How I Caused and Ended the Drought in the Western United States
There has been a story I have wanted to tell for a long time. It is a real story and it happened exactly as I am telling it. But it is kind of unbelievable. However, in the middle of the unbelievable parts of the story are some extremely powerful experiences and surprising ironies that should leave all of us questioning the very way we normally conclude the moral of a story.
We often hear the overreaching evangelist or politician state that some natural disaster is because of abortion, gay marriage, Mexicans coming to America, etc. Most of us just ignore them and our friends when they choose to repeat their outrages claims.
But I may need to rethink my ignoring what the evangelists have said. You see, I need to be honest. It is highly likely that the very damaging drought in all the western states of a couple years ago was my fault. And I am so very sorry for possibly be the reason for this very terrible drought. As far as I know but I am not certain other terrible natural disasters like the current flooding and blizzard may be my fault too. While I am at it I better take responsibility for the terrible typhoon in the Philippines last year. It looks like from the actual events that I have brought God’s wrath down on the world; I am eternally sorry. I am praying that God will forgive me and stop this wrath He has against all of you because of me. Also, I ask that all of you will forgive me for bringing this weather down on you. Maybe I better explain.
It all started when I was a little boy. Back then, I was told by many of the adults in my church circle, that the church had used its various superior doctrinal scholars to determine exactly what the Bible (God’s word) said. Through these interpretations, I could create a great foundation of truth for myself. If I would but study these truths and then follow them, I would find God; and this truthful knowledge of Him would save me. The proof that I was saved would be that I would be this good, righteous boy and that everyone would know I was God’s special child because I was so good. God would then bless me with tons of good things like rain when I needed it.
In my early years, it was not the rain that I needed. I lived in a part of California that never ran out of water; so I did not need to worry about pleasing God so he would send the rain. The rain just came anyway. However, my family had problems and I was not good enough to deserve God saving me from those problems. So one beautiful day on the banks of the Klamath River in the mountains of California I said, “I am not good enough, God, to please you and I never will be. I cannot do this. God, you need to change me; I surrender to your changing power and no one else’s.”
Big mistake. The more I studied God’s changing power of love the more I realized the church was full of humans just like me that also made big mistakes and were wrong all the time. The only real truth was that we all needed God to change “me,” not “you.” The more He touched me the more I wanted from Him, the more I wanted to be like Him. The wanting of more became wanting more and more love. God did not change my family for me; he gave me the strength and the love to get through. He did not change my church for me; he gave me insights on how we could be different and still be part of the same community.
As I grew I learned to let go of others’ desire to determine the change I needed to make and learned to listen to the voice of the Spirit, and the sources it chose to use to show how I could be more loving.
Kathy, my wife, was a great source that the Spirit used in my life. We learned from each other as well as from God. We were married September 1989. She was 20 and I was 23. She was not perfect and neither was I was I, but we loved what was and pushed each other to move beyond our potential to the risking ideas that there was more to life than what was safe and right.
Over the years I have had to repeatedly go back to my Klamath River experience and statement, again letting go of my ideas and other people’s ideas of what was good and true and just let God do the work. Still, the only thing that God would change was me, not them. It was only my heart that He would work on, and love was the only thing He would produce.
This was very rewarding. It allowed me to fall in love with God, not because He was right, but because He was this extremely exciting and considerate being that was working tirelessly for all His created beings.
So the questions came. How could some doctrines be wrong at times? How could experts who studied the Bible with such determination to be right but then they would not be loving at all? How could I effect change beyond my own self when they had failed at it over and over again? God needed a voice. He was being misrepresented on a regular basis and mostly by people who claimed to know Him the most.
The more I saw this wonderful God who needs to be represented correctly the more life seemed to just knock me down. Lately, it seems, I cannot do anything right. I have lost so much. In 2007 I lost 100% of my clients to the mortgage industry crash. These included some very big clients, the largest mortgage service in the Bay Area and First Collateral, a subsidiary of Citibank. We were doing the unheard of, but in a few short months all was lost and no one was buying.
In 2008 we were all told that the God caused the fires in California. The fires were caused because the California Supreme Court allowed gay marriage to happen and it was a very evil thing. We were scared into believing that we had to vote for Prop 8 because, if we did not, the American-Christian family would be destroyed. We were told that if Prop 8 failed, the churches would no longer be allowed to call gay sex a sin, and gay sex would be taught in public as well as private church schools. So I voted for Prop 8.
