"...the healing of that old ache."

It is often a long loneliness, a feeling of "being on the wrong side of a giant set of glass doors" for Wesley Hill, a celibate gay Christian. But to this feeling of being outside these doors, looking in, he's found great meaning and comfort in the words of C.S. Lewis:

Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with

something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside,

is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.

And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor

beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.

(from C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses)

In Wesley's book, "Washed and Waiting, Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality", he gives us very vulnerable pieces of himself - struggles, confessions, despair - but also invites us to rejoice and walk with him in Truth, deep friendship, and the road of this "old ache" that he is coming to see as his ministry to the Church, to the world (or the pieces of the world to which he is connected).

It's a beautiful book, and it reminds me of larger conversations about love, sexuality, marriage, singleness, and intimacy (not reserved, or even only made for, marriage). What a gift Wesley has given us! He has laid himself wide open for us to know - even those of us who couldn't give this gift of friendship to our own homosexual friends - in hopes that we will be the Church, telling the Truth, celebrating both marriage and singleness (which equals celibacy, when faithful to Scripture) and a myriad of other things we should be celebrating.

After all (and I agree with this), "we must call into question any notion that the supreme expression of human love is found in marriage." (Wesley Hill, "Washed and Waiting...", p. 112)

Marriage is good; many other ways to live and love are, too.