This morning while driving, a memory came rushing back.
I passed the church that was formed during one of the most painful seasons of my life, and suddenly I could feel something I hadn’t felt that vividly in a long time. At first, I couldn’t quite place it. There were so many moments from that season.
A little over two years ago, I was nearing the end of twenty years of ministry at a church I deeply loved. For more than a year, a group within the congregation had been organizing for the church to leave our denomination, largely over issues of inclusion. There had been private meetings, anonymous emails, petitions, threatened withdrawal of significant financial support, and relationships increasingly strained by questions of who stood where.
Through most of it, I kept pleading for us to stay together. For twenty years, I had watched people who did not think alike worship together, serve together, care for one another, and participate in a mission much larger than any one issue. I kept talking about unity without uniformity. I wrote that “in Christ, there is no us and them.”
But there was one night when the weight became too much.
On my way to an executive leadership team meeting, I unexpectedly walked into another gathering taking place nearby—a group organizing for the church to leave the denomination. For the first time, I saw the faces in the room.
People I loved.
And I did not handle that moment particularly well.
I interrupted the meeting. I was deeply upset and pleaded emotionally for us not to give up on one another and on the life we had shared. Then I carried all of that into the executive leadership team meeting that followed. There, too, I let out much of what I had been carrying, distracted from the purpose of the meeting, and eventually excused myself.
I later apologized to both groups. I don’t regret the substance of what I said that night. But I do regret some of how I said it. In my desperation to plead for unity and love, there were moments when the way I spoke did not embody the very thing I was trying to ask of us.
Somewhere in those emotional minutes, I talked about my gay son and what he had experienced from Christians throughout his life. And I said something boldly enough that it stayed with people:
If my son is going to hell because he is gay, then I will stand there with him.
Months passed. Eventually the congregation voted, pretty overwhelmingly, to remain in the denomination.
That was the outcome I had hoped for. But it didn’t feel like a victory.
I remember lingering after an executive leadership team meeting following the vote because I was sad. Whatever the numbers said, people I loved were still going to leave. Something we had shared for years was ending. One of the leaders who had advocated strongly for leaving lingered too.
Soon it was just the two of us.
He returned to what I had said months earlier about my son. In a calm, measured voice, he told me he was concerned for my eternal soul and referenced Matthew 10.
I responded as graciously as I could. I tried to explain my trust in the Love of God and my deep desire to follow the way of Jesus—that it was precisely because of that trust and that desire that I could imagine standing in solidarity with my son wherever that might take me.
Then I left the room, and something began to give way.
I already knew this man and I understood some things very differently. What hit me was something deeper: he had looked at the faith from which I had tried to live and minister and become so concerned about what he saw that he questioned my eternal salvation.
And suddenly the implications felt much larger than one conversation. Was this how others saw me too? Had one emotional night become the lens through which some people now understood twenty years of ministry?
The questions reached into something foundational—my love for Jesus, my desire to follow him, and the vocation to which I believed I had been called.
I went first to someone I trusted who knew the details and had been one of my sounding boards throughout that season. I think I needed validation.
And I got it.
But it didn’t touch whatever had just broken open inside me.
I tried to pull myself together and continue with my responsibilities that evening. I couldn’t. I told a couple of leaders that something had happened and I simply wasn’t in a place where I could lead that night. Even that was difficult for me. I don’t relinquish responsibility easily.
Then I went to my car. I remember trying to figure out whom I could call.
And one person came to mind.
Twenty years earlier, when I first came to the church primarily as a youth minister, she had been a freshman in the youth group. I had watched her grow into adulthood, build a family and life of her own, and remain an active part of the congregation. As adults, we had become friends.
She knew the pain our church was experiencing. We had talked about our shared hope that people who understood some things differently could remain together. And I knew that she and I didn’t land in exactly the same place on some of the questions at the heart of what was dividing our church. But those differences had never defined our relationship or our ability to recognize the love of Jesus in one another.
