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Through the looking glass: Jamie Arpin-Ricci

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Jamie over at emergent voyageurs weighs in on homosexuality with personal experience, conviction, grace and love.

There are a few things I know to be true -

People who have same sex attraction are PEOPLE. Complicated, beautiful, flawed people created by God…as are we all. And people with same-sex attractions can still be servants of God and followers of Christ.

People ARE NOT ISSUES. Issues can be divided up into boxes and categories and “right vs. wrong”. People cannot and should not be treated that way. It is disrespectful and irresponsible.

God LOVES complicated people - he deals with people not issues. We are to LOVE complicated people and focus on people.

We are fallen, the whole earth groans and longs for the return of our King. There is much that is connected with that fallen state and the groaning that results is often painful to deal with. But we are not called to run away from it or stand at a distance and condemn it, we’re called to embrace it, to embrace people and to offer hope and we should be able to do so with grace for we too are fallen and groaning.

Beyond that, I don’t know much….but those things I can say with strong certainty.

[tags]homosexuality[/tags]

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5 Comments

  1. Jamie Arpin-Ricci — January 30, 2007 #

    Thanks for the encouragement and great thoughts.

    Peace,
    Jamie

  2. Paul — January 30, 2007 #

    so true and thank goodness God does love the complicated and the simple and the simply complicated like me ;)

    As I commented on Jamie’s site, sexuality has often been a case of christians finger pointing rather than loving - we’re all screwed up in so many different ways and it we could love, encourage, confess and bless each other - and if we do need to judge then start with our own stuff…

    It was really the start of God helping me in my own struggles with my sexuality to be given the courage by people being honest with me to start being honest back - to them, God and myself and I hope Jamie’s post inspires people to well be people…

    i’ve started exploring christian sexual ethics on my blog but have got about as far as you ;)

  3. Adrian — January 31, 2007 #

    I really like what Jamie said on his approach to reach that community in his most recent post. ;-)

  4. Ari — January 31, 2007 #

    thanks for stopping by Jamie

    paul - yeah, pretty exhaustive post there on my part eh? hehe…I’m ok with that actually.

    adrian - hehe, good call

  5. Paul — January 31, 2007 #

    exhaustive posting for exhausting times… :)

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