GCN Radio - March 30, 2005
Transcribed by Vombatus

To listen to this episode, visit http://www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio

[GCN Radio Intro]

JUSTIN: Oh, Brian, I smile every time I listen to that intro.

BRIAN: Aww, well thanks, it’s a fun intro and I think really represents us. So we’re taping today, Justin, on St. Patrick’s Day. And I know that not everyone is into saints, or into St. Patrick’s Day, but I know for me, it’s kind of like Labor Day is in the Fall which signifies the beginning of Fall, the end of a season and the beginning of another. And that’s how it is for Spring… when St. Patrick’s Day comes around I just know that the weather’s going to start to get warmer, the trees are going to start blooming, and I even have a few little flowers coming up, so I know this is a good time to start thinking about Spring. What is it for you that means ‘Spring’?

JUSTIN: I don’t know, but I would like for it to hurry up and get here because it has been cold and wet for the past two days here and I am sick of it!

BRIAN: You’re telling me!

JUSTIN: I’m ready for short-sleeve weather.

BRIAN: That’s right, I remember you’re kind of a short-sleeves guy.

JUSTIN: You know, I like to be able to dress casually and I’m tired of being all bundled up every time I go outside. But it’s getting there. I spent most of the day today preparing for a presentation I’m going to be giving at Wake Forest University next week, next Wednesday.

BRIAN: Excellent, excellent.

JUSTIN: Yeah.

BRIAN: Similar to the kinds of things that you’ve done there before?

JUSTIN: Yeah, and for anyone listening, if you’d like to have me to come and do a presentation for you school, to talk to the campus gay-straight alliance or conservative Christian fellowship or whatever other group might be interested in a presentation about homosexuality and Christianity, I am available. I have spoken at a number of schools now and always get good responses and am continuing to refine the presentation. So I think this one is the best yet. I’m excited.

BRIAN: Excellent! That’s good news. Well, we’ll ‘spring’ into our show today…

JUSTIN: Oh no!

BRIAN: Ha ha ha. Oh, I’m so funny. Oh my gosh, gee whiz!

JUSTIN: ‘Worst transition, ever.’

BRIAN: You know, if it weren’t for me, I wouldn’t have an audience. Okay, well, we have a really great guest today. We first discovered I. Edison Bolin on our GCN Message Boards, but we could have found him in the heart of LA passing out Bibles to people who show interest—mostly impoverished people. Now he’s teaching in a transitional living facility that he once lived in himself. Edison was good enough to join us on GCN Radio today to share a little bit of his story, so Edison, welcome to GCN Radio.

EDISON: Thank you very much for having me.

BRIAN: Your story is so multifaceted. You grew up on a ranch. Then there’s coming out as gay and reconciling that with Christianity, which we all have to deal with on some level. Then the circumstances that led you into a transitional living place. And now you’re back on your feet, going to school, and passing out bibles. Now, help us make some sense of this. Where does this journey begin for you and what points of that are significant?

EDISON: Well, first I want to clarify the misconception that I’m ‘back on my feet’. I don’t think that I was off my feet when I was living in the transitional facility. It’s been a long, strange trip as some artisans once described it. I don’t know where really to begin other than I never really had a problem knowing that God loved me as I was, He made me how I was, and I believed that. I had never quite put the two together. It’s like, “Okay, I know that my spirituality and my sexuality reconcile, but I’m not sure how…but I know they do.” So I just walked in that for years. As the pieces came together and whatnot, I was able to increase in my faith and my strength, but there was always something that seemed to hinder me. I had my ups and downs, and I would say my ups and downs were possibly… well, a little more severe than most. And it turns out back in about ’96 or so I was diagnosed Bipolar Manic 1 disorder. After a number of years of getting medications and therapies and regimens that make my life more manageable, I realized that I needed to clean up some of the mess that I had done back when I didn’t know what was going on with me. And I was in a position—I could live in Arizona, ignore all of my responsibilities and be fine, and I’d probably never be found out; or, step out in LA no matter what to take care of what needed to be taken care of. A caseworker that I was working with at the time had this great housing arrangement worked up, and she’s like, “No problem, the worst you’ll ever have to deal with is somewhere between 24 and 72 hours that we’re not going to know.” And of course once that started to happen, it kind of fell apart, and I ended up spending maybe a week, maybe a couple of weeks sleeping behind a bush, or staying in a mission, or whatever it took to just get through the period. And I was led to a place called Lamp Community in downtown Los Angeles in an area called skid row, and that’s where the journey really began. I think God led me there because I was able to get in there and so many people have been on the streets for years before being able to get into what’s called a Transitional Living Facility. I didn’t have anything to do with it, really, I just knew that I was doing the right thing; and if I was doing the right thing and living rightly, then no matter where I was at, it was exactly where God intended me to be. And so that changed my outlook on my circumstances and I simply had to look around and say, “What can I do for God today?”

