The wound that won't go away

If you are a straight conservative Christian, I highly recommend that you read this article by my good friend Wesley Hill, published this week in Ransom Fellowship's Critique magazine. Wesley describes the lonely struggle of remaining celibate as a homosexual Christian, and how having the support of even a few Christian friends can make a seemingly unbearable situation bearable.

If it weren’t for other people, I don’t think I’d make it. For me to live faithfully before God as a sexually-abstinent homosexual Christian must be to trust that God in Christ can meet me in my loneliness not simply with God’s own love but with God’s love mediated through the human faces and arms of my fellow believers.

For all of us who have criticized the immorality and sexual irresponsibility practiced by many in the gay community, how much more earnestly should we support those homosexual Christians who have taken a stand by embracing this highest, most difficult calling of lifelong sexual abstinence? Supporting these brothers and sisters in Christ would demonstrate that our compassion is genuine, that our stand against sexual immorality is true, and that like Jesus we aren't afraid to embrace those whose struggles can only be despised by the self-righteous.