As some of you know (via this story), I became a Christian very suddenly, out of nowhere, when I was 38 years old. Yay!
I was at that time working in the Office Services department of a large law firm. "Office Services" consisted of me and a young woman named Joan Finch, who was my supervisor.
Joan Finch was also a lesbian. To a lot of Christians, of course--just as with a lot of people generally--someone's being gay or lesbian can register as a Fairly Large Deal. But I had been around gays and lesbians all my life, so I had no understanding at all of someone's sexual "orientation" being any kind of ... moral indicator about them. I knew it didn't tell me anything whatsoever about a person's character. Some gays are awful people. Some are noble, wise, kind, and impossible not to love. Same as anyone else. People are people.
I'd certainly had gay friends all of my life. Real friends. Best friends. It's obnoxious to stereotype, but generally gay people have suffered for being gay: Just about all my gay friends, for instance, have countless stories about as kids getting regularly beaten-up by ... well, by everyone around them. Schoolmates. Siblings. Dads. Crosswalk guards. Dog walkers. Whatever.
Growing up gay in America can just be a tough row to hoe, period.
And that gays and lesbians have generally suffered in their lives means that they are generally sensitive to the suffering of others. And generally that makes them kind, compassionate, and insightful about the things that make humans tick. Which is why I generally found them to be people with whom it was rewarding to hang out.
I'd certainly found that to be true of Joan Finch, anyway.
In my world, Joan Finch rocked like Gibraltar. She was easily one of the two or three funniest people I've ever known. Her mind was lightening fast, she was deadly witty--and man could she do voices.
Seriously: It was like working in the middle of the funniest TV show you've ever seen.
Besides loving working with Joan Finch, I also deeply respected her. That girl worked. We spent all of our time alone together in this huge room equipped with two gargantuan photocopy machines, four office tables pushed together, a fax machine, a shipping station, and two walls of bay shelves holding so many office supplies we mostly felt like employees at an abandoned Office Depot. It was sooooo boring in there. There was never anything to do--until some Big Case launched into gear, and we suddenly had to spend 10 hours straight making photocopies or whatever.
The thing about Joan that so impressed me was the pride she had in her work. All her photocopies looked awesome; she could take a wrinkled, faded, completely wrecked document, start pushing all kinds of buttons on the photocopier's airplane-like control panel, and in seconds she'd bust out a copy of the thing that looked better than the original ever had.
We lowly Office Services folk prepared the vast array of documents our firm's lawyers used in court on behalf of the largest corporations in the world. Joan's document packages were always Library of Congress worthy. Mine always looked like something a junior high kid had dumped from his locker into a box on the last day of school.
Actually, they didn't. At first they did, but the care with which Joan did her work forced me to kick up my own game. She taught me how to be greatest Office Services worker that it was possible for me to be.
But I loved her anyway.
I knew Joan, too. We spent a lot of time--endless days on end--doing nothing but talking. I knew everything about Joan Finch. She was smart, kind, painfully hilarious--and was taking night classes in massage therapy, which I kind of ribbed her about before I learned that she could name every one of my ribs. Turns out certified massage therapists have to learn so much as far as I can tell they're about two pharmacology classes away from becoming full-on physicians. Who knew?
Anyway, I had my Big Conversion Experience at (of all places) work, on a Friday that Joan had taken off. When she came to work the following Monday, I waited until our morning busyness had ebbed, and then broke the news to her that since she saw me last, I had become a Christian.
The moment Joan registered what I was saying a look of genuine heartbreak and anxiety came across her face.
"Oh, no," she said. "Now you're going to hate me."
I was dumbfounded. I'd just been filled with the love of God!
"Why?" I said, slightly panicked. "Why would I hate you?"
"Because Christians hate gays," she said. "Don't you know that?"
"They do? We do? Why?"
"Because it's in the Bible," she said. (Jane had grown up in the church.) "They have to. It's part of their whole deal." And then Joan turned away from me, so that I wouldn't see her cry.
And that was how I learned that, by the will of God, I had joined a group of people very well known for having very serious issues with a whole other group of people for whom I'd always had nothing but love.
It's a tad disquieting, isn't it, when something wonderful happens to you that seems so simple--and then you get that first inkling of understanding that it's entirely possible that the wonderful thing that's happened to you isn't, in fact, anywhere near as simple as you'd thought.
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