If You Were

words and music by Doug Howell (For David – Valentine’s Day, 1991)

if you were God’s grace to me
would your face be any dearer to my eyes?
would your love taste sweeter to this thirst of mine,
welcome home this wandering child?

if you were God’s peace to me
would you bring my battled soul release?
would you wave white flags across my war-torn fields,
reconciling me to me?

I used to think the world was made in such and such a way
but now I know it’s full of possibilities
I used to think that heaven for me was light-years away
but fulfillment of the prophecy is closer than it seems
if you were…

if you were God’s love to me
would you be more faithful through the years?
would you bring me safely through my wild frontiers,
make my trembling disappear?
if you were…
could you be God’s grace to me?

2019 Notes

Have you ever asked God for a sign? I have, and this song is a record of the answer.

My coming out process was long and tortuous, partly because I was naive and didn’t realize what was happening to me, and partly because I wasn’t willing to turn my back on God and all I’d been taught in the Bible. Of course, there were those who thought (and still do) that I was doing just that, but I wasn’t. (More on that in an upcoming song.) Whenever someone insinuated that—or came right out and said it—I thought to myself, “Boy, if only I could turn my back, this would sure be a lot easier!” But if there’s one thing I knew from the depths of my being, it’s that I could not live without God. I didn’t even want to try. And that meant that I had to take God with me through whatever struggles I faced. And that wasn’t easy. Believe me, working through three decades’ worth of literal interpretations of all the scriptural “clobber passages”—not to mention social and religious prejudices—is not an easy thing.

It was a dangerous journey, and my ship nearly foundered a few times. One of those times, a good friend recommended a psychotherapist who believed he could change my sexuality through therapy. I enlisted his help, and started laying myself bare once a week, sometimes twice. I was a regular customer for eight years, exploring conscious and subconscious alike. The last couple years, I also belonged to a local Homosexuals Anonymous group, which, like Alcoholics Anonymous, used a 12-step program to help group members live “sober” in regards to their unwanted sexual proclivities.

I had several close Christian friends who entered into the struggle with me, but largely—both for them and for me—this was uncharted territory. Think maps of a flat world with “there be dragons here” scrawled near the edges. I was beginning to feel it was time to venture out toward those edges, because nothing else seemed to be working. And something had to change. I prayed a lot, and wrote in my journal ad infinitum, including the dreams I was analyzing with my therapist’s help.

Near the end of this saga, I visited a friend in San Francisco. While there, I decided it would be a good time to take a few little forays into unknown territory. I remember walking into The Stud, a gay bar, and hanging out by the dance floor. I danced one or two by myself before I fell into small talk with the guy next to me. After sending out a few test questions and getting some encouraging responses, I asked if he was a Christian. He said he was, but I could tell from the look on his face, that wasn’t a question he thought he’d be hearing that night.

“Could I ask you something?” I said, leaning in so as to be heard over the latest Paula Abdul. “How do you reconcile your sexuality and your faith?” I asked him. You know, I don’t remember his response, but I do remember he kissed me. Unflummoxed—well, mostly—I continued with my interrogation. I found out he was there with a friend, and that, believe it or not, he was from my own town. I explained I was in the middle of trying to figure all this stuff out, and having a bit of trouble… Although this whole scenario may seem very strange to you, I think it’s this approach that kept me from splitting right down the middle: trying my best to just be who I was, struggles and all, wherever I happened to be. At church, at Bible study—even at The Stud.

The search went on, and similar scenarios played out at other times, in other places. I was a P.I. on some big fact-finding mission, and I was not about to stop until I got some answers. And an awful lot was riding on the answers.

*       *       *

A few months later, and thirty years ago this last May 19, I saw David draped rakishly across a chair in the outdoor courtyard at the Nectarine Ballroom, dressed in a blue mesh T-shirt, smoking a cigarette. That same day I had come out to Mom, and taken her to meet my therapist for one last visit. On the previous visit, he admitted to me that he was no longer sure about the premises we’d started out to prove, and that I had ended up changing his mind more than he had changed mine. So it was that after a couple decades of struggling blind, six years of psychotherapy and a couple years in HA, I finally come to the conclusion that God had other plans for me than those I’d been stubbornly holding onto.

I know Mom did not feel in a celebratory mood after that, but I did. I felt that a huge burden had been lifted. So I asked my good friend Carole if she wanted to go out and celebrate with me. And that’s how I ended up at the Nectarine. I don’t think I ever felt more comfortable in my own skin than I did that night. David had come with his best friend Rob, too, even though he didn’t really feel like going out. The stage was set…

It didn’t help that Carole and I were introduced to David’s group of friends by someone they all considered to be a flake, but we made our way through the polite introductions. Then I looked at David and asked, “What do you do?” Unfortunately, another friend jumped in and started answering my question before David could speak. After he had given his answer, I responded, then turned rather more deliberately toward David, and asked again, “And what do you do?” After a little more conversation, we said goodbye, and I gave him a hug. He whispered, “Save a dance for me.”

We did share a dance before the evening was out, to Donna Summer’s rendition of “This Time I Know It’s for Real,” complete with David’s cute little hand motions every time the line, “say ‘I love you’ with a neon sign,” came around on the chorus. After the dance, he whispered again: “Don’t leave without saying goodbye.” I agreed.

As fate would have it though, I did leave without saying goodbye. I tried to find him, looking through all three floors, but he and Rob were talking to someone in a section of the place I didn’t know about. Despite that miscue, plus Rob’s strong objections to his getting involved with someone in the middle of coming out (namely me)—plus the trading of Rob’s dyslexic version of my phone number—David and I somehow managed to get together again.

It wasn’t necessarily clear sailing from that point on. More like a grand experiment, with all the attendant ups and downs. The ship hadn’t quite made it to the harbor yet. It was an incredibly long process reconciling my feelings with my faith…

So, like Gideon, one of my favorite characters in the Old Testament, I asked for a sign. An unmistakable sign. I put out my “fleece” to find out for certain what the will of God was for me. I didn’t want to disobey God. And I didn’t want to disrupt my life and the lives of family and friends if I wasn’t absolutely sure.

I got four separate “signs” over the next several months, but the first one came quite soon, within a few days. I was in the shower one day, and I was thinking about 2 Corinthians 12:9. In this chapter, Paul talks about the “thorn in the flesh” that plagued him, and how he had pleaded with God three times to take it away. (I’m pretty sure every gay Christian knows this verse!) Anyway, the Lord answered him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” How many times that verse had been a comfort to me, and never as much as now. So now I said, “Lord, I know that no matter what answer you give me, your grace will always be sufficient for me, too.” Out of the peace that followed, I heard the Lord answer me—not audibly, but in my mind and heart, in words that rang as clear as day: “What if David is part of my grace to you?”

Hence this song, written a couple years later to commemorate the event, and that all-important answer. Just as Jesus was rejected by people who expected a different kind of Messiah, we sometimes risk rejecting God’s grace because it doesn’t look like we expect it to…