My daughter R. and I sat outside on a perfect Monday summer night.  Even with the nearby lights of the city and the airport several miles away, the clear, warm sky revealed hundreds of tiny pricks of light above us.  R. had been especially withdrawn and closed off the last few days.  L., my wife, was worried for her.  She had been going out of her way to give attention to R.  "How are you doing?"  "Everything OK?"  "What are you doing?" "I love you R."  Who could argue with such attention?

R. was hesitant to talk to me about what was bothering her.   But I had a good sense of it.  To warm things up I began rambling a little about the stars, showing her Venus and Mars and then certain constellations.  It only took a little cajoling for her to open.

About a year ago, R. had admitted to us as a family that she "liked girls more than boys."  This revelation really hardly phased me.  I had known for a long time that while other teenage girls were already shoulder-deep into the pubescent pool of sexuality, R. was barely up to her ankles.  It made sense. 

Unfortunately, for people in our family, especially L., it is still the subject of the label "sin".  R. had struggled mightily against this, particularly since she was so incredibly dedicated to her church and doing God's will in her life.  Her pastor, youth minister, her sunday school teachers, her friends -- they tried to be sympathetic with the "urge" of the homosexual attraction but insisted she must resist it.

R. confided to me that she had sought after an answer for months from God about what was the right choice -- whether to deny those urges and live as best she could in a sexless existence, fully committed to the Lord's work, or to accept her "urge" as a blessing from God and commit herself to find a healthy but "romantic" relationships with another girl that could eventually lead to sex and "coupling."

I have consistently told R. that she needed to follow her own truth -- the truth revealed to her in what she senses from her own look at Scripture, her own views of relationship, and ultimately what God put inside her to feel.  And yet she struggles with living out that "core" of herself, knowing that by doing that, it explodes everything else in its path. 

A few days later I spoke to my best friend, M., about my conversation with R. and the repercussions of it.  And I also happened to mention in passing how things were going with L. and I.  She stopped me and said, "Sounds like you two have the same problem."  And in that revelatory moment, I said to her (but secretly I was lecturing me), "I guess I need to be the real dad now and show her how to do that."  M. agreed.

Being ourselves in many cases involves something profoundly destructive.  When we truly live as we ourselves intend, we destroy the expectations and dreams and desires of so many people -- fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, bosses and assistants, lovers and friends.  The "Big Bang" of the self threatens to shatter the bonds we have between those around us.  And yet, just as the singularity that exploded eons ago, the "big bang" of the self births into existence everything we know to be real and good and true in our personal world.  Anything else is merely just dead dust drifting in space. 

So to "re-create" R. and I will probably mean breaking bonds and causing pain to people who THINK they know who we are and what we are made of.  Our hope is that the force of the explosion and the reassembling of the pieces through love and time will forge new bonds, new relationships and new life for us.

So when am I going to "get going?"