Through 2009, my wife and I struggled to get back on our feet and to save our own house from being taken back by the bank, there seemed to be this hand that was guiding things. We watched as each time our mortgage refinance was determined not to be within the framework of those that could get help, and yet, each time the rules were changed and we could continue with the refinancing process. If our approval had been started and finished at any other time, our house would have been lost. We felt that we had been blessed and that someone knew what was going to happen before it happened.
In January of 2010, I was impressed by this same guiding spirit that it would rain until the end of May. What a stupid impression. It never just keeps raining until the end of May. In a normal year in our area, when spring came, the breaks between storms became longer. That just how the weather is here. What a silly impression.
Kathy and I, as we had done for 20 years of marriage continued to seek God’s changing power, to find out how love would do things, and enjoy our journeying together. And it rained and it rained. It was a week before school was out at the end of May and it was still raining. It was one of the wettest springs on record.
On June 1, 2010, the process was over with the bank, and the house had been saved. My conversation with Kathy that day was how proud I was of her for all the change she had gone through to help bring our finances under control. With a reasonable house payment, it would still be difficult; but there was hope again for us and our family. We thanked God for working for us and with us. It was one of the most rewarding days of my life. God had rained down such blessings during those long months. God had shown his hand in changing our hearts toward love, saving our house and in sending the rain. Wow!! But this was not the message.
I came home late that evening after working on a server at a non-profit where I donate my time. Kathy was asleep so I did not wake her, but simply and quietly got into bed. The next morning I was awakened by her alarm clock. But, she was not. Her life, as we knew it, had left her in the night. Over the next few seconds, minutes, hours, and days, my life was ripped apart. I was being changed again and not by my choosing. Our friends and family were so good to me and the girls. There was so much love and real support. People just stepped in and helped. Hailey’s school is still being partly paid for by the generosity of others.
The hardest part was that my very heart had been ripped from me. As I slipped into despair the rain stopped. The spirit had told me that it knew a great trial was coming and that human love as I knew it was going to be ripped from me. This insight alone was all I had for a while. It was the only ray of hope that made it down into the darkness that I was now living in.
And it got darker. It never fails, when you are at your lowest, often those that should be there to encourage and prop you up, do just the opposite. So along with the loss of my wife, my family and I endured some painful and destructive experiences, courtesy of thoughtless and misguided individuals.
So, again, I choose to go back to my Klamath River experience, surrendering to the changing power of love, learning to tune out the mistruths and expectations of others and live in the light of God’s love. Wow, what an eye opener! I was again impressed with how insecure we are as humans, that most of the time when we search for truth we are only searching to prove we are already right, that we marginalize others, not because they deserve it but because we want to push them down as a way to feed our own insecurity. We talk about others changing and the evil that exists in the world, but when it comes to us actually breaking the cycle, we are unwilling to do so.
We have believed so many lies. Lies that say God demands payment for our wrongdoing; that someone had to die to please God; that the poor are poor because they are lazy; that God only blesses the ones He loves; that the current human church no longer makes the mistakes of the past; that it is okay to kill someone when you are defending your country’s security; that we must convert others to our doctrines. And so on!
The struggle to find what God intended for me, the real me, the one that could be a channel of His love, was now more than ever on my mind. I so much did not want to continue the cycle of human relationships as they had been before. I wanted to break the cycle. I continued to study intimacy with God, spiritual mathematics, and economics based on the Golden Rule of love and benevolence. I restudied how the new kingdom of Christ might function and what the meaning behind the old temple might be. I began challenging everything and insisting that every idea must point humans to a God of extreme love or I removed that idea from what I believed.
At some point, at the bottom of emotions, when the darkness is pressing in on you, you have to start to understand the value, a God of love, would place on you. You are basically faced with an understanding that you are a unique human being and that there is a calling to express a love that only you can fill. You start to see that even still as damaged and in pain as you may be there are those that only you can love. Those that your love will make the difference for them.
I was living without the earthly intimacy I had become used to and going through so much grief. At times it was hard to even just breathe, and much of my soul was taken up in watching over the girls. But I had to move on; I had to find the value of love again, in a relationship I could invest in.
