Hugh's Blog

Payday

Today is payday for my day job, which means that I sit down and pay the bills that will be due before the next payday. Perhaps it just means the capitalists have won, but the feeling of it being payday and sitting down and being able to pay all of your bills – there is truly nothing like it.

I get how sad that sounds. But I have spent a not-insignificant portion of my life – both as a child and as an adult – not having a lot of access to money to pay just the regular, everyday bills. Poverty changes your brain.

In my twenties, my business card said I was an “Account Executive”, but basically I helped rich old people hide their money from the government.

I was successful, in that I made good money and I was praised for my performance, but a failure, in that I hated the pressure my managers put on me, and I hated the pressure I felt to push people into solutions that made money for me but were of dubious real long term value for them. I was a failure because I hated my life, and wouldn’t do anything about it.

If you know the movie Glengarry, Glenn Ross, my life was a lot like a weekly visit from the guy from Mitch and Murray. I once was told by a manager that I just needed to buy a more expensive car – because then I would have more debt and thus be more motivated to close deals.

I hated that money drove everything in my life. I hated that it was the only way we kept score. I hated that it was all that mattered. I made good money (especially for a 28-year-old kid) but we spent it like drunken sailors, too.

Eventually, I noticed that I had to drink a pint of vodka in my car to work up the courage to go into the office, and I quit.

I made $96,000 in my last year of selling money at the beginning of this century. The next year I made $18,000, got a divorce, and moved into a friend’s attic apartment.

So, all that is to say, I have lots of screwed-up narratives in my head about money.

Earlier this week, one of our cats had some weird symptoms that we needed to take her to the vet. This was unplanned and unexpected, and I hate that my only hesitancy around taking her was that I was unsure how much this would cost. To be clear – it wasn’t that we had no money to pay for it – we do – but that open-ended question just hung over me.

I have broken teeth in my mouth I am scared to go to the dentist for. Not because of fears around pain or fear of dentists or even that it is likely that at some point in the next ten years I shall have to migrate to dentures – it is that it is a huge open-ended question mark around how much it will all cost and that there is every possibility that I will have a pleasant visit with a professional who will, at the end of our meeting, tell me I owe them $3500, with no warning in advance.

The lowest I have ever felt in my life was one summer morning in May, in Durham, NC. We had just left Duke Hospital, where my wife was being evaluated for eligibility to have a heart transplant that would save her life and give her a normal life expectancy, rather than the 3-7 years she had if she did not get it.

That morning, we had a meeting with the financial counselor, who looked at our insurance coverage and told me that if we did not get approval from one of our insurances to cover this procedure, I would have to show evidence that I had $20,000 in cash before they would list her as eligible for transplant.

I did not have $20,000. I worked at a small, scrappy grass-roots severely underfunded nonprofit that I had founded, and I made very little money while doing good work. I did not know where I could get $20,000. I had very little hope, under normal circumstances, of ever seeing $20,000 at one time.

And so, with a smile on her face, this nice person at Duke told me that because of choices that I had made around vocation and income and yes, money, my wife might die.

Spoiler alert: We got it worked out, she had the surgery, and she did not die.

But I still feel all sorts of anxiety about money. While writing the passage above about that day at Duke Hospital, I had to stop and get up and walk around, because even though it is almost 7 years later, it is all still too fresh in my brain.

So, when I decided to launch the membership program earlier this month as a way to make my writing economically viable, I had butterflies galore. All the old stories reared their head.

“Who are you to try to get paid money because you write things on a blog? It’s not like it’s real writing.”

“You aren’t good enough to get paid to write.”

“Nobody will support you, and you will just look stupid.”

“Writing is fun for you. Things that are fun we should do for free.”

“You are just going to be let down.”

But those are just stories I tell myself and have no bearing at all on what happens in reality. Because my brain is filled with old stories. Stories that are not kind to me.

In the Spike Jonze movie Her, the titular character says that the past is just a story we tell ourselves. And we can learn to tell ourselves better stories.

