Depth of Field (Day 16)

 

It's been a while since I have blogged. To be honest, I haven't had the emotional energy. Politics made me tired. School made me tired. Religion made me tired. People made me tired. But this is a new year, and I'm trying to make positive changes. One is to stop holding my feelings inside. For the past few months, I have been steering clear of talking about controversial topics in my posts out of fear that I might offend a friend or a customer. I've put myself in a "jail of caution". What resulted was almost no change whatsoever. Some friends still ignored me. Some customers still vanished. So for all my worry, the outcome still happened. So screw that. I'm going to talk about things I want to talk about, and let the consequences occur where they may.

First, a word about politics. I think most people know how I lean (heavily) on that. So I'm not going to discuss them. Period. Ever.

Everything else is open season. I'm going to blog once a week, on Mondays. So buckle in. 

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I'm a photographer, and while most of my work is in portraiture, I do love still life and fine art photography. The two images below were both taken at the same time, with the same lens:

The first image was taken with my lens set at F/2.0 aperture. The second was taken at F/22. As you can see, in the first image, only the vine in the forefront is in focus; everything else melts away into a blur. People pay a lot of money to get a lens that does that; a lens that can make the background vanish. In the second image, the vine in front is still in focus, but the vines behind it are now very much visible.

I'll admit, it's pleasant to only see what we want to see. To make believe that what we are and what we believe is the only thing that matters, or the thing that matters most. I used to believe that. I attended a church where the only Bible was the KJV and translations based off it, and any religion outside of our own was to some degree wrong. I was told that the Bible I held in front of me was in inerrant and inspired Word of God, and to question any of it, or insinuate anything might be misconstrued or mistranslated was exactly what Satan wanted. That deviating from it in any way was a sin, and that included questioning whether or not this word or verse might have more than one meaning. In short, if you question the bible, you are falling into a trap created by Satan to make you fall away from God.

I believed, for example, that being gay was a choice. I believed acting on being gay was a sin. I also believed that being a democrat or liberal meant you were a baby killer and a worshiper of the immoral. I proudly set my sights on bringing as many people around to my way of thinking as I could, because, I believed that was what Christ called us to do. I had my aperture set firmly at F/2.0, seeing everything that was behind that first vine as something that should be erased from view, or questioned harshly.

Over the years, some major events occurred in my life that made my aperture begin to see more of the big picture. I won't go into all of them in this post, but I will address a lot of them in upcoming ones. I now believe that being gay is not a choice any more than being straight. That people of the same sex have just as much a right to love one another and marry as straight people do. I am well aware that those beliefs will be seen by many evangelicals as my faith being tainted by sin, and that as a result, I may be given greater scrutiny, or even not allowed to teach in the future, which is something I love more than anything. 

I do love the Lord with all my heart. I do not believe being gay or being a liberal is a sin. There is nothing you can say to me that will change that. I had a discussion with a friend a few months ago, wherein after us talking about this for a bit said "Daniel, do you believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God?" I said I did. They said "Then are you saying that some of the Word of God is wrong?" I said that some of it may have been intentionally mistranslated for personal preference or agenda. They said that is exactly what Satan wanted me to believe, and that I have fallen into a well-laid trap. I don't fault them for saying that, because until I allowed my heart and eyes to open, I felt the same way.

I am well aware that many will disagree with me on that one point. That's fine. I've actually had people ask me if I have turned gay, and that's why I'm choosing this way of believing. I've had people unfollow me, unfriend me, and shut me out of their lives over it. I know that a lot of people who used to read my posts and blogs won't even see this one because they have hidden me from their feeds...setting their minds at F/2.0. Understand, it's not that they don't see the vines in the background, it's that they have chosen to either ignore them, or say they are in some way wrong.

It's convenient to set your mind at F/2.0. You don't have to care about as many things or consider them. In the movie "The Matrix", Neo was unaware of the world right in front of him until he took the red pill.

I took the red pill. I'm going to lose friends over that. I'm going to be told that the red pill was poisonous and that I'm being deceived. However, the friends I have gained by seeing them and loving them and embracing them are gifts I would never give back. 

I choose love. I choose acceptance. I choose tolerance. 

I've lost church friends over this. I've lost teaching opportunities. I've lost leadership roles. I've been kicked out of groups and churches and told I'm not welcome anymore. It absolutely breaks my heart, and I have dealt with crushing depression and PTSD because of it. Things I will never overcome, but yet I will bear for the sake of love.

This is already running long, and many won't even bother reading it. We have become a generation of "TLDR". (Too long, didn't read.) We'll spend hours scrolling through photos of puppies and pointless memes but won't take 10 minutes to open our hearts and minds to something new. 

However, this is what my heart has been screaming to talk about; and not just the LGBTQ+ community; so many other things. These are things I will talk about this year, with the knowledge that doing so may rob me of so much more.

As I said, buckle in. Some of what I write will be joyful, and some full of anger and pain. But it's all me.