I’m sitting at the dining room table. Ice tea’s on tap.

I’m halfway between pensive and docile, visualizing a faithful life on this screen. I’m near the brink of an ice cream binge, dreading and looking forward to all that lies ahead---birthdays can do that to a guy. Oh yeah, I’m also holding a letter sent from somewhere in Massachusetts. That’s what started all this. She’s to blame.

Cold Play is singing about Ruling the World from an Idaho FM station and the moon is sort of present but mostly distracted by a murky sky and shallow reflection. The geese are noisy on the river. The bull pines are silent overhead. My head could use a mute button but I hear that option wasn’t available until the ‘05 models.

I’ve nearly burned through a thousand topics for this quarter’s write-a-thon but my heart is elsewhere. As is my concentration. I’m not facing writers block. Oh no, it’s way worse than that. I have Literary ADHD.

I did the drive home tonight in spurts. I stopped at the Post Falls Wal*Mart because the feral cats are out of Special Kitty and then I broke my New Years resolution and landed at Sonic, “America’s Drive-In-Restaurant”.

Again.

Life in late January doesn’t get much better than Onion Rings and Texas Toast and Fry Sauce. That is unless you happened to be munching all this down and staring across the road at 24 Hour Fitness and adding just a smidge of guilt to wash down that fry sauce.

“We are not really here. This is a dream”, I tell myself, “You are so the full meal deal. You really should have saved the onion ring feast for the day before lent.” But the guilt I wear is super-sized with February Resolutions written all over them.”

Typically cowboys and truckers and those known for hyped individualism don’t do guilt, do they?

In past years, I’ve given up Responsibility, Celibacy and for a least a decade, my Credit Rating for Lent. This is not news to any of you.

This year I think I’ll be letting go of the Onion Rings. But not the Fry Sauce.

So while I’m feeding at Sonic, this waiter dude is out there on the icy parking lot, going all Scott Hamilton on rollerskates. I sh*t you not. I think he toys with fate like this simply because at 20, you can. He is wearing skin tight black Carhartts, straight up courage and a blazing devilish smile. Watching him, I decide he’s “family”, with that extra enthusiastic voice that usually alerts the in-the-know. I tipped him way more than I should because anyone who is that brave or crazy enough to be skating on wheels, on ice, is a sure candidate for truck driver school. We need to support our own.

Trucker Chase called in about that time. He expresses abundant disappointment that I am eating at Sonic.

“Dude, I haul that shit. What are you doing? You are so not eating at Sonic.”

I confess that I am and that if he is not careful I will dedicate a song to him over “Sonic Radio”, the prepackaged Muzak that plays nationwide at each location.

Gulp. That shuts him up for a minute. He sometimes runs team and should he receive a dedication from another dude while unloading cases of onion rings with his co driver, well that could be problematic.

He advises he is calling from somewhere on I -35. He, leapfrogging over the Kansas/Oklahoma line, is deadheading back to the mother ship distribution center in Oklahoma City. He tells me about toll booths and gates. According to Chase, you never really know when you get to roll through a toll plaza; if it will be at full speed without stopping or, if the Prepass Transponder in his cab will advise him to gear down and idle through. We talk about his latest land acquisition and acquisitions of the heart and because he’s been keeping score on our mutual progress, he announces that I am finally catching up to him on both accounts.

After this assessment, I decide that maybe I should have gotten the larger order of onion rings. Chase is ten years younger than I am but his addiction to energy drinks seems to have spurned miraculous changes, increased vocabulary, and spot on accuracy. I wonder if breaded vegetables could do the same for me?

I hit the road and we talk about kids and if I’d ever be up to adopting them and the fact that his ex girl friend just moved into his fifth wheel trailer with her three kids. I’m thinking there’s a reality show in that scenario somewhere when the call dropped just south of Rathdrum. I turned up the radio.

I reckon toll gates seems like a good enough metaphor for all the things that hold us back, which was just the excuse I needed to turn Sean Hannity Off and CNN on. Anderson Cooper with a side of reality please.

It occurs to me a minute later that Anderson Cooper has never eaten anything deep fried. Ever. He’s a little too better than me. I change the channel again, past the Catholic Channel, past Martha Stewart Living Radio. My dial is restless. I know that somewhere on all 200 channels of Sirius Satellite Radio, Oprah or Ellen or God must have something interesting to add to the evening’s already very interesting roundtable discussion being hosted in my head.

I pull into a 24 hour carwash because I can’t seem to see out the back window of the Jeep. The dirt and deicer that is caked on it filters the headlights behind me to the point where they’ve become suggestions. Only after I’d put my money where my Jeep was, did it occur to me that maybe a car wash when it’s only 19 degrees outside might not have been so smart.

