Update from MO

I finished my first week of work in the Midwest. All is well. I like the guys that I work with, with only one exception. We work in a band shell on the nice days and inside a bar on the rainy days. I think the season is beginning to pick up as there were more people this week than the previous weeks from what I hear. The band shell is on a lake and is part of an extensive resort facility in which people on three different levels of balcony's with tables (essentially 3 separate clubs) overlook our performance. The tips are poor but the people are fun and nice and so that makes it worth it to me. I've gotten positive feedback from many of the other players including the entertainment director, so I'm happy about that. There is one guy that by his own admission doesn't even like the gig, but he's been doing it for so long and the money is so good that he is stuck doing it. Onstage he can at times appear as though he is thoroughly annoyed with the audience and there doesn't seem to be any interaction between him and whatever other player is opposite him. I heard that he ran some customers out of the bar with his bad attitude, and he alsonhad some unkind and very nonconstructive criticisms about my playing. That upset me, because I'm the first one to be open to constructive criticism.

On one of my days off I went down to visit my friend that had found Jesus. It was good to see him, and he seemed happy in a religious zealot kind of way. All his greetings including his outgoing phone message involved the Lords blessings and when I left to travel to Kansas City, we had to hold hands as he invoked the Savior's blessing upon my travel. But it was good to see him, and we had a nice day, although he seems to have lost any sense of humor about the foibles of humanity, curse words or gay culture. After we had had lunch, dessert and spent a couple of hours in a basement practice room of a local college waiting out a tornado, he felt compelled to give me his "story" of how he came to Jesus. As distasteful as I find Born-Agains, it had been suggested to me by a very wise man that instead of finding differences, that i might look for the similarities between his experiences with religion and my own spiritual experiences. With that in mind, I heard all of the revelations, and life changes he had experienced and I immediately related to much of what he said. I told him this, and although he didn't say it, I just knew that there was an undercurrent of disbelief that I could possibly have had such profound spiritual experiences without being Christian.

Now my friend has been gay since he first had sexual feelings at 12 years old. He had told me that since he has found Jesus he is no longer gay and has met the woman that he will one day marry. As he described her, it sounded more like a gay man's fag hag than a fiance. They've been very close for a couple of years, but apparently haven't kissed. I asked him if he was sexually and physically attracted to her and he told me that "when the time comes, Jesus will see to it." What do you say to that????