I knew I was different. I had not always known, or perhaps denied what I knew about myself. Why? Because the good Christians had informed me that I had to read the Bible their way. I had been blessed with a wonderful marriage to Kathy. However, now with the insights that love and pain had given to me, I knew if I was going to work on a team of two again, I had to deal with who I was. I had to deal with how God and epigenetics and/or life had designed me. I knew I no longer trusted the spouting off of others on any subject without studying the subject for myself. I knew that what was best was for me was to take a male into my heart. I was left with a strong impression that this was God’s design for me.
As strong as the impression might have been, I was not going to follow an impression over the word of God. I do not expect everything to agree with the Bible. I believe that the Spiritual Writings are only a tool to be used to help us to find a God of Love. I believe there are other tools like the Spirit, Nature, science, and common sense. I do believe that Love is the best tool but again not the only tool. I believe the when things do not agree we need to very careful and stay on the side of caution until things are more clear.
A friend said what if the Bible was being misused. I knew that was a high probability. I had seen that happen in regard to many other topics. Some people were certain the Bible said that women were punished and had to be subservient to males, while others insisted that the Bible says all humans must be treated as equals. Still, others said equal but different roles. Well, they could not all be right or maybe there is more than one truth.
I had another friend, who you could tell by the way she lived her life; she was very committed Christian, who had surrendered to God’s changing power a long time ago. So I asked her, how she could be in a same-gender relationship and be a Christian? She told me her story, and what she found in the Bible. She spoke about God’s reassuring voice in her life. Her answer was not enough for me. I had been raised to be through in my understanding of God’s concepts as they were found in the Bible. However, her answer was completely different that what else I had heard on the subject of God and same-sex relationships. It was a start.
So I dug into the Scripture and the original meaning behind every text I could find on the subject of eunuchs and same-gender attraction and relationships. As I studied, I became angry. I had been lied to. Over the centuries, hatred and bigotry against those who were simply different in the way they were designed for love had been added to the Bible by putting the opinions of the translator into the text. Under cross-examination, each text actually applied to certain types of sexual abuse like rape or adultery, but the texts were not a blanket statement about same-gender relationships and certainly not about loving relationships.
Paul in Romans does agree that same-gender lust is sinful. The context is about those that do not love God and deny what is natural, God made, in them. But Paul goes on to say it is not a sin that leads to death. Then he counters that with the concept that the mistreatment of such people is a sin that leads to death. An accurate translation of Leviticus is that a married man – that is a heterosexual man in today’s understanding – should not cheat on his wife with another man. If it was talking about what we now understand as homosexual males, it would have just said a eunuch should not have sexual knowledge of another eunuch. It does not say that at all. The mistranslation comes in the word phrase “as with a woman.” Woman also means married woman, wife, or his woman. ”As with” literally means in the bed or bedding and is used only three times in the Bible, twice in Leviticus and once in Genesis. The Genesis’s usage is also related to a story about adultery when one of Jacob’s sons was in his father’s bed with his father’s concubine.
The discovery of these lies made me agree and I was searching for understanding and healing, not anger. It was not wise for me to follow the bias of so-called church members in regard to their biblical understanding. I needed to follow the changing power of God in my life by his design and not their understanding but it was not my job to point that out to them. Oh, I wanted to just rub it in their faces.
Again the impression came, “I will bring you a male lover and together you will build a new Christian family.” The impression left with me was that God intended for me to stand against the misuse of His Book. But I had to find a way to do that in love. I had learned a lot more and I was not there yet.
How could I do that? There were those much more knowledgeable than I am on all the related subjects and they will not listen to each other. How could I help? I studied more. I open my heart to God, believing He would send whomever He felt was right for me.
With some prayer and with a simple posting on a gay Christian site, I again open myself up to God and the heart-changing love that he has so freely given me. I soon found out that my type was in high demand. People are starving for real committed companionship. They are searching for someone who believes in the holiness and purity of love and has a track record to show that God’s ideal for love is active in their life. They were also searching for someone that together they could be devoted to God and service to others. But for me one stood out; one with an extremely kind heart and a very simple, yet beautiful faith in Jesus. As we talked about the principle of following God and of loving others, the chemistry just clicked. He was everything I needed and more, and he felt I was the answer to his hopes and prayers.
