As a man struggling to walk in accordance with the Gospel of Jesus Christ while struggling against unwanted and undesired same-sex attractions, I find it extremely difficult to make any significant headway without the necessary support. I have found that men don’t necessarily run from me when I share my struggle with them; but they aren’t sure what to do with the knowledge, so they essentially do nothing. I’ve been a member of a Men’s Small Group via my church and shared my struggle with the men there in the context of the group. The only question I got was, “Is that all ya got?” It seems I wasn’t rejected outright. Unfortunately, at each meeting I listen as these men tell of messaging each other and having lunch together during the week, and I feel left out and marginalized. I’m relatively certain that these men don’t mean to marginalize or ignore me, but I’m pretty sure that each of them is thinking to himself that someone else will come alongside me and be my mentor.
In the past, I have intentionally reached out to other men seeking a mentoring relationship and been ignored or rejected. I’ve stopped doing that because I am tired of the rejection. But, I know perfectly well that I will not have the kind of success in my daily pursuit of Christ and His perfection of spirit if I don’t have a mentoring kind of relationship with at least one other man. For me, the setting of a generic Men’s Small Group just isn’t sufficient to meet that need. So I continue to plod along and become discouraged on a daily basis as time passes and I see no significant advances in my personal walk and my responses to temptation. So what am I to do? I continue to do what I’ve always done without much success: I continue my daily conversation with God and ask Him to provide me a mentor or two with whom I can just spend time doing ordinary things like playing golf or having lunch or talking over coffee. I’m not looking for someone to come in and miraculously take away my unwanted and undesired feelings; I’m just looking for a friend who doesn’t really need to understand me….just to be a friend.
So, I begin another day asking God to open doors of relationship with other men for me. I’m tired of hanging out exclusively with women all the time. I work with them all day long and I come home to one every night. It would be nice to find acceptance and relationship with at least one other man where the relationship doesn’t consist solely of text messaging and video conferencing. So, if you know someone like me and you’re a man, seek God in the process, but get in there and befriend this guy. He may be 19 or 55, but he still needs to have a non-sexual same-gender friendship that just fills that void he’s never had filled without sex.
pauseforthought1961 