So, I’m trying to write (in my head) better stories about money, abundance, and scarcity, and better stories about my worth as an artist, as a writer, and as a person.

I’m trying to learn to tell myself better stories about myself.

And part of that is coming to believe that my labor has value and that other people believe that as well. That I need not apologize for making money for doing something which I both enjoy and do well. And that it is OK for me to ask for what I need.

The Wildlife Pond

So, I’ve talked around it, and even talked about building it, but not specifically about the reasoning behind it – we now have a wildlife pond in our backyard.

I grew up in a place where ponds were large – a ¼ acre or more – and muddy and where one fished for catfish and where the cows drank. This is not that sort of pond.

Neither is it a koi pond, where exotic goldfish swim.

It is a pond designed for frogs. And dragonflies. And birds. It is, when all is said and done, a wildlife pond. No other project I have done has elicited so many comments and questions, so I will attempt to answer some of them here.

Why did I build a wildlife pond?

Amphibians are in trouble. Their habitat is in decline, and their populations are plummeting. So I decided to make them some habitat to go along with the habitat I am already building for birds. And speaking of birds – they are more drawn to water than they are to feeders, so that is a bonus. And since I’m building a habitat for all the animals that live on my property, of which I am one, the fact that I love moving water is not incidental to the decision.

There are a lot of resources out there if you want to build a fish pond in your backyard. There are a lot of resources if you want to build a fountain. But as I researched wildlife ponds, nearly every single thing I could find supposed you lived in the UK. Apparently, wildlife ponds are a big thing there. So I had to do a lot of translating as to climate and so on. This post is my attempt to explain how I did it, and my reasoning behind some of the decisions I made.

It’s six feet wide and ten feet long and is 4 inches deep at its shallowest point and 18 inches deep at its deepest. Much like a swimming pool, there is a shallow end and a deep end. Your pond needs to be deep enough so that in hot climates (like mine) the water will stay cool in the deep parts. If you had fish, it would need to be deeper, but I don’t have fish, nor do I plan to add them. But more on that later.

The shallow end is for birds – it slopes from zero to 4 inches deep, with rocks here and there in the shallow end for the birds to light on. The robins, doves, and finches use it daily for bathing. The slope is also important for frogs and other critters to get in and out of the water – like a beach of sorts. Almost all the frog spawn we get is in the shallow end.

I dug the whole pond in an afternoon after it had rained and the ground was soft. We have clay here, so it was a pain, but the hole held its shape. I don’t know how one manages in sandy soil. It’s important that the perimeter of the hole be level – this meant I took some of the soil I dug up and used it to build a berm on the low side.

After digging the hole and tamping it firm with a tamper, I put down pond liner underlayment and then a 45 mil EPDM liner. This was by far the most expensive part of the build. There are cheaper liners than EPDM, but it is the one that professionals use and is reliable and durable. It has a 50-year life expectancy, which is 20 years longer than mine at current rates, so we should be good.

Some places will tell you to use old carpet or sand as underlayment, but underlayment is cheap, and this is part you don’t want to get wrong. The underlayment protects the liner, and I don’t want to deal with punctures.

After the liner is in – a pain, and you can probably use another person’s help here – you just add water, and then the weight of the water will press the liner into the creases of the hole. You will want to get in the hole as it fills, so you can shift things around as it fills. What sort of water you use is a matter of choice – I used tap water from the hose, but if you do this, know you need to let it sit a few days to let the chlorine dissipate before you add plants or anything. Some people just let the rainwater fill the pond, which is probably best, but I would still fill it the first time with tap water to set the liner. You could then siphon the water out and let it fill with rainwater if that is important to you.

At this point, you want to take a break anyway. Let the chlorine dissipate, and let the liner get settled. You can use this time to order your plants and find a source for rocks.

