The Cross in the Closet Read Online Free

betrayed the soft creature crying endlessly on my shoulder.
    It was a subtle betrayal, but a cruel one: I was silent.
    She did her best to compose herself. “Now I have to leave. I’m moving to a friend’s. She’s my only friend that my dad doesn’t have any control over. I’m going to Texas tomorrow…” Her voice trailed off.
    Tell her what Leviticus says about homosexuality. Read her Romans 1! Go on, Tim, it is your responsibility as a follower of Christ to help her see the error of this choice.
The voice inside me had a distinct tone. It didn’t sound like me. It didn’t even sound like it knew me, yet it was powerful and opportunistic. It was a voice of rejection, telling me to reject Elizabeth. I realized that I hated Lizzy. Not because she was a bad person, but because she liked other women. That one facet to her being was enough to spark remarkable animosity toward her, animosity I could not comprehend.
    The Bible tells us to love one another as ourselves. How could this voice be Jesus? And if this voice wasn’t Jesus, what voice was it? Whatever it was speaking to me, I knew it wasn’t guiding me in love, and that could only mean one thing. The voice had to die.
    Elizabeth left the bar with tears still in her eyes, but they were tears of goodbye, not anger at my lack of understanding. Had she been oblivious to my inner turmoil? I stood silently, staring blankly at the door she had just walked out of. The din from a Styx song caught my ear but not my attention. Nothing could steal my attention; gut-wrenching feelings of shame brought tears to the corners of my eyes. I found my way to a booth and sat down.
    And that’s when I saw him for the first time, sitting across the table from me, smirking like a schoolyard bully. He looked like me, dressed in khakis and a black button-up shirt, but he seemed to bleed arrogance. I wiped my eyes and shivered.
    “Who are you?”
    Why didn’t you tell Liz the truth? Why did you waste an opportunity to help her see her choice for the sin that it is?
    I felt heat. It began in my toes and moved slowly upwards.
    Cat got your tongue?
    “You can’t be serious. I hurt her enough with my silence! I should have held her, cried with her, loved her, but I didn’t. That wasn’t Jesus.”
    How do you
know
it wasn’t Jesus? Sure, Jesus died for her sins just like anyone else, but she’s not His child. You were right to think what you were thinking. Go get your Bible—there’s still time to run after her.
    I felt his words in my bones, in the very marrow of my bones. He was manipulative. He felt wrong. I felt like I had that day at Liberty, standing off against Soulforce.
    Someone had to say what Patrick couldn’t.
    That day broke my heart.
I
was supposed to be the one who loved, not the one that rejected a group of people because they were gay. I was wrong to offer such empty condemnation. I should have disagreed differently.
    No, you weren’t wrong. You just weren’t committed enough.
    I shook my head and wiped the sweat from my forehead. No, I wasn’t right. I had not been right then, and my condemning silence with Liz wasn’t right, either. The memories of my theological instruction flashed through my mind like images on a television. But I didn’t see myself in these images; I saw the condemnatory creature, the Pharisee, who sat across from me.
    And then it dawned on me, and a weight lifted from my shoulders:
I might have been wrong all along
.
    The figure across from me shook his head, judging my thoughts as quickly as I thought them. But the Pharisee’s finger was fixed, pointing cruelly at me. I stood up, but he remained seated, smirking. I was repulsed. I had to get rid of him.
    You can’t.
    I had to! Something drastic needed to happen, something that would test my beliefs on a foundational level…And then it came to me: Walk in Liz’s shoes—the shoes of the very people I had been taught to hate. Live with the label of
gay
.
    The implications of the idea