Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: I just got home from an impromptu dance party with some small foster children I was on a playdate with. I’m still beaming – my heart does a happy front-flip every time I picture the goofy smile written across the face of this pre-verbal toddler who didn’t say much but who communicated such loud joy with his whole body as we rocked out together to The Lion Sleeps Tonight. His older brother was the mastermind behind the idea; after we got back from a playdate at the park and found there was no one else home yet, a mischievous glint flashed across his eyes and he said, “We have the house all to ourselves… we should have a party!!!A dance party!” So we did. It was awesome.
Author: Matt Ventura
Heavy Burdens: Book Review
Dear readers, It's been a few months! A number of you have been quietly nagging me to do some more writing, and while I can't make any promises for the future, I do hope I'll be in a position to share more of my writing soon. I have a lot of things I'd like to put into words and many feelings I'd like to share, but the truth is, I can't. Not right now. There are a few reasons for this, but most of all I'm just so emotionally depleted.
Christian Leadership, Risk Absorption, and Conversion Therapy
Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash A few years ago I had to stay overnight with my younger sister on suicide watch. She was in a pretty vulnerable place and at a high risk of harm, and since I was in town it just made sense for me to support her by being present and … Continue reading Christian Leadership, Risk Absorption, and Conversion Therapy
Solidarity
On Monday morning I woke up to a message from a friend that read, “I am sorry to hear about your lockdown!” I had literally just woken up moments before picking up my phone (I know, I know, I’m a millennial), so the fact that we were going into lockdown was news to me. When I’d gone to bed 8 hours earlier, I expected to wake up to another normal day. Instead, I found out from an interstate friend that Brisbane was going into a snap lockdown to control the spread of some new covid cases.
Learning Family
When I first started this blog about a year ago, one of my main goals was to share stories. By nature, I tend to intellectualise a bit and default to sharing ideas rather than stories, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that there’s a deeper kind of learning that happens through embodied experiences and stories. Some learning is more caught than taught: especially the kind of learning that involves character growth and worldview shifts. So I wanted to share with you a story of how my church family taught me about family.
Life on Side B Podcast Episode
This week I had the privilege of being interviewed for an episode of the Life on Side B! I've so appreciated the work of Life on Side B and the way Josh Proctor has reached so many people with stories of Christian sexual minority people over the past few years, so it felt pretty surreal … Continue reading Life on Side B Podcast Episode
Listening Well
Last weekend Eternity News published this article by Nathan Campbell that I contributed to. Our article explores how the church might respond differently to things like the Victorian Change or Suppression Practices Prohibition Bill if we formed habits of listening better… listening to stories of gay and trans people, the kind of stories that led … Continue reading Listening Well
Sexual [or] Intimacy
"Do you love him?" "No, we're just friends." "They were 'intimate' with each other." "During lockdown, we were only allowed to visit a person if we had an 'intimate relationship' with them." I’ve been finding that there's a lot of confusion out there about the difference between intimacy and sex. The quotes above show how we often use love/intimacy as a stand-in to describe sexual/romantic relationships as though they are basically the same thing.
I Want to be Held
I've been thinking a lot about what it means for humans to be embodied people--not just spirits, but people made of physical bodies who relate to each other in embodied ways. I am someone who deeply craves physical touch, and it's been a weird year to think about this stuff during 2020 while touching other people has suddenly gained a whole lot more baggage than usual.
Belonging
A few weeks ago I was on a late an evening walk through the park talking to a dear friend on the phone about how lockdown and social distancing have affected us this year. Both of us are people that have always been good at long-distance friendships, and we’ve both managed to stay closely connected to our friends this year through phone calls, video calls, 1-1 catchups and small group gatherings. But something was missing.