"Queer as Faith"
by Nathan Gunter

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 25:
24 at 39th

I always get freaked out and a little depressed around my birthday. I don’t know why, but in my twenties that’s been the case. Maybe it’s the fact that after I turned 21 I didn’t really have any more “milestone” birthdays to go – there was 10, then 16, then 18, then 20, then 21, and now, well, the only thing I can’t still legally do is rent a car. And since I have a car, I don’t see the point in getting too excited about that one.

When I turned 20 I was in Dublin, and when I called my mom, freaking out, wanting to hear the story of the day I was born, she seemed slightly put-out that I had the gall to be 5,000 miles away and wouldn’t tell me anything. Like the story of my birth was a classified secret, and if I asked again I’d find myself pinned to the ground by John Ashcroft and his cronies.

I get this weird depressive humility around my birthday, but it’s not the good kind of humility that Jesus seemed so all about. It’s the same kind of “leave me alone” attitude I’d get when someone would praise me for good SAT scores or some other meaningless achievement. I was born. Great.

Birthday stress manifests itself in weird ways. For example, my family wanted to take me to lunch, and I thought, yeah, that sounds great. But of course I had to choose the restaurant, which was just completely unfair. Just because it’s my birthday doesn’t mean I don’t have people-pleasing issues, and the thought that my choice of restaurant might not be what everyone wants – what everyone has been deeply craving in their souls and stomachs all day – was just a little too much stress.

Then there was, “What do you want for your birthday?” I kept saying “Nothing.” Then I started saying, “The charges dropped,” or “Liposuction” which drew unkind stares from the better portion of my friends and family. Finally, I ended up with an iPod and a season pass to the two amusement parks in Oklahoma City. Not a bad deal.

But I was still kind of freaked out about this getting older thing. I fear aging, and regret, because these are both things that my family doesn’t do with a lot of grace. Most people, I feel, glide effortlessly through time, their dreams coming true, their life kind of falling into place like some beautiful, moving work of art. My people, we do it like we’re getting dragged behind a car.

Last year, when I turned 23, I had just moved out of my mom’s house and into a new place with Erica and Tim, and Tim thought it would be fun to take me to a bar he knew called Booger’s. At 23, I was sitting in Booger’s in Midwest City, Oklahoma, wondering what had become of my life. I was beyond freaking out. My mind was sitting in a garage somewhere with the door closed and the car running. It’s all over.

So at 24, I was bound and determined to take the reins and do my own thing. Everyone kept asking me what I wanted, so I thought, what harm can there be in telling them?

So we went to the gay karaoke bar. Some of my friends are troupers, and they’ll gladly embarrass themselves on stage with some Shania Twain or Madonna. Others think they might be just a bit too cool for it, and those people weren’t invited. I don’t really get along with people who labor under the illusion of “cool” anyway, so really, nobody was any worse off.

As I’ve grown my friendships have become more valuable, and being cool has become less. The only time I think about it at all is when I like a boy, and even then I remember that I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of anybody thinking I used to be popular in high school. For some reason, six years later, that can still matter. And yet, knowing the truth of my own dorkiness helps me to realize that my friends love me because I’m me, shaggy, nerdy little me.

So there we were, singing like dorks, celebrating me. Weird, yes, but good to know that there is this odd gaggle of people who are glad I came into this world. I put it on like an old coat that maybe doesn’t fit right, but only because I don’t know how to wear it.

I feel that way in prayer, too, because I don’t know how to believe that God cares. I know how to tell myself that He does, and there was a time when it seemed so perfectly natural – of course! Then, of course, life happened as it tends to do, and I forgot.

Now, though, when I take time to actually consider the damn lilies, the reality of my own redemption seems deeper somehow than it has in the past.

When I became a believer, a man in my church who discipled me showed me something I’ve seen a million times since: the cross diagram. The cross diagram shows us two timelines: one is the view of our own sin, the other the view of the cross. As we see more and more of the sin that is in us, our view of the cross grows.

Life, growing older, aging has taught me that I am more of a lost cause than I can even fathom. And yet, I am beloved beyond anything I could ever understand.

So I celebrate. I sing karaoke, and I let people – and God – love me. Even in those moments when I don’t want to ask for what I want, and when I just want to be left alone to age in my comfortable insanity, I don’t get to. I get dragged out and reminded that my birth – and rebirth – was a good thing.

So now the knowledge is deeper, if I’m more sporadic. It’s more rooted, even if I’m blowing in the wind. And it makes me wonder if next year I shouldn’t rent a car, just for the heck of it.

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