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 5:
I Can See My House From Here!

The best thing about not living in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma - for me, at least - is that when I get to go home, if I sit on the correct side of the plane I can always get a great aerial view of my house, my high school, and all the places that constitute my life as of late.  Try it sometime.  If you ever fly into or out of OKC, and you're on the east side of the plane when it's landing, well.... come to think of it, there's no good guideline I can give you as to how to find my house.  But trust me, you're looking at it.

I couldn't help thinking, staring down through the tiny black dot that was my bedroom window from thousands of feet in the air, how completely ambiguous the world looks from that high up, and I began to wonder what exactly God sees when he looks at it from that high.

Because flying into or out of Oklahoma City, you can see a thin veil of smog - not as bad as Dallas or L.A., but there nonetheless.  You can see the gridlike layout of the city streets, the urban sprawl.  You can see parks and schools and an unusually high number of churches (8 within one mile of my house, almost 20 within two miles).  You can see backyards and swimming pools, skyscrapers and houses.

And I was watching my world go by beneath me, wondering if I was looking at heaven or hell.  Because I knew the evil that exists down here, and I know how I've been part of it - and how I still am.  Someone said to me recently, "Sometimes I think you hate the whole world."

What could I say to that?  "Part of me does."

And I saw my house, and my backyard, and my bedroom window and my neighborhood and my high school.  For the first time in months I'd been around people who loved me and wanted to spend time with me.  I'd walked the San Antonio River Walk with Jon and Tish, watched football with my mom and brother, watched South Park with Caleb.

So if there's a part of me that hates the world, there's another part that loves it.  I wonder if God is torn like this.  We see that in Scripture, I think.  God looks at the world of Noah's day and is sorry for ever having created it.  And yet in the midst of deep sorrow - for God certainly felt the pain and the weight of the world - God saves it.

Kind of like my house.  My family.  Not the most put-together, nuclear, Leave It To Beaver type of household, for certain.  We're comprised of my mom, my brother, occasionally my dad (who's always there in spirit but not so much in person), and a slew of friends who spend nights - sometimes weeks - living with us, eating our food, breaking up (or causing) our fights, and hopefully doing our laundry.

Despite the hardship and the pain that comes from living in this world - because just living is just about the hardest thing we can do sometimes - there is redemption.  I don't think that we're ever called by God to feel a certain way.  Rather we are called to acts of love, acts of faith, fruits of the Spirit (see Galatians 5 for a better picture of this than one I can paint).

God looks and sees this world exactly as it - as we - are, in all our mess, all our smog and urban sprawl, all our sloth and vanity and the ways our hearts find to commit murder every day.  And God isn't afraid of that, which tells me that maybe on some level we shouldn't be either.

So the sight of my house…doesn't last long.  Soon it's gone and the eastern half of our embattled nation lays itself bare before my eyes in a few short hours.  Below me: millions of houses, millions of families and people and broken hearts, creative minds, and souls laid bare to the redemption on offer every minute, every day, if only for a moment we allow ourselves to see it all the way God does.

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