When we lived in North Carolina, rocks were everywhere – for free. I planted an apple tree once and unearthed five or six bowling-ball-sized rocks in the process. But this land was once prairie, and any rocks here were transported here. So, I went to the expensive landscape rock place and looked at rocks that cost $700 a ton. Then I went to the place that sells gravel and bought limestone rip-rap for $45 a ton instead. I ended up using a ton and a half of limestone rocks, ranging in size from roughly an apple to two or three the size of a duffle bag.

There are lots of ways to edge a pond, but I like rocks, and since this was close to the house, I liked that rocks were clean and easy to do and that they would create hiding places for amphibians and the green anole lizards we have everywhere here.

Placing the rocks is more art than science: Trim the liner to about six inches beyond the hole’s edge, then place rocks around the inside of the hole against the walls, as if you are lining the hole with rocks. This creates pockets where tadpoles will hide. Then place rocks around the perimeter to mark the transition and to hold the liner in place. Big rocks first, then smaller ones, then finally get some bags of gravel to fill in the remaining spaces. My liner is invisible because it’s completely covered with rocks. This keeps the liner from getting UV damaged, keeps the pond cooler, and also looks much more natural.

Everyone asks about mosquitos since we don’t have fish, and we use a 3-part strategy to prevent them: We have moving water, we plant for dragonflies, and as a failsafe, we use mosquito dunks. Mosquitos need still water, so we bought a simple pump and spitter that turns all the water in the pond over once per hour. This also makes for lovely sounds and is visually interesting.

Dragonflies showed up on the second day, and have been here ever since. They eat tons of mosquitos. And dunks are floating cakes made of bacteria that kill mosquito larvae and nothing else – we replace them monthly and they cost pennies.

We don’t have fish because they eat amphibian eggs and they poop – a lot. The nitrogen in the poop causes all sorts of filtration problems. People who have koi ponds spend thousands of dollars and lots of time filtering the poop out of their ponds. And koi are not endangered, but frogs are. So no fish.

A wildlife pond needs plants – preferably native ones. You want 60% of the surface of the pond to be covered with plants. This is a goal – right now I have swampwort and watercress and rush and papyrus and Louisiana Iris and water lilies growing in the pond, and canna and daylilies growing on the edges. I have ordered some more plants – If there is a downside, it is that pond plants are hard to find in most nurseries. Had I planned ahead, I could have had the plants lined up in advance.

The plants provide shade, habitat for the wildlife, food for the wildlife, and also make it look nice, which is also important to me. A pond is a whole new ecosystem, and it all plays a role.

I built a small landing pad patio beside the pond, so I can sit next to it in the afternoon and watch the birds bathe and hear the soothing sounds of the water. At night, the frogs sing, and I have hundreds of tadpoles zipping about in the water. Lizards sun themselves on the rocks, and in the morning, I walk the edges, looking for frog eggs that were laid overnight. And watching the birds bathe is pure joy.

It’s my favorite addition to my garden, and I wish I had done it years ago. The total cost was around $800, and it took a month of nights and weekends to do, but I probably could have done the whole thing in 3 days with planning.

If you have any questions, put them in the comments and I will try to answer them.

Food is love.

If I were to make a list of the things I know for sure, that food is love would be one of them.

I have known that since I was old enough to know anything. That the secret ingredient in the biscuits Aunt Monty stood in front of the counter and rolled out every day of her life was pure love. That the tender pot roast after church on Sunday was as sincere a sign of my mother’s affection as she was capable of making. That I have never felt as at home in the world as I did all those years ago, in the fellowship hall of Emory Methodist Church, eating Miss VanHook’s chicken and dumplings.

I come from working-class stock. We did not have money for vacations or new cars or even health insurance, but by God, we could have green beans seasoned right and biscuits fit for gods and jelly that came from the efforts of women who loved you sweating over a kettle in the heat of summer.

It was the way people who loved me but didn’t have a lot of tools to express that love, showed it.

I don’t believe I am alone in that. I have polled large groups of people, and always end up with the same results: If I were to ask you your favorite memories of people you loved who are now gone, most of the time, those memories involve food.

Because food is love. It is the product of love, and it’s how we show love, and it’s how we feel love.