JUSTIN: Edison, you and I have had some interesting conversations. You know, I think a lot of the Christian community, the very visible Christian community in America at least, it predominantly middle to upper-middle class white, protestant… not that this is what makes up the church, but this is the group that controls a lot of the Christian discourse that we see on television. It’s a community, honestly, that I grew up in. So I’m curious, what’s your perspective on what the church is doing today and how the church also responds to those who are not in that kind of economic position.

EDISON: Well, we have a hard time as the Church, especially with the image that the church has built for the most part, being able to separate or know the difference between compassion and pity. And I think a lot of times we play off our pity as compassion. I think that’s unfortunate, because compassion really comes from a place of empathy, and to empathize is to really be able to say, “I’m allowing myself to feel what you’re feeling. I’m putting myself in your position.” And there seems to be this idea that people that are poor, minorities, things of that nature, that don’t fit into the mold, that now that they’re in the church we need to make them more into that mold. And we forget that Jesus Christ wandered the earth—what did he say? He said that the birds have their nests and the foxes have their dens, but the Son of God has nowhere to lay his head. And yet we sit here and go, ‘Oh, these are the things I deserve!’ We’re taught that, sometimes, in Church: to take care of and pray for our necessities. Well, you know, Jesus did without and how presumptuous of us as a church to think that these are the things we deserve. And so if we can look at our community and say whether they’re rich or poor or in the middle, whether they’re black, white, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, whatever they are, recognize that God is there with that person in that circumstance, and if I want to meet God, I have to meet that person there.

BRIAN: Edison, you have this bible ministry, and this is how you’re interacting with the people in skid row. How have you been able to minister to some of those people who are ostracized because of their economic status or living status?

EDISON: Well, I’m not going to criticize some of the groups that come down here because I think that they’re doing a good work, but sometimes they come down with—their ratty jeans are better than some of these people’s best clothes—and they come down with their white socks and shirts without stains and they sit there and try to present this stuff. And sometimes the people just look at them like, ‘these are aliens that have come in here.’ And to some degree we are, we are aliens sojourning in this world. However, when I can come to them on their level, having been there, knowing what it safe to wear, how to act and whatnot, then some of that wall is broken down to begin with. And then secondly as far as the message itself, I think one of the things that I stress a lot in our conversations is the humanity of Christ. You know, they picture Christ as just a spirit, just God up in the heavens, Jesus as one of the Trinity so far removed. And they don’t remember that he wept, that he bled and that he was faced with every temptation and trial that they are faced with not to mention that he was a vagabond, like many of them are. I tend to approach it from that level and let Jesus also become approachable—let them be able to approach Jesus.

JUSTIN: The concept of being fully God and fully man. It’s so easy for us to just focus on one or the other. Jesus certainly, I think we can all agree, would be in those kinds of places today. I think some Christians that I talk to that are from sort of more middle-class backgrounds are unsure of how to respond, as Christians, to homeless people or people that they see who are on the street, some of whom may be asking for handouts and that sort of thing. If you were to give advice to those Christians, what sort of advice would you give them in terms of being good messengers of the gospel?

EDISON: As far as things like panhandling and that type of thing, the point I try to remember is that in Jesus’ day, they didn’t have the social services that are available today. The beggars, the people who were disabled, the people who were mentally ill, they were either at the city gates or outside the city, or some of them were even inside the city, and the response then was ‘they need money, the need it from people.’ Today I say consider giving a part of your income to a charity or whatnot that you feel compelled to, and then when people come up and say, “Hey, do you have this money or that money?” then you can let the Spirit move you as to whether you give it to them directly then, or you can say, “Oh, if you want my money, I gave it over here, go get it.” These organizations usually have caseworkers and things like that that can help that person recognize and meet their needs with the money that you’ve given them.

BRIAN: Kind of switching gears for a second, do you find it significant or impacting in your life at all that you’re conducting your ministry, you’re going about your life, not just as a Christian but a gay Christian? And does that come into play at all? Why or why not?

