Asking for Healing (Spring 2002)

By Jeffrey Pulling

 

For the past five years I have been the pastor for the Metropolitan Community Church in the Valley (North Hollywood, California), which has a primary outreach to GLBT folks. Being a pastor who stutters is often quite a challenge, as you can imagine. I happen to be in a career which requires clear and continual communication, and some days my speech is not very clear.

 

I do strive toward integrity in my life, bringing together the various aspects of myself into a whole: my spirituality, my gayness, my stuttering, etc. Integrity of course is my ideal, not the actual reality of my life every day. In February of this year, I was visited by two Passing Twicers who came to our Sunday morning worship at MCC in the Valley. Nora and Robin are from San Francisco, where they are involved with the MCC there. They happened to be visiting in the Los Angeles area, and came to our church. It was so good to see them, and it helped me (at least on that day) to be more integrated with the various aspects of myself. They also spent some time with another Passing Twicer in our congregation.

 

My sermon message on the day that Nora and Robin visited happened to be my first in a series on healing, specifically "Asking for the Healing You Desire." My motivation for this series is my own experience at the turn of the calendar year. The year 2001 was one of my most challenging yet, both personally and professionally. When it came time for my Christmas-to-New Year vacation, I just collapsed with the flu and a bad back. The misery from the illness and the pain from my back colored how I saw and felt about everything; I ended the year with a very distorted view of my life and work. Somehow I pulled it together to start the new year fresh; I recovered from the flu and started going to a chiropractor for my back. As I started feeling better physically, it was amazing how my emotional and spiritual outlook also changed for the better. We truly are a unity of our parts!

 

My prayer and hope for all Passing Twicers is that we get in touch with those parts of us that are in need of healing, and that we go after healing--with prayer, with the support of friends and loved ones, with the help of professionals, whatever it takes. Dis-ease and pain do impact how we see life and live life. Let's get healed--whether that be physical, emotional, or spiritual.

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