So, I’m writing a book about that. It’s a cookbook, in the sense that it will have recipes, but it’s also a book of stories because the stories give meaning and context to the food.

This has no commercial potential. Rachael Ray will not have some dude from MS on her show to talk about sausage gravy and the way it felt when his family had driven 8 hours through the night to get to his grandparent’s house and the weary travelers were groggy and sleepy but a hot breakfast was waiting on them.

But because I have members who support my work, I don’t have to worry about that. So I’m gonna publish it myself, with the financial support and encouragement of my members.

More information coming soon.

(Revised for accuracy and changing circumstances on 10/11/25)

The Plan

Some years back, I was hanging out in the smoking rea of the day shelter I ran at the time. It was one of my favorite community-building activities – it’s hard to have any agenda in a smoking area, especially if you yourself do not smoke.

If you just hung out there long enough, people would forget you were the guy in charge of everything, and eventually, they would just talk. And if you were willing to just listen, you heard some amazing things.

Like the time I heard how one of our guests had been in a drug deal gone bad, and so the other party to the deal was looking for him to kill him, but our guest had hidden in a dumpster and the would-be killer overlooked him.

He turned to me and then said, “Pastor, that’s why I believe in God. Because he was protecting me that day.”

Well, as the old saying goes, the Lord protects fools, drunks and, I guess, drug dealers.

Anyway. Another time, and to the point of this conversation, I overheard two guys talking. It seems that this was homeless because he had cheated on his girlfriend, and she found out about it, and she had then thrown all his stuff out in the street when he wasn’t home, changed the locks, and also called the woman he was cheating on her with, who was unaware he was cheating, and who also threw all his stuff out and locked him out.

So he’s telling this story to another guy who we will call Guy #2.

Guy #1: I ain’t mad though. This is all part of God’s plan.

Guy #2: Oh, how do you figure?

Guy #1: I mean, I just figure everything happens for a reason.

Guy #2; Sure. But sometimes, the reason is that you did some stupid shit.

Well, yes. There is that.

Our impulse to make meaning from chaos is strong. I have spent more time than most people at the deaths of youths who died violent deaths, and I always hear folks say that God needed them more than we did, or that this is all part of God’s plan, or that God won’t give us more than we can handle – all of which are really stupid things to say that bring comfort to no one but the speaker.

But they say them anyway.

I get how it happens though. As I look back over my life, I see things that turned out poorly – a bad relationship, a job I got fired from unjustly, a friendship gone bad – that at the time seemed horrible, but which, in time, became a turning point for my life, and that led to my finding a better partner, or a more rewarding job, or led to my developing healthier relationships.

And so it is tempting to believe that the bad thing that happened was part of the plan – God’s, The Universe’s, hell – somebody’s – and that it was foreordained that as a result of this bad thing, I would be better off eventually.

But I don’t believe that to be true.

What I believe is that the universe is inherently frugal, and wastes nothing. The leaves that fall from the trees in Autumn become compost that feeds the trees in Spring. The flurried attempts to get nourishment by bees from flowers are also the accidental means by which flowers get pollinated, and thus exist. The spring ephemeral flowers only exist because the leaves fall off the trees, and thus bring sunshine to places that are normally in darkness.

The Universe is a very frugal place.

And I exist in that frugal universe. And so do you. We don’t just exist in it – we are part of it. Like the leaves, or the bees, or the flowers. And so, since the universe wastes nothing, the tragedies that befall all of us are not debris left over from disasters, but building materials from which we build our lives.

And so the fact that I spent most of my 20’s doing a job that I hated, that required me to do things I found abhorrent and that led to my drinking an unhealthy amount to survive was neither a personal disaster nor part of a benevolent god’s plan, but rather the source of the skills (such as public speaking, persuasive writing skills, and confidence in dealing with people) that I have used to build a 15-year career advocating for people who have their backs against the wall and effecting culture change. Work I would not have had the tools to do had I not learned them then, in that ugly period of my life.