EDISON: You know, oddly enough, the more I’ve been comfortable with both my sexuality and my spirituality, the less my sexuality tends to have a driving factor in my witnessing or in my life in general. A lot of us would like to have a partner and stuff like that and we go in the areas where gay people are and whatnot, but for the most part as far as the decisions go, I think for myself, especially down here, it gives me the ability to approach not only the heterosexual person who’s on skid row with whether it’s drug addiction or mental illness. I can approach them on their level, approaching them as a Christian, and when we talk about people who are gay or transgender, or those who—and down here there are plenty of people who have had gay experiences because of their circumstances—and I can approach them with an understanding on that level too. So I think it actually opens up the doors. You know, I see someone who’s transgendered and I don’t go, “Ooh, how do I talk to this person?”. I’ve seen him in other parts of my life and the same thing, I think, basically with people who are gay and lesbian who end up on the streets down here. I think a lot of times, like you were talking about, the middle-class white protestant comes in from the suburbs and they’re just taken aback because they can’t tell if someone’s a man or a woman and then they start realizing that they may be in between states and it just freaks them out. They have a hard time relating with them.

JUSTIN: If you open your eyes, sometimes its amazing how the situation God put you in, or allowed you to be put in that maybe you wouldn’t have chosen for your self can open so many doors for you. I want to ask you something that is completely unrelated, just because—I was just thinking, Brian, that this is the first show that we’ve done since our conference back in January with someone who was at the conference.

BRIAN: Right, it’s true!

JUSTIN: So, briefly, Edison… can you give us your impression of it and hopefully encourage people to come next year? [laughter] Shameless plug here.

EDISON: It was an amazing time. It was great to be able to put faces to posts and things like that, and as a matter of fact, I think a lot of people were able to become more personal. I can’t recommend it enough, especially since I notice that a good portion of the community on GCN are not in major urban areas and they don’t have that connection and that fellowship. I’m sorry to say, but I’ve noticed a lot of loneliness and whatnot on GCN lately, and all I can say is that the thing that saves me from loneliness is either getting busy or fellowship. And for a lot of the people out there: Get in touch and get involved. And I think the convention is a great way to do that.

JUSTIN: Absolutely.

EDISON: May I real quick?—I had posted something some time ago…

JUSTIN: Go right ahead.

EDISON: It’s just a kind of creative expression, and it was for the people at the conference.

I want to thank you
For lifting my spirit when I was so low
For providing a diversion when needless fear oppressed
For helping me put my fear into perspective.

I want to thank you
For reminding me of where many have come from
For reminding me that I had a purpose and a mission
For encouraging and equipping my return.

I want to thank you
For showing me that loneliness has an answer
For giving my happiness a reason
For providing my hope a renewed goal.

When parting strikes the bell of gratitude
Longing is a bittersweet tone.

BRIAN: Wow, that’s really beautiful.

EDISON: That’s just kind of is it… what we’re experiencing is when we part it’s more of a bittersweet than anything else I think.

JUSTIN: Well let me just take this moment then to put in a quick plug for those folks who are looking for a friendly supportive fellowship of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Christians. GCN will have its national conference this next winter—I can’t give you an exact date because I don’t have one yet—but it will be in Orlando, Florida. And also for those folks who are freer in the summer, Evangelicals Concerned has its western Connection conference in San Francisco this July. And you can get the details of their conference at www.ecwr.org and it’s called Connection 2005. I’m going to be keynote speaking at that conference, so they are going to be some GCN folks there as well, hopefully, so either of those two conferences. Of course, you can get all of the information on ours at www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio. So either of those conferences would be a neat place to go and you can meet cool people like Edison who hopefully will be able to come back.

BRIAN: That’s awesome, that’s so cool. We’re running out of time on our show today, but kind of as a wrap-up question, Edison, you now have a captive audience of people around the world with their laptops and computers and dial-ups and iPods and you are at the center and we are wondering: how do we get closer to God… just a single step closer? Maybe going out of our comfort zone some more, maybe it’s doing whatever… How do we make that initiative?

EDISON: You know, I hear a lot of people talk about trying to find the will of God in their lives and to be honest with you I don’t think God really cares for the most part whether you’re a plumber or the president… he cares about the character with which you live your life. And as long as we’re living rightly and according to His Word, then wherever we are is exactly where he wants to use us.

BRIAN: That’s amazing.

JUSTIN: How fabulous. What a great note to go out on.

BRIAN: Absolutely.

JUSTIN: Edison, thanks so much for being with us today and we’re happy to have you around GCN and thank you again for being on the show.

EDISON: It was my pleasure entirely, and I look forward to seeing you guys post and look forward to the future ahead of us.

JUSTIN: Excellent. Well, I guess that wraps up another edition of GCN Radio. As always you can send your comments and questions to us at gcnradio@gaychristian.net.

BRIAN: And you can also listen anytime to current and past shows at http://www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio. So for this week, I’m Brian…

JUSTIN: …and I’m Justin.

BRIAN: Take care.