No Stoplight Living

As a young Christian in my early teens, I sat in the backseat of my family’s car attempting to discern God’s will through stoplights. Should I go to the school dance this weekend? If the next three stoplights were green: yes. One red light in the mix: wait and see. Two or more red lights: no.

This method proved surprisingly reliable in supplying an answer, even if God’s involvement in the process remained questionable. At the very least (I tell myself today), it was Trinitarian (three stoplights!) and involved light leading the way like a pillar of fire for the people of Israel. Beyond that, it breaks down into nothing more than the modern day equivalent of reading tea leaves or divining through animal entrails. But that God had a path, and I should be on it, was never in doubt.

Still, I wanted a detailed map.

In college, I learned of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral as a method for moving through the world. With its four sides of Scripture, Reason, Tradition, and Experience, the Quadrilateral suggested the tools needed (a map!) for understanding how I should live a Godly life. While not as straightforward as my Trinitarian Stoplight Scheme, the Wesleyan Quadrilateral attracted me with its attempt to combine the Bible with human knowledge, history, and feeling.

Yet, as I began to face the realities of being a gay person, the Quadrilateral brought confusion. Should or shouldn’t I pursue a marriage relationship with another man? Scripture seems clear on the question with its declarations against it (even if, in recent days, that clarity has become muddied), but what of my experience of meeting Christians in same-sex marriages who deeply love Jesus and who so obviously “live a life worthy of the calling”? What of our traditions as more and more churches affirm gay marriage and perform marriage rites for same-sex couples?

Red light. Green light. Yellow light.

Things have become spectacularly complicated for gay Christians (likely all Christians) in our post-modern era. Where’s a person to go to find God’s way? There’s a saying that “God doesn’t move a parked car”, which seems apropos here in reference to my Trinitarian stoplights and the truth that our God is One who acts. The saying suggests that as we start heading in a direction (for good or ill), the Spirit can guide us. And, likely, this guidance comes through the very stuff of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral—the Bible, our reason, the traditions of our churches and families, and the experience of our lives.

Yet, often, that guidance isn’t as immediate as colored lights in the sky. We go in circles. We hit dead ends. We find highways (and low-ways) that just seem to go on and on and on with seemingly no end. What then?

Last year, I dated a man.

I hadn’t planned to, but I got in my car and it went there. I invited my closest friends along for the ride. Some questioned the direction I was headed, others said little, and still others pumped the gas. I drove slowly then fast then in small circles of my mind as the relationship dissolved in a way I’ll likely never understand.

But I did understand something when I kissed him, when I held him in my arms, when my forehead leaned on his forehead. I knew peace. A person can drive a long way and never find a rest stop.

As I look back on my experience with my boyfriend, I have to acknowledge that for the first time in my life I was fully present in my own body. I wasn’t beside myself looking on or in the backseat looking up for stoplights. I was me and he was he, and we were together. And, in that togetherness, a new hope took the wheel.

And this new hope is not one of clarity on gay marriage (I still don’t know what God thinks of it) or a fresh scheme by which I can immediately discern God’s will for my every coming and going. Rather, it’s a hope in relationship. God is both knowable and unknowable, and will be so forever.

Answers are overrated.

The challenge in front of us then isn’t just to read the signs rightly, but to read the signs with the right Person. It’s this with-ness that God was after all along.

What we do, how we behave in the world, is important, but pales in comparison with our constant circling back to be with God—to have God with us whatever or whoever we meet over the next hill. God will lead through our relationship with God, others, and all creation. The Bible will help. So too the Spirit. So too our experiences and minds and churches. And together, a mishmash caravan, we will make our way to a city where we’ll live alongside and within one another forever and ever.

A home without stoplights.

Perhaps we’ve gotten it all wrong, heading out instead of in. Maybe it’s only when we’re suspended, going nowhere, that we find ourselves at home—fed and warmed by another with nothing to do but be. ~ AJ Saur