Like bones and water, which, with time. Heat, and intention, form broth, the things in our past are the materials with which we build our future.

I once knew a lady who lived in a van. Her story was harsh and brutal, and she had legitimate grievances about the circumstances that led her there, and her reasons for being unable to be rehoused. But she wasn’t angry. I asked her why not, and she told me she never really thought of it that way.

“I don’t focus much on what got me here. I just ask myself what I’m supposed to be doing now that I’m here.”

That sounds like a plan to me.

Hot dog sandwiches

A while back, I was interviewed for the Food and Faith Podcast, and we talked about food and how it figures into our memories. And I had a throwaway line in there where I was talking about the power of food, and I said that the best meal you ever had and your favorite meal was probably two different meals.

My point was that the feelings we associate with food are often separate from the actual quality of the food. This is why my favorite way to eat a hot dog has nothing to do with the best tasting hotdog I ever had.

The best tasting hotdog I ever had was about two weeks ago, in my kitchen. It was the Kirkland bun-length all-beef hotdog, from Costco. It was on a Natures’s Own butter roll, and it was outfitted with dill pickle relish and dijon mustard.

They are in our rotation, and maybe once a month when we need supper in a hurry, I will steam some hotdogs and bake some tater tots and have supper on the table in 20 minutes, with very little mess to clean up.

It’s an amazing hot dog. Really. But it’s not my favorite.

I was six years old and was staying at Monty and Doc’s house. They were the retired farmers who lived next door to us and served as my surrogate grandparents because all of mine were either dead or far away.

Monty was the best cook in the world – I know I said so dozens of times, and usually to my mom when she tried to replicate something I had eaten cooked by Monty, and Mom’s version was found wanting.

“Of course, it’s not as good as Monty’s, Mom. Monty’s the best cook in the world.”

This was probably not, in retrospect, the most empowering thing my mom ever heard.

But anyway, I’m staying at Monty and Doc’s. And for lunch that day, she told me we were having hot dogs.

I loved hot dogs. Mostly, Mom just boiled them and we put them on buns with mustard and ketchup (don’t judge – I was young and foolish). Sometimes, when we went camping, we would eat them grilled. But I had never had Monty’s hot dogs – I just knew these were gonna be great!

I knew something was up when she got out a cast-iron skillet. She then sliced the dogs – the bright red linked dogs you bought at the butcher counter, not the “regular” hot dogs Mom always bought – from end to end. Then she put a dab of bacon grease in the middle of the skillet and turned the stove on medium, and I watched the fat melt and coat the bottom of the skillet. She picked up the skillet and turned it first this way and then that, coating the bottom of the skillet with a thin sheen of fat.

She put the sliced dogs cut side up in the skillet, and cooked them until they got a slight crust on the outside, then flipped them over. At this point, they would often be curled from the heat, and she would take her turner and press the cut side down against the bottom of the skillet until it, too, was crusted.

While they were cooking, she had put white bread (light bread, we called it then) under the broiler to toast. Then she slathered one piece with yellow mustard, put one and a half hot dogs (three strips) on top of that, and then coated the other piece of toast with mayonnaise and the sandwich was made.

I protested. “I don’t like mayonnaise on my hotdogs!” I told her.

“Have you ever had a hot dog sandwich before?” she asked.

Well, no, I admitted.

She told me that meant I didn’t know if I liked it or not, and to sit down and eat my sandwich.

So I did. And that was the day I learned that I love mayonnaise on a hot dog sandwich.

Membership Month

Sunday, June 5th, is my birthday. I will be 50 years old. Yes, I know, I seem young and sprightly, but trust me, that is just the Tylenol talking. In any event, the last year has been my most creative year ever.

Over the last year, I launched a new blog, Humidity and Hope, on which I have published 186 articles just since October, consisting of more than 152,000 words. I published my weekly newsletter, Life is So Beautiful, where every Monday morning I send a short (previously unpublished) essay and five links to beautiful things to thousands of subscribers. And I launched The Hughsletter, my personal newsletter, where I share what I’ve written that week and links to cool things I’ve found.

