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Rivers of Living Waters 3
The next day was my pastor's day off and I liked to spend it with my family. We often sacrificed our time together for the sake of ministry and it was only recently that Joanne and I had come to some sort of understanding about the issue. As a young pastor I had often assumed that because it was ministry related, it was OK to be out the whole evening several times a week, and I had been confused about Joanne's hostility toward something that was obviously benefiting the people involved, and which was not only my job, but also a calling from God.
It had taken a serious talking to by one of my more experienced pastor friends to wake me up to the reality that my wife was my first ministry. By the time our first child had arrived, the reality had penetrated even further. There was no question in my mind that my friend had been right and that the Lord wouldn't begrudge me the time I needed to spend with my precious family. I came from a broken home and had never had the security and love that I saw in Joanne's home with her parents, and I wanted my children to experience the same.
Joanne was a wonderful woman. She was beautiful, practical, no-nonsense and put our family and me first in everything. She had her own struggles, particularly in the area of self-image, but this seldom devolved into any kind of self-pity, as she got on with the very real job of running a home and bringing up two children.
We went for breakfast at the Wimpy, as we often did on my day off.
"Douglas, is something wrong?" As usual Joanne was reading my mail.
"No, nothing... "
I looked up from my plate with a bland smile that didn't manage to make its way to my eyes. In the few years that I had been focused on pursuing ministry to the `sexually and relationally broken,' I had not on any occasion felt guilty about anything that I had done or felt. And even now I had not pursued any course of action that should logically make me feel guilty. I had not even "looked upon" Danny "lustfully" (Matthew 5:28) and entertained lustful thoughts, and therefore "committed adultery in my heart", but my mind, heart and body were betraying me. I tried to coax my love for Joanne to reach my eyes -- it was all I could do to refrain from getting up and sniffing the wind to see if I couldn't find a trace of the clean manly smell that still lingered in my nostrils after Danny and I had ended up fused body-to-body the previous night.
I felt a spark of anger and resentment dislodge itself from my heart and hurl itself at the dry husk of the gay self that I had abandoned at the threshold of my walk as an ex-gay Christian. Of course, in the split second that I registered the concern in Joanne's eyes I was wracked with a mixture of guilt and shame, which only poured gasoline on the smouldering embers of my resentment.
Why was I angry with her? She had never, not even once, required that I should sacrifice my nature for the sake of the icon (or should that be "idol"?) of virtue and purity that I was crafting so carefully, in the image of the picture that I thought Jesus held up as the standard.
In that moment I realised that something even more unthinkable was taking place, and my mind and heart recoiled in shock. As my being registered that I held God himself responsible for my plight, I applied a superhuman effort of will and rose out of the mire of my self-pity to face my choices responsibly.
Joanne's face registered relief as my face warmed up and my deep affection for her thawed my gaze.
"I'm just tired, my Love," I admitted truthfully, as I became aware of the bone-numbing weariness that dragged me down. I was used to this. It was the reason that ministers had Mondays off in the first place. We, in ministry, were very familiar with the results of the effort to personally lift the `flock' into heavenly realms on the one day they set aside for such activities.
I saw the alarm retreat even further as compassion filtered out from her heart like an unction and cradled my trembling psyche in its palm.
"Let's go for a walk in the botanical gardens. Your mom has agreed to take care of the kids. It will do you good to stare at the waterfall for a while."
I knew she was right. Joanne had the ability to ground me in the moment regardless of almost any obstacle. On occasion it had been necessary for her to urge me to get over myself, but that was balanced by her fierce loyalty, so I had learned to trust and rely on her judgment, but I instinctively shied away from sharing my true dilemma with her. She could only interpret it personally, given her vulnerability in the area of self-esteem and my growing need to see my sexuality reflected back to me in the eyes of a loving man.
Still, there was no way for me to avoid being with her. She was, after all, my wife, my mate, and even if being with her was a painful reminder of what I craved, by its very absence and the presence of its opposite, I could still revel in the very real love and support she represented.
Besides, I was going through a temporary setback and the more I dipped myself into the streams of Living Waters that flowed from the foot of God's throne, the paler any possible gay reward would become in comparison. I girded my proverbial loins and nodded.
"That's a great idea," I said and paid the bill. We packed the kids into the car. The gardens were just what I needed. And time with Joanne to shake off the melancholy longing that was beginning to eat at my soul.
Joanne and I walked hand-in-hand in the sun, the luminous green of the indigenous plants a soothing backdrop for the peace that was returning to my heart. I was dimly aware that after the sensually charged experiences with Danny that I had accidentally and incidentally been party to, in the last day, being with Joanne was a little one-dimensional. I wrote it off to the familiarity of several years of marriage and comfort that ensues as a result. It was at once reassuring and worrisome, almost as if I had suddenly become colour blind after having gazed, rapt, through a dazzling kaleidoscope. A dull resignation, masquerading as resolve, slid down into my guts and I purposefully quenched the pang of grief at the loss of possibility that threatened to bloom into full-blown anger if I gave it even so much as a sidelong glance. So I took a deep breath and with Joanne's hand in mine, made my way to the main feature of the Walter Sisulu botanical gardens.
