Mike........

Funny how days go. I write a blog about thanksgiving and then something makes me sad .... I write a blog about roads and then the path of my own mind takes silly turns and twists.
The news announced that Sparky Anderson had died.  He was the manager of our home town Reds and took us to two world series championships. I am sad for the loss of this man, but sad as a stranger is sad for a public figure.
But what my mind did upon hearing those word was to twist around the block in a heartbeat of time, and remember my friend Mike. Our senior year of school, skipping school to go downtown to see the Reds return victorious from their second championship............ oh the people! Man I had never seen so many people in my whole life.... every  street in Cincinnati looked like it was an ocean, swaying and moving like a million ants were walking together, but it was people .. everywhere. We had such a good time, looking at the crowds, laughing at our 'grown up' ability to go downtown and hang with the crowds. We had such a good time!
   But 16 years ago my friend Mike ended his life. What is spoken of on the news almost nightly now, was hush hush and quiet then. A homosexual man struggling to believe that a God could love him, that people would accept him, hiding all his hurts and insecurities inside bottles bought off the shelves of liquor stores. Multiplied in strength by pills that well meaning doctors doled out to shush the voices of shame and confusion that screamed inside his head. He had told me once that now he had found God and accepted Him as His Savior that he would be 'good', be all that people told him he needed to be. He would abstain from men....... he would abstain from alcohol, he would abstain from medicine that he abused and he would live for God. The problem is that those well meaning people who told him that love for God was enough, never told him how to actually make all those promises happen for him. How loving God would suddenly make him not be attracted to men. How the shame of that attraction would make him feel more shameful than ever and in turn have to return to those things that silenced the pain and shame....... words were thrown at him about what God expected but never words that shared the Power of how to actually make it happen.
  He said that if he ever felt like he was going to return to alcohol and drugs to silence the shame, he was afraid He would renounce his God and lose Him forever, and so if the draw to the chemicals overtook him, he said he would end his life before he renounced God, and hope that God would take him into heaven , even with his flaws , understanding that his death would be his last act of love to God, done to show that he refused to be in the place where a drug and alcohol hazed brain might cause him to renounce Jesus as His Savior.
    Today as I hear about the death of sports legend, my mind goes instead to a boy....... a real life honest to goodness sweetheart of a boy, who had one day of the most fun ever, laughing and cheering for a team that won the hearts of a city in 1976....... and my heart is heavy thinking of the years following where that boy grew into a man, but never lost the hurt , the feeling of being not good enough, the pain, the shame, and all the things that people and their words and their judgement weighed him down with. I miss my friend . I wanted to grow old with him , sharing stories and memories and laughs and faith and tears with. I want to be able to pick up the phone today and say , omg , remember the day the Reds won? Remember how we picked our way through the people and loudness and craziness of the downtown gathering? But I cant. I will never be able to again. And that stinks.
I miss you Mike. You were always good enough for me............ I wish so many voices had not convinced you that you werent good enough for God.
TJ
2010