And now I’m launching something new: A membership program to support my work.

Figuring out how to monetize this sort of work is hard, especially if you have scruples. I don’t want ads everywhere, scraping your privacy. I don’t want to limit access to only people who can afford it, like a paid newsletter. And all of this *waves hands* costs a lot of money to do – my email service alone is hundreds of dollars a month, whether I send anything or not.

I’ve had a Patreon account for years, but we are transitioning from it to a simple membership program: People who want to support my work, who want to keep my public work free and ad-free, and who want more of my work in the world can contribute as little as $5 a month and help make that happen by clicking here.

One more thing, related to this: Just like there is Pledge Week at NPR, June is “Membership Month”, because of my birthday. I will be making a big announcement next week about a secret project that is for members-only, for example. And I will each week, highlight more of the creative work I do, made possible by the members who support this work.

And to the existing members who all kick in to keep this train going: Thank you. Seriously. I could not do this work without you.

Nouns and Verbs

June is Pride month for the LGBT community in the US.

From Wikipedia: LGBT Pride Month occurs in the United States to commemorate the Stonewall riots, which occurred at the end of June 1969. As a result, many pride events are held during this month to recognize the impact LGBT people have had in the world.

My current Facebook timeline is a damn riot of rainbow flags. I love it.

Yesterday, I wrote a story that involved my friend Tony. It got shared a lot around places on the Internet, and I went snooping, as I do, to see what people are saying about it.

One woman who shared it on her Facebook timeline called me a “courageous ally”.

Hmmmm.

I’m not sure the courageous part really is applicable – I work at an open and affirming church, in a denomination where my credentials are not at risk for my being affirming. I’m aggressively “out”, no pun intended, about my being affirming. I’m not really risking anything, so it doesn’t take much courage on my part to be affirming. I did all my losing because of that a long time ago.

But quibbles aside, I found the use of the term ally to be interesting. I mean, I’ll take it, but it isn’t a term I use to describe myself.

There is an apocryphal story I have heard in Mennonite circles for years that goes something like this:

A traveling evangelist is lost in Mennonite country and sees a farmer plowing a field that runs beside the road. He stops to ask the man for directions. After getting them, he figures, as an evangelist, he can kill two birds with one stone, and asks the farmer, “Sir, do you mind my asking if you are a Christian?”

The farmer looks at him for a long second, then he says, “Well, I’m not sure. I mean, I think so, but then again, I could tell you anything. I suggest you call my neighbor and ask him whether I am or not.”

I think some titles are not for us to claim for ourselves. Like Christian. Or ally.

Don’t get me wrong: I am straight, and I want a world where LGBT people are affirmed. I spend significant portions of my time and resources working for that sort of world. But I still won’t call myself an ally. Because I don’t get to determine if my actions are allied with oppressed people’s interests – they do.

All too often, we who are in the majority find it easy to pick up titles for ourselves that make us look good in certain contexts. We want to claim nouns – like ally – rather than doing the hard work of actually doing work that puts us in solidarity with LGBT people. Trust me – if you are doing solidarity work, no LGBT person will doubt where you stand, without your having an #Ally hashtag on your profile page.

Like, I know a white guy who calls himself a feminist in his Twitter bio. If I were desperate to get that point across, I might use, “Promoter of women’s rights”, but for the most part, I just prefer to let my actions speak for themselves. After all, if the only way people know I believe in and advocate for the political, economic, and social equality of women is because I told them, I would be a pretty shitty feminist, I think.

I could understand that things like titles do come in handy when you are creating difference: Like, I will sometimes describe myself as someone who supports LGBT rights, so people who oppose LGBT rights won’t be confused and try something, but I still wouldn’t call myself an ally.

I tend to use verbs rather than nouns.

It’s more important that I write than that I call myself a writer. I advocate for LGBT folk, but I wouldn’t call myself an ally. There are people who said I was a prophet, but none of those people were me.