I had also intentionally not drawn her into the details of what I had been carrying behind the scenes. I wasn’t calling because I needed someone to agree with me. I knew we didn’t see everything the same way.
I needed something else.
Something I could barely put into words, although I think some part of me knew exactly why I was calling her.
I needed something that felt as close to the voice of Jesus as I could find.
Of course she isn’t Jesus. She is wonderfully human. But for twenty years, I had watched her become someone who embodied something of the love of Christ—a compassion spacious enough to receive another human being without first needing to resolve every difference.
And that night, I needed that.
She answered, and I lost it. For several minutes, I couldn’t even speak. I just wept.
I don’t remember what she said that night.
I remember what it felt like to be received.
A few days later, I found words.
I carefully and prayerfully wrote a letter to the leader who had expressed concern for my salvation. Reading it again now, I’m struck by how much of what I had spent years trying to live somehow found its way back onto the page. I was wounded. Certainly there was some defensiveness. But there were also boundaries, conviction, grace, and a determination not to return condemnation for condemnation.
I clarified what I had meant that night:
“If my son experiences hell because he is gay, then I will choose to stand with him to make sure he knows how much he is loved. This is a statement of solidarity and love for my child over MYSELF, NOT over Jesus.”
I didn’t believe then, and don’t believe now, in a God who would condemn my son simply because he is gay. My statement was something different: if that understanding of God and hell were somehow true, I knew where I would stand.
With my son.
And it would not be in opposition to Jesus. It would be because I was trying to follow him.
The leader had referenced Matthew 10 without quoting a particular verse. I went back and read the chapter, trying to understand what he had meant. I assumed he was pointing me toward Jesus’ words that anyone who loves son or daughter more than him is not worthy of him.
But I kept reading.
Jesus immediately speaks of taking up the cross and following him, of losing one’s life in order to find it.
So I wrote back:
“It is the example of Jesus, whom I seek to follow, that leads me into that kind of self-sacrificing love.”
And then, later in the letter:
“I do not need to offer concern for your soul because the same Christ who lives in me, lives in you.”
There was probably some edge in that sentence. He had questioned my eternal salvation, and I was very intentionally refusing to return that judgment.
But the reason matters more to me now.
The same Christ who lives in me, lives in you.
I understood what I was trying to say then. I don’t think I yet understood how much deeper those words would continue to take me.
Because before I could write about Christ living in us, I had needed to experience something of that reality myself.
I had first gone to someone who could validate what I was experiencing. I needed that. But validation wasn’t enough. What eventually reached the deepest place in me wasn’t an argument or someone assuring me that I was right.
It was presence.
Someone I had first known as a teenager entrusted to my care had grown into an adult whose presence could now hold me in a moment when I could no longer hold myself together.
Not because she became Jesus, but because something of the Love I had spent my life trying to understand and share became embodied for me through another human being.
Maybe that’s part of what Christ-in-us actually means.
It would be easy to make one person in this story the one who wounded me and another the one who revealed Christ to me. But human beings aren’t that simple.
Neither am I.
That earlier night reminds me of that. I was pleading for unity and love, while the way I expressed my pain at times worked against the very thing I was pleading for.
Maybe we’re all capable of revealing Love and obscuring it—sometimes in the very same moment.
Today, Christ in us has become one of the deepest realities of my faith. En Christō—“in Christ”—was a significant part of the apostle Paul’s theology and language that had shaped my own faith for years. But I think I am still discovering just how deep that reality goes.
Maybe what caught me as I drove past that church was realizing that I was already reaching toward it then.
In my fierce love for my son.
In my imperfect attempts to hold a church together.
In a former student answering her phone.
In the letter I wrote after being wounded.
And, mysteriously, even in people I struggled to understand.
Trusting that Christ is present doesn’t make the wound less real or harmful words harmless. It means the deepest truth about another person is larger than the position they hold, the ways they have failed to embody Love, or even the wound they have caused me.
Maybe that is what I was already reaching toward when I wrote:
“The same Christ who lives in me, lives in you.”
I still am.
Maybe I just trust it more now.
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