.
Or maybe it’s just that the world around me seems so much larger today than in the past that my little corner of it seems smaller by comparison. That doesn’t feel at all like a bad thing.