When Gifts Rush Back

One of the things about doing this is the surprises that keep happening. Gifts come in the form of responses from people I assumed to be long dead. It's shocking they're not and over time ... decades ... they rise from tombs I'd tenderly placed them in to let me know ... we still share bonds. Strong and rich things that made us ... us.

Yesterday, I wrote about a song I could never finish that my friends helped me complete. It came about because another friend was taking issue with me over mixing holy words with profane ones and then told me of a bad experience with her mother's caregivers in a nursing home. I was already thinking about my friend Trolly Joe. Then I had the most wonderful of Saturday nights when my life was painted orange and King Aurthur popped into my head because I love the story of him pulling the sword from the stone ... and that made me remember the song ... and my friend told me that she was "formed by stone" ... and this writing happened.

I'm always stunned by it. I start off either meaning to say one thing ... or having no real idea what I mean to say ... then it takes on a life of its own ... like baby Sunflower seeds that burst from the ground ... or like my kids who all turned out as them, which are things I never would have imagined but I wouldn't trade for anything.

So I wrote about breaking away from stone. I didn't think it was that good so I threw in some Monty Python to give people comic relief. But it was me ... from the heart ... surprised at what came out. I've learned to trust that ... without over thinking it. Just do it! Just be me.

Then my friend Jim Lowder wrote. I haven't thought of Jim in years. Decades! We were in serious trouble together for different reasons in different places. He was the Pastor of the Deloris Street Baptist Church in San Francisco and I was Pastor/Director of the Jefferson Street Baptist Chapel in Louisville, Kentucky. Our support group was the Oakhurst Baptist Church Church in Decatur, Georgia and the Koininia Commune in Americus, Georgia.

These were our peeps.

Jim and I actually met in Kansas City during the southern Baptist Convention and we immediately hit it off. Kindred spirits do that. He was about to be fired by the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention because he had the audacity to love gay people who had AIDS. This was the mid-1980s so everyone thought that you could catch AIDS from toilet seats and the country was horrified at it ... and gay people who brought it to us.

So, Jim did what Jesus would have done. He just loved who showed up. They happened to be gay. Too many happened to have AIDS.

And that got him fired.

I was in trouble for the minor infraction of hiring Cindy Weber to be Associate Pastor of the church I was inexplicably in charge of and Baptists don't believe in women ... except to be helpmates ... which is bullshit.

Anyway ... Jim and I stood there ... he wore a three piece suit which cracked me up with his long hair and beard. I was styling the Kroger Bag Boy look ... blue jeans, white shirt, sock tie, and blue blazer. We looked good.

Fast forward thirty years and Jim comments on yesterday's blog ... and it may as well have been Jesus rising from the grave. He wrote and I wrote and then we did it again. I felt we were standing on the floor of the Southern Baptist Convention in Kansas City ... he about to be fired ... me in trouble ... and the two of us just laughed at the trouble we were in. Though there was this fierce intensity behind the laughter.

Then later on the same day my fiend Judy Puckett Stainaker posted this picture of a very younger me standing there in Forsyth Park in Savannah, Georgia for the first AIDS walk in a sleepy southern city. We think it was 1990 though I really don't remember.

What I do remember is marching by one of the Historic District's shops and the owner yelling at us, "Why are you doing this? We hate you!"

I hadn't thought of these things in decades but yesterday they were gifts that came rushing back.

And today I hold them dearly.

I so proud to have been associated with such damn good people who ... pull swords out of stones.