The 5-hour Drive: A word on fear & hope

When my friend Chris told me he was driving up from Dallas to tell me something, I was very confused. It was a five-hour drive. Whatever he needed to say, couldn't he just say it over the phone?

But maybe there are some things that need to be said face to face.

We had been friends for more than a decade. Somewhere in the back of my mind I had noticed that Chris had never had a girlfriend, never even been on a date. I assumed he was shy. By the time I hung up the phone, I was pretty sure I knew what he was driving up to tell me.

If I was right, I had so many other questions. How many people was he doing this for? How many of those conversations had already ended with someone pleading for his soul — or simply closing the door? I already knew that some had.

We had grown up in the same fellowship of churches, attended the same Christian university in the South, joined the same social club — the private school version of a fraternity. In all of those places, being gay was not allowed. I thought of the specific hallways, the chapel services, the late-night dorm conversations where that message had been delivered, sometimes gently, sometimes not. The conversations Chris had faced had been hard. I was certain of that.

What I couldn't comprehend was the courage it required to drive five hours, walk into someone's life, and hand them the chance to condemn you, and then to do it again, with family, with old friends, with people who believed they were saving your soul by refusing to accept you.

I wondered if condemnation was what Chris was expecting from me? As far as he knew, I had worked as a Youth and Family Minister in one of our churches since graduating from university. He did not know that we had recently made the choice to leave, that I was now working at the hospital, that we were attending Trinity Episcopal Church. He had chosen a diner instead of our house. I noticed that.

When Chris pulled into town and we sat down across from each other, I gave him my full attention. Starting with college, he told me the story of his life — the attempts to date women, what working life alone had been like, how lonely it had gotten, and the long slow work of accepting himself. Chris was a gay man. He was making peace with that.

He never asked the question directly, but it hung over the whole meal. He had spent ten hours round trip in a car to tell me this. When he had said everything he wanted to say, I told him I was honored that he had valued our friendship enough to tell me the truth, that he was still my friend, and that nothing he had shared that morning changed that.

What struck me most, sitting across from Chris, was not only the courage it had taken him to make that drive — though it had taken plenty. It was that he had not given up. Not on his friends, not on his family, not on the possibility that some of them might actually listen. He had driven five hours on the stubborn, persistent hope that love might turn out to be stronger than judgment.

In 1 John 4:18 we read that perfect love casts out fear. I think that is exactly what Chris was acting on, even if he might not have put it that way. Setting aside fear — especially the fear of rejection — is a spiritual practice. It takes faith and discipline and a willingness to be vulnerable that most of us spend our whole lives avoiding.

That kind of hopeful fearlessness is not easy. It might actually be the most difficult thing to achieve. Setting aside fear is something I now recognize as a spiritual practice that takes discipline to find.

My prayer is that we will continue to strive to be a people, a place, a church that takes that sort of hope seriously and that being able to say it in person is still worth the drive.