It’s always around Thanksgiving when I miss him. 

My uncle was something. He had his partner, Ray, and their pet monkey “Monkey” and birds in his bathroom. Real birds. The kind that flew around and pooped on things. Beyond the tub was a sliding glass door and beyond that, the bird sanctuary where feathers flew all over the place when you entered the bathroom. The birds actually couldn’t fly past the sliding glass door, but they watched you through the glass. As I got older, I wondered how my uncle cleaned up after his bathroom birds.

Monkey lived in my uncle’s house and was a stinker, too. She had a baboon’s naked butt and a junior high girl’s knack for cruelty to other females. Ray was her guy. She groomed him regularly. Picking through his hair as we sat around the living room after Thanksgiving dinner. My uncle had the gift of hospitality, and my grandparents’ Thanksgivings and Christmases tended to be celebrated at his house. An eccentric, old, Victorian mansion in the country where naked Greek statues adorned a sweeping yard (it covered the side of a hill) filled with palm and oak trees and blooming orange trumpet vine.

The cats, the dogs, and I feared Monkey. Especially once I started menstruating since Monkey would bite a girl on her period. Monkey nipped the dogs (mostly poodles) and cats for no apparent reason, jumping off the roof onto their backs to ride them around Uncle’s wraparound porch like a cowboy on a horse. Guess Monkey was afraid Ray, a cowboy himself, might look for a mate elsewhere, and the dogs, cats, and young fertile females were a threat to her. Considering Ray remained faithful to my uncle for nearly thirty years, Monkey missed the boat on this one, but she ate my grandpa’s $400.00 dollar hearing aid twice. Monkey didn’t like that little hearing aid near her lounge chair (you didn’t dare sit in Monkey’s lounge chair) beside the swimming pool as Grandpa floated around in the summer while Uncle made big money in real estate.

Both my uncle and Ray rode Tennessee Walking horses around their sprawling ranch in the Sierra Nevada foothills. For Christmas one year they gave me Earth, Wind, & Fire records in a beautiful, fancy, foldout holder. At nine years old, I couldn’t connect with the music (the album You Light Up My Life by Debbie Boone spoke to me), but I appreciated my two uncles seeing me as worthy of this grown-up gift. A few years later, Uncle humiliated me when I walked into Christmas wearing a pretty holiday dress and Uncle exclaimed to the party, “Look, everyone, little Paula grew chi chi’s this year!” In seventh grade, you don’t want to hear this, especially when Uncle’s exuberant gay friends howled with laughter as I ran for the bathroom to sit with the birds.

I never grew close to Uncle until his younger brother, my Uncle Dan, committed suicide, leaving both of us shaken. Uncle Dan was my favorite uncle, a single, straight (I think) guy who treated my brother and me like his own kids. His wake was held at Uncle’s mansion amid the palm and oak trees, but the old Victorian had burnt down awhile back, and now a lovely modern ranch house sat in its place. The bathroom birds were gone. Monkey was gone. She died of cancer after years terrorizing the cats and dogs. Ray was on his way out the door, too, leaving Uncle, nearing 60, gathering a string of young companions who didn’t make him happy.

Eventually, Uncle sold the ranch in the foothills, got rid of his Tennessee Walking horses, and moved to town with his poodles. Then Uncle moved to Mexico, and after traveling the world, returned to our town when he finally found a young partner who would stick. Uncle paid for Carl’s braces, and the two settled down building a life together, but by now Uncle’s health wasn’t good. Finally, Uncle and I began to spend time together outside of Thanksgiving and Christmases.

It seemed to me, Uncle just wanted a family. Wanted to be loved and accepted and eat Sunday dinner with his niece and nephews and their kids. Conversations about God surfaced again and again during these visits, and one day we realized Uncle wanted to attend a service. With us. At our conservative Nazarene church. So we took him. Pretty soon, Uncle and Carl became regulars in the pew with us. Uncle said what he really liked about church was the music. It filled him with hope.

