I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat, avoiding eye contact with the ladies in my small group. They offered encouragement to a woman sitting next to me. She cried softly and spoke in halting sentences, wiping away tears with a tissue they offered.
“It’s just awful,” she said. “You can’t even imagine.”
But I could.
She was talking about her son. Her gay son. And nobody knew that he was gay but me and her. She didn’t even know that I knew. She didn’t know that I knew he had a boyfriend. That he had only just come out to her a day ago. That she was crying because he was gay and perfectly happy to never change. She didn’t know that I knew about it all.
She didn’t know that I was gay too. None of them did.
“Pete just needs prayer,” she said about her son, never mentioning his secret. “We learned some things about him yesterday. I can’t go into details, but he’s falling away.”
I fingered the pages of my Bible nervously and found myself saying, “Your son loves Jesus… he really does. God will watch out for him.”
“This is just so terrible, Bridget,” she said, eyes bleary and red. “I can’t say what it is, but it’s just so bad that I’d rather have learned he was dead.”
I’d rather have learned he was dead.
Her words lingered in the air as I looked away. One of the ladies gave her hand a little squeeze, and the mother went on about her family’s despair. A woman volunteered to pray for her. And then we moved on.