As Dad once advised me, I just try to be both indispensable and invisible. I want to be, rather than seem. And to do the verb, rather than claiming the noun.

The Giddiness of God

Tony is a Black man who lives on the edge of homelessness, with occasional bouts of sheltered living. Tony is also a gay man, but not completely out, largely due to concerns about his safety in the world he lives in. And Tony is also Christian in a very intense and Evangelical way, mostly, I suspect, as a way of dealing with his shame around his sexuality.

So when Tony came into my office and asked if he could talk to me, I knew this was going to be interesting.

I want to say upfront that while I know that there is no single Black Church Experience and that there are many positive manifestations of the Black male-led church, Tony is involved in none of those. Instead, he regularly attends a storefront Pentecostal church led by a power-hungry man who preaches prosperity theology with a side dish of shaming, who demands that people refer to him as “Pastor”. Like it’s his name.

One of Tony’s friends is Jimmy, and Jimmy is very gay and very out. Jimmy had been going to Tony’s church, and was recently “convicted” about his sexuality, and had recently been, at the encouragement of the pastor over there, committed to praying that God will take away his “homosexual desires”.

Earlier in the week, Jimmy had confessed to the pastor that it wasn’t working. Despite all his praying, Jimmy was still just a big old gay man, and this made Jimmy feel ashamed and made the pastor angry.

So at the Wednesday night prayer meeting, and at the leadership meeting afterward (that Tony was a part of), Pastor doubled down. They had a ‘Come to Jesus” meeting, Tony told me, where Pastor let it be known in no uncertain terms that being gay was a sin, against the law of God, and to prove it, they had a verse by verse reading of Romans chapter one.

Everybody in the room was supposed to read two verses out loud, and when it got to Tony, he was supposed to read verses 26 and 27 out loud.

For this reason, God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

There was a long pause while they waited for Tony to read.

“I can’t do it. I won’t do it.” Tony said. And then he left.

Pastor was upset, obviously. He isn’t used to being defied. He sent Tony several texts, basically threatening his eternal salvation if he didn’t repent and come back to church.

So Tony thought about it and came to see me. Because that’s sort of what I do. I’m the pastor you come to when you don’t have anyone else to talk to. The conversation went like this:

Tony: Pastor told me last night that my being gay was a sin, and that God was angry at me.

Me: Well, what do you think?

Tony: I really don’t think it is a sin. I think God made me this way. What do you think, Hugh?

Me: I think you’re right Tony. I don’t think it is, either, and I think God made you this way.

Tony: You do? (This two-word phrase was so filled with hope, tears, and pain that it almost broke my heart.)

Me: I really do. God made you, and God doesn’t make mistakes. You are exactly the way God meant for you to be, and God loves you, and God loves that you are gay. You being gay is exactly what God wanted, and it makes God happy.

Tony, thru tears: No pastor has ever told me that before. I wish they had.

Me: I really wish they had, too.

We talked a bit after that about what Romans chapter one was actually talking about, and I lent him a couple of books that would be helpful to someone from an Evangelical background. But mainly, I let him know he was loved, by both me and by God.

As he was getting ready to leave, I asked him if he would let me read another Bible verse to him. He agreed.

So I read Romans 8:38 and 39 to him.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Him: That sounds like it’s saying that nothing can come between me and God.

Me: That’s exactly what it’s saying.

He hugged me, and then, heading to the door, stopped and turned to look back at me.

“No pastor has ever told me that before, either.”

And he walked out the door.

# # #

If you are gay, and like Tony, you have never had a minister tell you that God is happy you are gay, then please, allow me to be the one to say it.

You are made, the book of Genesis tells us, in the very image of God. You are not an afterthought or a mistake. You are not defective. Your being gay was part of the plan, and has been all along.

And because every creator delights in seeing their creation being fully utilized, God is delighted that you are gay. Not just delighted that you are attracted to other people, but your expressing your sexuality makes God happy. In exactly the same way that it makes God happy that you like to paint, or that you like to run, or that you enjoy singing songs or making music.