During this time, Prop 8, the law to bar same sex marriage, hit California. My Christian friends began putting up their Prop 8 signs. They tried to convince me to do the same, but because of my uncle, I refused to stake a sign in my yard or slap a bumper sticker on my car (I don’t put a fish there, either because I don’t want to misrepresent Christianity with my driving). And I certainly don’t want to fight the same-sex marriage battle. Not then and not now.

But I wanted to fight for Uncle’s soul.

One day Uncle asked me how I felt about his homosexuality. “I love you the way you are,” I told him truthfully. “Do you think being gay is a sin?” Uncle pressed. He was smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke away from me as we stood on my front porch with my tangle of kids playing nearby. Uncle was always careful to keep his smoke from touching me, though I never complained about it. Uncle’s smoking didn’t bother me, except it wasn’t good for him. He was diabetic, and had had a stroke.

“Well, the Bible says God is against homosexuality,” I told him, my heart hammering because I didn’t want this conversation to hurt our relationship. “But the Bible also says God hates divorce and a lot of my Christian friends are divorced. All of us are sinners, Uncle,” I continued. “Everyone falls short of what the Bible teaches and we all need Jesus to help us make our peace with God.” My uncle nodded thoughtfully and a few weeks later, he admitted he was searching for this peace with God. I prayed for Uncle often, longing for Jesus to capture his weary heart. In Jesus, I’d found my peace. I wanted this for Uncle.

For four years, Uncle went to church with us and I loved it. Loved every minute of sitting there with my gay uncle and his partner in our conservative Nazarene church. I loved that we were all sinners seeking peace with God together. I do believe the Bible is God’s word. And for half of my life, I rebelled against this book. I understand why it makes people so crazy. And I understand the push for same-sex marriage. If I didn’t believe the Bible was true and backed by a living God who means what He says, I would be all for same-sex marriage because I loved my uncle. This is where many of us end up. We have gay family members. Gay friends. We love these people and want them to be happy. Want them to have equal rights. It makes perfect human sense.

Until the words of Jesus pierce our heart, “If anyone comes after me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters– yes, even his own life– he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple” Luke 14:26-27.

Whether you are gay or straight this is the place we all must come to: do we choose Jesus over everyone and everything else in life? Do we accept or reject the Bible as truth? Do we lay down what we want and pursue God’s plans and purposes for this world or do we keep going our own way?

Often, I hear people say, “Well, God is all loving. He accepts me the way I am.” This is true. But it’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is God accepts you because Jesus died for you. And God doesn’t just want to love you the way you are. He wants to transform you from a sinner into a saint. The only way to transform you is to save you. This salvation comes when you seek Jesus and do a transaction. The transaction is: you agree you are a sinner in need of a Savior. You have rebelled against God. You know it and God knows it. You confess your sins and ask His forgiveness. This happens for everyone who wants to make peace with God, gay or straight it makes no difference. And then you settle into working out your salvation with fear and trembling. Dying to yourself and your sins. Doing things God’s way, not your way, or society’s way.

And how painful this is!

For years, I didn’t want to die to myself. Didn’t want to surrender to God. For decades the Bible made me mad. For a lot of reasons. But after a night with Jesus that changed my life 13 years ago, I came to the conclusion the Bible was a lot more than a book written by a bunch of buttoned-up old dead guys. The Bible was true. And Jesus was alive inviting me to follow Him. This reckoning razed my rebellion. Peace with God followed.

Two days before Uncle died, I sat in church with him. He was sick and seemed so tired and vulnerable. My love for him felt like a ton of boulders on my shoulders. I put my hand to his puffy cheek and looked into his eyes. “Let Jesus heal you,” I whispered to him. “I’m trying to do that, honey,” he whispered back with a tender smile. It’s my last memory of Uncle.

* names have been changed to protect privacy.