A Keen and Surprising Witness!

Here is an excerpt from Glenn Stanton's current article in Christianity Today--I'm excerpting it here by way of follow-up to earlier exchanges here and elsewhere about homosexuality and Christianity. This excerpt sheds light while expressing the author's viewpoint, I think:

I have seen true humanism at work in a friend named Anita, whose life is illuminated by the Incarnation. Many years ago, her son announced that he was homosexual. As a Christian mother, she was devastated. Her efforts to "talk her son straight" were to no avail. Years later, she got an evening job waiting tables at a restaurant. Her boss asked her if she realized the diner was a "gay hangout" at night. Feeling that God had led her to the job, she stuck it out. She applied herself to her work and came to love the men that came in every night.

Years later her son, Tony, now a young adult, moved in with his partner, Rick, an older man. Rick was not kind to Anita, saying things to shock and embarrass her polite Christian sensibilities. Anita also learned that Rick had infected her only son with HIV and that they both had contracted full-blown AIDS. She wrestled with hatred and anger, but then she remembered what she had learned years earlier by working with young gay men. Anita explains, "Rick was not the enemy. He was another lost soul created in the image of God, just like my son."

So Anita committed herself to loving and caring for the man who had given her son a death sentence. In Rick's last months and weeks, Anita fed and cleaned him, tracked his medications, changed his diapers, and just spent time talking and being with him. Rick came to love Anita, and they shared many sweet moments together before his slow death. Rick is gone, and Tony is still alive. But they both witnessed the remarkable, incarnated grace of Christ through Anita.

I'm proud to count Anita as a colaborer with me in the culture war. But I'm even more proud to consider her my fellow humanist.

Copyright © 2006 Christianity Today. Click (http://lists.christianitytoday.com