In spite of the fact that it was about 10h00 on a Monday morning, there were quite a few people wandering around in the peaceful, sunny gardens. Besides moms with their kids running around excitedly in the peaceful atmosphere, there were also a few couples like Joanne and I. Some were older and it was clear that they had become very comfortable and familiar with each other. I smiled, quietly grateful that this was where I was heading and turned to look at Joanne, pulling her closer while she put her head on my shoulder. As I turned back, two elderly men came up on my left. Although it wasn't obvious that they were together, the same familiarity appeared to hang over them and a pang lanced through my heart like a white-hot chisel. As they walked closer to the rail that guarded the approach to the beautiful little waterfall, they exchanged a few quiet words and I remembered what it had been like to be in a committed gay relationship.
Being in a public situation like this one at the botanical gardens was a bit like travelling in a special bubble that only we could see. We, my lover and I, had been acutely aware of our peculiarity. Neither of us dressed particularly differently and our speech didn't betray us in any special way. We weren't the stereotypical gays that people like to parody: just two ordinary guys, except for one thing. We were joined at the heart by an invisible, yet tangible bond. That was the very thing that I relished then, the absence of which I appreciated about today: always being odd, when now I can always appear ordinary.
I was so confused. In my mind played the now familiar refrain that these poor old men before us were so lost in their deception that they believed what they had was natural and desirable, but my heart lurched with lost possibilities. I was relieved when Joanne turned me towards her to speak to me about my son Joel. The normality of the conversation as we spoke gradually drew me back into the circle of our lives together and a reassuring feeling of safety settled on my heart.
To my relief the two guys walked away, taking them out of my field of interest. Then they were joined by two women who walked up to them and each took a man by his hand. The "gay couple" split into two heterosexual pairs. Oddly my fleeting feeling was of regret that these two old gentlemen had not weathered the storms of man-love to arrive in their golden years as an example that men could grow old together as life partners -- no, spouses.
Joanne and I sat down on a bench facing the waterfall and I put my arm around her shoulder and she put her hand on my leg. We chatted about this and that -- and the ripples in the pool of my being slowly came to rest, leaving me tired but placid, once again husband to my wife, father to my children and minister in our church.
Later I was alone in our house. Joanne had to run an errand that would leave me solitary for some time and I didn't even have to take care of my kids since my mother still had them. I was sitting on the couch with my legs crossed before me and I looked down along my stomach and my eyes came to rest on my crotch. I was wearing denim shorts and I had to admit that the lump in my pants, though subtle, looked enticing.
Mentally I shook myself and decided that, in spite of the whole "day off" thing, I would check my emails. I walked over to where my laptop rested on the dining-room table. I sat down and opened it. When it was connected to the home network I clicked on "refresh" button in Outlook. I had two addresses: one for work and one personal, both Gmail accounts. I decided to be a good boy and ignore the work address and see what awaited me in the other inbox.
As usual there was all sorts of stuff from the online ex-gay group that I had started. I had sent out a plea for financial support to attend an ex-gay conference in Seattle and a lot of the emails were related to that. I was pleasantly surprised to find many pledges and I could see that with the amount promised to me by the church, I would most likely end up going. It was quite exciting as we were due to run our first Exit training (the ex-gay ministry that I had pioneered at our church) and I would get the chance to buy the workbooks and bring them back, while also meeting men and women from the ex-gay movement internationally.
I absently clicked on some more spam-type emails while thinking about the upcoming conference, and all at once I was surprised by a picture of a bare-chested young blonde guy with a naughty smile on his face. The kicker was that he was dressed only in very brief, cut-off denim shorts, so short that his perfect, uncut penis, turgidly erect as it was, could not be hidden by the frayed hem from which it protruded like an obscene Thor's hammer. Unbidden saliva squirted into my mouth as I hastily clicked on the little trash can icon that would relegate the piece of smut to the rubbish where it belonged.
My heart pounded in my chest as I slammed my laptop's lid shut.
"Lord, preserve my heart," I whispered feverishly and reached for my cell phone, dialling Joanne's number.
"Hello, Love," her cheerful voice answered. "Is anything wrong?"
"No, I just wanted to hear your voice," I replied truthfully even though shame still painted my cheeks with the crimson hue of guilt that I hadn't earned.
But even with her on the other side, a lifeline of sanity and safety, I would never be able to unsee the vivid image that still throbbed in my mind's eye.
"Oh God, please protect my mind and heart," I begged as an image of Danny, shy and coy as he had been the previous night, merged, unbidden, with the pornographic picture that I was sure that some spiteful homosexual had sent to my email address to inseminate my heart with temptation to sin.
"Well, it didn't work!" I shouted to nobody in particular, as I resolved to go and work out my frustration at the local gym.
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