My Chair Smells Like Coffee

My Journey To Freedom … for me and others

It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m sitting here in my favorite chair. You can still faintly smell the wonderful aroma of coffee that’s been infused into the rich brown leather over time. This awesome chair of mine once had a vastly different earlier life. It was a useful life to many but it was very different from its life today. I find that I’m very much like my chair.

This beautiful overstuffed leather chair used to be one of those wonderful comfy chairs you’d see back in the corner of your favorite local Starbucks. It was a really great chair as it sat in my favorite Starbucks back in Michigan, but that was a whole lifetime ago. Today that chair sits in my living room and as I settle down deep into it, I am reminded just how much this chair is like my life.

Tonight as I sit here in my chair, I am full of big thoughts of that earlier life: a life where answers were easy and came quickly. They with given out with religiously confident (aka smug) authority. In my mind, the lines between who was in the holy-enough club and who was on the outside looking in, were pretty clearly defined.

I was that person who would make every effort to express love and welcome to everyone. But in the deepest places in my heart, I was always on a covert mission to change them. The objective of my secret mission was always to win them over. I can remember myself saying a thousand times that my job was to win them to myself so that I could win them to the church in the hope that I could get God to win them to himself. However, secretly and silently I would add “and then He can fix them”.

That sounded so very noble and religiously pious at the time and it was. Today I am so incredibly sorry for that whole agenda. It was disingenuous to them and misrepresentative of who God really is. But, it’s where I was and it is still where so many in my former religious tribe as well as the vast majority of conservative evangelical christian believers are.

To be fair, there was no hate or disdain in my heart at all. I genuinely thought I was doing a good thing. Much like the new testament villain Saul, I was eager to go out and defend God by doing His work. I did the work even though that meant surreptitiously terrorizing or somehow doing harm to those who God loves.

God doesn’t need defenders! Did you hear that? God doesn’t need defenders! God is quite capable of defending himself if he were ever to need defending. God certainly doesn’t require our assistance. God doesn’t ask for it.

What God does want is for us to have our heart and our eyes opened. We do that by realizing that our only real responsibility as Christ-followers is to actually express true Christ-like LOVE — and do it unconditionally! In loving every other human we interact with and loving unconditionally we will clearly reflect who God is.

Love is messy. Love takes us into messy places. It causes us to get dirty or even bloody sometimes. When we engage with true love without an agenda, it often intertwines our hearts with others and we will feel the pain of their lives. That’s what it looks like to love in the same way Christ did. Remember when Jesus cried bitterly because of the grief and pain Lazarus’ family was experiencing after his death? Jesus knew that he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, but his heart was intricately intertwined with them because he loved deeply. Their pain was felt so deeply by him and he wept hot bitter tears along with them. That is what real true love looks like.

As I sit here in my coffee scented chair thinking about loving all kinds of wonderful people who, just a few years ago I had a very specific and potentially harmful agenda toward, I am also mentally sorting through a flood of thoughts about this significant shift of my priorities and my purpose. My life has gone from being righteously pious and smugly situated on my high horse to being painfully and humbly aware that I have had to leave most of what was comfortable and familiar. I am now actually doing the work that I was born to do and am truly called to do.

In the next few posts, I will write about my own spiritual/religious and intellectual/emotional journey as I have travelled this path. That’s not the primary purpose of this blog but I want to set the scene for you. The real objective of this blog is to write about the journey of those who are being kicked aside and ostracized every day by the traditional church. In these first few posts, I am going to share with you my journey. I want you to understand where I have come from and where I think the future is leading me and you and many others like us.

I want to wish you a much better year as we move into 2019. In the world we live in, socially and politically, I don’t really know if happy is a realistic sentiment to wish for anyone. It’s not realistic if you are constantly hearing churchy folks tell you that you are broken and in need of being fixed by giving up who you are or to stop loving who you love. Clearly that’s not a happy place to be, but maybe things like this blog might at least be able to make “wishing you a better new year” a doable thing.

Please know that you are actually fully loved, actually fully accepted, and actually cared for just as you are in this moment! Also know that in relation to who you love or who you are, in the deepest places of your spirit, you are are in no need of being fixed - because you are not broken. Please hear and believe that. You are not broken! You are exactly as you were designed and created to be. You are not an aberration or a mutation. You are perfectly crafted. Many of you have former churches or even family members who will tell you just the opposite, but I’m telling you that they are wrong!

To my LGBTQ+ friends, I’m available for you! If you would like to connect with me directly to talk, cry, vent, scream, rant or whatever, you can do so in several different ways. You can connect with me through the contact tab of this blog site or connect with me by email at: Murphy@MurphyGill.com message me through Facebook at: www.facebook.com/murphy.gill I’m also on Twitter ( @Nvstalot ) and Instagram.

It’s New Year’s Eve and I'm sitting here in my favorite chair that smells a lot like coffee and I realize that my chair is a lot like me.

Peace,

Murphy