Your being gay, realizing you are gay, seeking to express your gayness – all of that makes God giddy with joy.

And as to what can separate you from the love of God?

Not a damned thing. Not a single damned thing.

The Dreambook

In North Mississippi, in the late 1970s, the value of the Sears Catalog cannot be overstated.

It was an endless source of amazement and entertainment. It was my portal into other worlds, where people wore suits and had couches that matched the armchairs and the men wore t-shirts that matched their underwear and the women wore underwear that was not white.

We were dollar store people, sometimes including Kmart and Walmart, darkening the doors of Sears only twice a year – when we shopped for back to school clothes and when we went into the mall at Christmas, when we children were admonished to touch nothing – NOTHING! – and were told in no uncertain terms that we would not be buying any toys here today. After all, maybe Santa would bring us what we wanted.

The catalog was called the Wishbook, but that’s not how I used it, as I had no doubt that there was never any chance of affording anything on offer from there. No, for me it was a Dreambook. I think the closest analog would be the way we use a site like Pinterest now – looking for things that are visually appealing and then using that image as a basis for our imagination to take over. Like, I see how this blogger redid her living room, and although mine is smaller and has fewer windows, perhaps the built-in bookshelves and the hardwood floors would work in my living room as well…

So I pictured a life where I wore a suit like that to work, and where I had a briefcase like that one there, and of course, I would need a gold watch with a snap bracelet and a Cross pen set that matched the watch. I would wear a gold necklace with a little cross on it, too, and a gold money clip. I didn’t know much, but I knew matching was important.

I would have one of those dorm fridges in my bedroom, where I would keep my six-packs of beer. My parents did not drink – nobody I knew really did – but beer is what cool grownups drank, so it was a given that I would have a beer fridge in my room. That bar set was nice, too, and then there was the pool table with the leather pockets and the stained glass lamp that would hang over it. It would all go in the rumpus room in my basement, despite the fact I had never been in a basement in my life, nor did I know anyone who owned a house that had one.

But neither did my imaginings default to so far away as adulthood. You could, back then, purchase Boy Scout uniforms from Sears, and I desperately wanted to be a Boy Scout, but there was no troop for many, many miles. So I imagined starting my own version of the Boy Scouts, and with our own uniforms, and I had found an ancient Boy Scout handbook – at least 40 years old – at a thrift store and we would not only learn things like how to start fires and camp in the woods, but we would also fight crime and assist the police and make the world better. Girls would not be allowed. It was sort of like if the Boys Only club from Little Rascals met the Superfriends and the Eagle Scouts.

I spent hours, laying on the floor of our living room, flipping through that catalog. Dreaming.

Rocks

Yesterday, I moved a ton and a half of rocks. By hand. Twice.

I loaded them in the truck. Unloaded them from the truck. Put them in a wheelbarrow, and moved them to the backyard. Then moved them into and around the new wildlife pond I’m building. I bet I touched each rock 5 times, at least.

I turn 50 next week, and I feel every single one of those years right now, and a few more on top of that.

Here’s a picture of some of them. The can of beans is for scale.

So, about this pond. It’s small – roughly 6×10. It varies from 4 to 16 inches in depth and is lined with an EPDM liner, and then covered with rocks on top of that. I have a water spitter that looks like a frog, and a small pump that stirs the water up to keep the mosquitos under control (Mosquitos only lay eggs in still water). Also, mosquito dunks are helpful, too.

But it takes rocks. Lots of rocks.

The shallow spots are for the birds – I have already seen 3 robins bathing there, just this weekend – and for the amphibians. At night I hear the frogs singing, and I already have frog spawn among the rocks. I still need more gravel around the edges, and then I need to finish landscaping around it, but it’s getting there. That is an in-progress picture, from earlier today.

Also, the homemade baffle I made for the bird feeder was thwarted by the squirrels. So I broke down and bought a baffle, which has worked well for 5 days now.

So, that’s really it on the half-acre this week. I’m beat and am ready to take some Tylenol and go to bed.