1987 - 2007
Wow, it’s hard to believe it. Twenty years have gone before my eyes. Twenty years ago I was a brand new college student, fresh from my senior summer and the big chested days of having recently graduated from academy. The whole world was opening up before me. And the pictures I look back upon show such a beautiful and precious young black male. A young black gay male.
2007 has turned out to be a particularly deep year for me personally. So many milestones feel so much more significant at the twenty year anniversary.
And life has a way of turning out differently than you plan or hope.
Twenty years ago I stopped dating females with the hope that it would “change” me. Thank you Jesus! Call it prophetic, but I saw the “Teg Haggard” I’d become otherwise. And I early saw that doing so was a statement of high love and respect for women.
Twenty years ago was when my knight in shining armor was supposed to meet at my Bible college where we’d graduate, have a Holy Union ceremony and live happily ever after. Well he never showed up, and I flunked out looking for him. I see the same sort of hopes and youthful expectation in the young brothers coming through twenty years my junior. Thankfully, the odds are much better in their favor today (their day) than they were for me in my day.
Yet the big “20″ is when I also began the journey of coming into my own…, becoming my own person; holding down a job not because someone would force me or come after me if I didn’t show up. In fact, I could not show up all I wanted to or do a half-ass job. I’d just get replaced and then where would I be? I had a new thing going, however small, called my life, my new adult life.
It’s that adult part that makes this anniversary so important to me and not just the adultness but twenty years beyond the start of this new level of life. Wow! It’s humbling really and of course I’m prone to responding to such things with himility and awe. And thankfulness.
That same young man is still here inside and he can say today “how blessed I am”. I know it’s the High and Holy One yet Meak and Lowly One, the Source who has seen me all the way. Too many brothers have been cut down in these years! Even if I doubt I’m going to say it was the Source, Love who has seen me through. The road hasn’t been easy, but how blessed I am. It’s been lonely sometimes, but how blessed I am. Trouble has at times pressed me down, but how blessed I am.
I’m twenty years older but I still have high expectations and I’m blessed, blessed, blessed! Twenty years blessed!
