Queer as Faith is a weekly column by Nathan Gunter.  Unconventional and thought-provoking, Nathan writes as a gay Christian struggling to live authentically in the real world.

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Week 1:
Buildings and Bridges, Trauma Rooms and Temples

So I'm on my knees on a sidewalk, blood is gushing out of my head, and the man I can't stop loving as hard as I try is standing over me probably trying not to show me how panicked he is.

And I'm thinking, "If I live through this, that's it for me. I'm going home."

I had fallen through a window. It's a long story with which I won't bore you, but suffice it to say it was the last nail in the coffin of a bad several months. My partnership, the relationship I thought was going to last me until I was gray and wrinkly and ogling 22-year-old boys the way old men seem to ogle me now, had ended, and against my will nonetheless. Two dear friends had seen fit to try to take their own lives. Graduate school hadn't been the theological discovery land I thought it would be.

And now, here I am, my brand new Gap khakis drenched in my own blood, my heart racing, my stomach retching, and a lesbian named Bernadette cradling my head in her arms telling me to be calm, to breathe, to wait for the ambulance.

And I'm thinking of my life, and the nice city that I've built here. The structures that I build of which I'm so proud. I remember now how Ayn Rand would look at a city and see what she perceived as man's heroic nature.

And I'm sitting here and my heroic nature is gushing out of my head and onto my pants, my shoes, the sidewalk. My buildings are crumbling. I knew in that moment I was leaving divinity school. I knew in that moment, looking up at this man who'd broken my heart (who happened to be there when I went through the glass), that the architecture of my life would be nothing like the plans I'd drawn up and pored over.

He and I were over. Everything I thought I'd learned about love and commitment and everything I was ready for and cherishing was gone. And now, I have no career path, my average looks have suffered a fairly severe blow, and the new khakis I'd just bought were ruined.

So twenty minutes later I'm in a trauma room at a hospital, and there is a swarm of people around me. The paramedics who brought me in, a young nurse who cleaned off my face and hands, and a man named Don who stitched me up. They're gathered, and you can see it in their eyes, they care.

So my buildings, all my carefully planned structures have crumbled, and I'm lying in this trauma room being cared for by people who are telling me they love what they do. I'm telling them I'm amazed and humbled by all of their effort, by the fact they can look at what must be a nasty head wound and not pass out. Not only not pass out, but lovingly stitch and nurse and nurture back to health.

And here I am, in the temple of God. Here I am, surrounded by compassion given hands and feet and here I am, flooded with peace, as everything in my life that I'd built, that I'd clung to, was washed away in this rush of blood, and what I have left is all I ever really had to begin with. The knowledge, the faith, the simple and complete and sufficient thought: I am loved. There is One with plans to prosper me and not to harm me, one with a greater blueprint and a better purpose, and at times like this that's almost impossible to see.

But faith is that power we're given to reach out and claim the unseen, I suppose. So I'm loved, and no ruined relationship, no stitched up head wound, no packed-up Toyota can change that.

Just remind me of that in a month when I'm living with my mom.

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