Some lessons are learned from the least-likely sources. For whatever the reason, whether it's a shortage of humans willing to teach, or a belief on the Lord’s part that I am intellectually more on par with domesticated animals, very relevant lessons have been presented to me by my pets.

It was four o’clock in the morning, when I was awakened by Geo, my cat, jumping up onto my bed. A few seconds later, I reached over to pet him and continued doing so until I heard the unsettling noise of a cat using the litter box. Since Geo is an "only cat", I flicked on the light to investigate what I had been petting. I remember clearly my exact words when my eyes finally focused:

"Ugggh! Cat, that is so vile! Oh, I know you didn’t!!! This is. This is an ABOMINATION. How could you? Ugggh.

There, in my bed, was a freshly-killed squirrel, still oozing blood onto the sheets. (Whenever I tell this story to my friend Steve, he likes to remind me that a dead squirrel is still better than some of the things I myself have dragged into my bed, but he always says things like that just to keep me humble).

As I was standing in front of the washing machine, pouring a full gallon of bleach into the wash water, I began to reflect on the night’s events. What had me most perplexed was my spontaneous use of the word "abomination". I am from New Jersey and we say things like "yo" and "wassup". We just don’t use words like "abomination" unless we are in an S.A.T. review course or Bible study.

I realized at that moment that God had used the squirrel incident to bring closure to my confusion about Leviticus 18:22, which reads:

While I was in my teens and twenties, I used to stay in all night, every night, burning for a man’s touch. I would then reach for my Bible and turn to Leviticus 18:22 (hoping it had been divinely-modified since the last time I had checked), and experience feelings of hopelessness and anger. Hopelessness because I saw a personal future of desperate loneliness if I obeyed. Anger because I felt I had to live a miserable and bitter life for God to want to love me.

Oh, I tried to reinterpret the verse and play with it’s wording. Some of my more imaginative attempts have included:

1. What if I bring a man home and we don’t lie, but we do everything either standing on our feet or seated in a reclining chair?

2. I would never lie with a woman in the first place. Therefore, if I lie with a man, I am not doing as I would with a woman, so it’s all good.

3. Since I am, in fact, a woman trapped in a man’s body, if I lie with a woman, it would celebrate spiritual lesbianism (a sin I created out of desperation) and spiritual lesbianism is really nasty and would be an even worse abomination, so it is better for me to lie with a man.

Maybe it was just the way "abomination" looked on paper. To begin with, it’s long. Second, even as a teenager too lazy to grab for a dictionary, I was alert enough to know it did not mean "eye candy to the Lord". "Abomination" is a negative word that’s proud to be one. It even has other unpleasant words within itself like "shun" and "bomb". In the New Living Translation Bible, "abomination" is paraphrased as "a detestable sin". It hit me that a sin can be a sin for two reasons: either it is something that God wants us to avoid, to improve the quality of life here on earth, or it is something that simply turns His stomach.

The Bible says that Geo is on this earth to live under my authority. I know that when he killed and deposited the squirrel onto my bed, he was doing what seemed right and natural to him. I also believe he did not understand my subsequent tizzy of disgust and rage. He did not comprehend that, in order to keep my house clean and acceptable to my standard of living, dead squirrels in my bed were a no-no.

Now I see Leviticus 18:22 in a new light. When Geo comes in to my house after being outside all night, he stops being Geo, "king of the yard" and becomes "my beloved cat" and must behave accordingly. When I entered into the Father’s house, after being in the gay wild for so long, I stopped being Robert, "queen of the night" and became "His beloved child" and must behave accordingly.

Geo brought a dead squirrel into my house and made it unclean. Likewise, when I consider bringing homosexuality into God’s house, my views of clean and unclean must yield to His. I must obey House Rules. Whether I understand His views of clean and unclean is as unimportant as Geo understanding mine.

From Buggin’ Out ! Newsletter