Remembering a Friend—and a Prayer

To me, they were perhaps the most handsome and successful family in the congregation. Both were tall and slim, educated and refined. Their two daughters, a bit older that my two sons, had inherited their parents’ physical attractiveness. They seemed to be a family with many blessings.

My family was in St. Louis where I was attending seminary when we heard that this blessed family had split up. A “quiet” divorce, we were told. It didn’t make sense to me, but at that stage of my life, no divorce made sense. If someone had told me then that, after thirty years of marriage, I would be divorced, I would have laughed at the idea.

Since he worked for a non-profit organization with historic ties to my denomination, I ran into him occasionally over the next few years. At some point in the brief conversations that he and I had during those meetings, I somehow confirmed that the rumors were true: he had divorced his wife in order to move in with his gay boyfriend. I did not judge his actions any more than I judged my ex-wife’s actions when she told me that she was gay. That’s just the way life is. After all, Jesus said: Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. (Matt 7:1-2)

A few years before I left my first pastorate to pastor a church in Louisville, my wife and I ran into him at Indiana University. He didn’t look well; he appeared to be quite sick. As we were driving home, my wife said that, later in the day, she had spoken with him. He had told her that he was dying. “Is it cancer?” she asked. “No,” he said, “but I really wish it were cancer. I have AIDS.”

That was almost twenty years ago. Now, each December 1^st, when World AIDS Day comes around, I think of him. He was first the person I knew to die of AIDS. He wasn’t the last. And I pray that some day soon a true cure will be found so that no more folks die of this terrible illness.

s.