Being man (part 10)

“Mark, I know how difficult all the confusion such as you suffer may get. I should remind you, however, that you did not cause yourself to be. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have elected to be the sort of being that you are now. You, all of us, had been thrown into this unfamiliar world without having been consulted about the sort of being you were to assume. You simply found yourself here and then you realized that you are who you are. How you are, how you feel, is beyond your responsibility. It is not your fault if you are naturally drawn to feel for one of your own kind. Don’t put the blame on you for this.”

“Do you like being Kenneth?” I saw again those eyes that make me admire him. And I did not know what answer I would deliver to him.

“Of course, I do!” my lips just blurted.

“Because there’s nothing wrong with you.”

“And there’s something wrong with you?”

“Tell me, how can I go on pretending there’s nothing wrong with me and still smile at the world?” returned he. His eyes opened as he delivered his inquiry, but he did not throw them on me. I guessed that he was addressing himself to the twinkling things above again.

But that was not the reason that I did not respond at once. Rather, it was not in my immediate ability to face such questioning intelligently. Then I managed to say, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you. The way you look at yourself, there lies what’s wrong. If the way you feel about that man you say you love, which you deem devious and erratic, rationalizes your thinking that there’s something unnatural, therefore wrong, about you, then you are belying God’s claim to the goodness of all his creation. You are a special work of God.” (February 1998)

To be continued...