Free Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality by Wesley Hill Page B

marry them. “It would be like writing you a death sentence,” he said to Lisa. Another pastor, however, agreed to perform the ceremony, and they were married.
    When we talked, I said to Lisa, “Because of my own situation and my strong desires for a relationship, I’m very curious about your experience.” I asked her about day-to-day life with Stephen. Then: “Can I ask you about sex? How did both of you satisfy your desires in your marriage?”
    “It was awkward and difficult,” Lisa told me candidly. “We didn’t have sex very often,” she admitted.
    Stephen died from AIDS three years after being married to Lisa. “Just before he died, he told me—we had a very open, honest relationship with each other—’Lisa, I’m just now beginning to notice and be attracted to women’s breasts.’”
    Surely, in such a marriage, where one or both partners are gay and continue to struggle with homoerotic desires and temptations, there can be a kind of rupturing or handicapping of the mutual desire that ought to characterize marriage. In Lisa and Stephen’s case, for example, there were emotional and physical desires on Stephen’s part—unchanged longings from his hardwired homosexual orientation—that remained frustratingly present and unfulfilled as he tried to love Lisa well. These were desires she couldn’t fully understand or satisfy, and thus Stephen experienced a sort of loneliness, as I’m sure Lisa did also, though in different ways.
    Another option open to homosexual Christians who remain committed to the gospel is celibacy. * 6 Those of us who live day in and day out with the disordered desires of a broken sexuality can opt to live as single people, fleeing from lust and fighting for purity of mind and body in the power of God’s Spirit.
    But with this option, perhaps even more so than with the first, it seems that the lack of the sort of relationship Hannah Coulter describes—a relationship of mutual desire—is even more searing. I once read the testimony of a homosexual Christian who found the celibacy option unbearable and, I think, eventually rejected it for a same-sex partnership of some kind. His words aptly express this keen sense of lack:
     
I do not want to live life on my own.…Much of my struggle comes from the thought that my lack of someone to love and be loved by must be lifelong. Even though God gave me some very close and supportive friendships, as indeed he has in the past, those relationships would inevitably end. People would get married, or move house, or move back to their home country on the other side of the world—and I would be alone again. 7
     
    A friend of mine was at a Bible study not long ago where a pastor confessed similar longings:
     
I used to be married to a woman, but after ten years our marriage fell apart as I realized I was gay and that that wasn’t going to change. I was pastoring at that time. Today I’m still pastoring, except now at a gay and lesbian congregation, because I’ve always felt called by God to serve in that capacity.
    Like many of you I’m hoping to find someone I can share my life with. But it’s hard and it’s lonely. I know you can relate. I come home after work as late as I can into the evening, and then I stay up watching TV until eleven, twelve o’clock at night. You guys know what I’m talking about, right? I sit there in front of the television because I hate having to face an empty bed. I stay up and stay up until I’m so tired I know I’ll be out as soon as my head hits the pillow. That way I won’t have to lie there, awake and alone.
    Sometimes I ask God about it. I say, “Lord, all my life I’ve served you. I’ve always pastored as you’ve called me to do. I got married because I was trying to do the right thing. I stayed with my wife for ten years, even though it felt like I was having sex with my sister. It felt so unnatural. And now after the divorce I’m still serving you in the ministry, and yet I have to come