We let the friendship grow. We invested in each other’s daily lives and started thinking about our future. At first, we told no one; then I started telling a few select friends. To my surprise many of my Christians friends came back and told me, “We always knew you were gay” and/or that there was no problem with me being in a same-gender relationship. They understood some Christians did not see it that way, but they would support me as I followed God in my life.
When it came time to tell the girls, again I was shocked. Kathy and I had raised them to follow God and to be open to the differences in each other that make life beautiful. Hailey looks white but is a quarter African and has been told she is not African by others. Isabelle has felt the sting of not fitting in. So as I told them what daddy was and why; it was not a problem for them.
As gay marriage became possible for me in California, I timidly tried to take a peaceable stand in the doorway – referring to my love as being different but not using any of the words that made others uncomfortable or combative. That was helpful to a point, but that was not God’s plan. But I needed to learn to love. I needed to learn to be loving. I was hurting, hurting more for others than myself. I was hurting for all the pain and death and hatred I was seeing. I hurt for those who now hated me and my type. I was hurting for the pain I had caused those who were different. I believe I have finally learning to stop judging, but I was being judged.
They screamed that I was hurting them because they were Christians. They screamed the Bible called me the most wicked of sinners. They screamed that I was the reason for the drought. They screamed that I was filled with a devil. I wanted to tell them how wrong they were. I wanted to show them they were the ones misguided by the devil. And sometimes I did push back at them. But that kind of behavior would not break the cycle. So I continued timidly even though God had given me a personality that shakes things up.
“Your love for this man is My will, not yours; and I will use the two of you to show what love is” just kept ringing my ears.
So as our love grew, the day came for me to sign the papers for my fiancée to come to the United States so my love and I could be together and work together in love for others. It rained that day. Ok, it rains during droughts all the time. At each step of the process, it rained. When there were delays or things were not going well it was sunny and dry.
After he got here there was just too much adjustment and some very real problems and so the drought continued. However, on the day we were married, it rained. On the day his next set of paperwork was submitted, it rained. When counseling was going well it rained and when it was not it was dry. This continued so much so that I could tell when things were not working even if my love could not tell me he was having problems.
We definitely had some problems and there were some really dry spells. But as love would spark and understanding and mutual care for each other developed; it would rain again. Last year was a lot of growth and relationship building. It was a lot of learning the specialness and uniqueness that God put into each of us and why God seemed to go out of his way to bring us together. It also was a year of a lot of rain. Even in the summer, it would rain near us. One summer morning on my way to church I was pelted with mist, apparently, something we had talked about the night before had really help my love and his trust of me. I did not find out until the next counseling session, or did I. Did God tell me with the mist that my love and I were another step closer?
Over the last few weeks, love has completely returned for us. It is deep and other-centered love and we look forward to each and every moment we get to be together and work together on life and healing. That has not been so good for the rest of you, for the rain just poured in our area of California and has caused some serious damage in Oroville and deep blizzards in the Sierras and Nevada. Maybe we can dial it back a little but we are finally both very happy and growing in God. My love is going to get re-baptized and he wants me to be there next to him for this wonderful celebration. We have so much to live for and God has blessed us so much.
We are sorry our journey took so long. We are sorry it took us so long to listen to God instead of to man. I sorry that my delaying God’s change in my life and my love for another caused a delay in the rain patterns in the western United States. I am sorry for the drought. I am sorry there are no easy answers.
“For once you have love again, it will rain again.” And it has rained, a lot of rain.
It may be unbelievable but that is how I experienced. It may not be related at all, but the fact remains, love brings showers of blessings, including the unexpected joy of trusting Him in all things. Love shows us how the differences can make a better team. Love gives us the power to change and love gives us the understanding to what God/Love is like.
I pray that each of us will speed up our journey to love, for what the world needs most desperately is the rain of love everywhere. A storm of love that is so strong that it blows us with ideas that we learn from others. A storm that pushes us like a tidal wave to helps others. A thunder of love so loud that it reaches even those who have blocked their ears to acceptance, justice, and inclusion.
I do not know how to break the cycle. I do not know how to rain even more love on all. I do not know how my character will grow this next season under the flow of God’s changing care. But it is my choice to stay on the journey God has so graciously started in my life. Let it pour.
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