The ice wasn’t instant, but 55 miles later, I sat anonymously in front of my own front porch, trapped in Little Ride Em Good the 3rd. I’d frozen myself in my own damn ride. Crawling out the back, through the vagina of the soft top, it finally hit home that this act alone involved at least 20 contortions and contractions similar to childbirth and twice as many zippers as what usually leads to pregnancy.

Brilliance is not a trait I struggle with.

So I write this, on a January eve straddling the fence lines of topics because I’m caught here suspended between woulda-coulda-and shoulda. I’m a breach baby courtesy of a soft top and I’m protesting the cruelty of this world which refuses to conform to my hard fought faith in God---A battle scar that is inspired by my straight, letter writing friend. Her words circle in my mind.

She’s caught between two worlds. And it’s taken me three fricking pages just to get to the point. But when one is caught suspended between faith and hell, acceptance and a fellowship of condemnation, well you can’t just barge in and announce the struggle. It’s best to start these discussions gentle like, with subtle hinting about the tribulations of rollerskaters, artic car wash conversions, and plenty of trucker imagery.

She, my sweet friend from back east, is grappling with how people of faith embrace, or tolerate, or at least “love” the sinner but not the “sin” of the rainbow tribe. People like me.

Which brings me to the Amazing Race.

I know, I know, you’re thinking what the hell? Now he adds in a reference to the Amazing Race?

Stay with me here, ok?

Mel White, the former Ghost Writer for Pat Robertson (and a few other evangelicals) is about to be on the Amazing Race with his son. Mel White came out a decade or so ago and his direct action group Soul Force protested at my school, Seattle Pacific University.

He also knows a thing or two about being caught straddling two worlds, and when he finally came out, he so did not do what many gay folk do. He did not abandon his faith to land dancing at 4 am eternal in an endless succession of tweaker palaces and bathhouses. Rather he plunged head first right into the murkiest, suffocating, emancipating heart of faith and reconciliation. He did not renounce his faith but affirmed it-complete with contradictions and the rejection of his fellow believers. He’s even been arrested for his faith, which is very New Testament.

This is why I am writing my way through this really bad case of Literary ADHD. This is why I am tracing wood grains with my fingers, pacing, and going against the grain at this honey pined dining room table, even while Blondie is singing “Call Me”. I’m trying to sort out “callings’ and the act of straddling and living in two different worlds, all done while trying to find a place of serenity and acceptance.

Faith is not an infomercial or for people who like neat, clean, tidy packages.

It’s about people who embrace multiples of conflict and duality and rough edges with devastating uncertainty. Its about approaching toll plaza’s, like my friend Chase does with his semi truck, and wondering if you get to keep going full speed ahead or if you’re going to have to gear down and ease your way through the barriers or if your about to get stuck counting change--- wondering up until the last second if the gate is going to actually go up and allow you to pass. Sometimes the damn transponder isn’t going to respond and sometimes you aren’t going to have correct change. But faith, well faith is about plotting ahead regardless, because you know there is a destination calling you; One that may be better than where you’re coming from.

Faith is about moving ahead, even through the fog, even as you’re fighting exhaustion and second guessing everything. Faith is truly the most unsettling and wonderfully horrible amazing race.

I’ve been here before and I’ll be here again. I’m gay. But I don’t really fit so nicely into the gay urban scene. I am a rural guy, but at least on the surface, most rural folk don’t really aspire to land on Queer Eye for the Straight Logger. I accept Jesus as my personal savior but I fear His church that stands in front of me. I know full well that most of Christendom will not allow unconditional allowances, much less acceptance of a person like me.

I am also surrounded by friends who hold many faiths-they’ve experienced, and still believe, in everything from UFO encounters to Native American Sweat Lodges to Buddhist retreats to a firm commitment to believe in nothing. I must celebrate their faith as an affirmation of something deep, something that is within all of us which communes on a level that defies logic, rational, or Lent Resolutions.

In regards to Christianity, I lay claim to something mysterious that rises far beyond dogma and doctrine, prepackaged church histories and imperfect traditions. Indeed I cling to that ‘something” that is not constrained by these things but that exists despite them. Although I approach nights like this with trepidation, restlessness, and a gut full of saturated fat, laced with fry sauce, it is the act of seeking which allows those toll gates to rise and the journey ahead to unfold.

I’ll be tuning into to the Amazing Race with great expectations this year. If nothing else, just to witness a fellow believer, who against all odds, continues to plod forward. His is a most inspirational study of falling while rising. Despite Mel White’s very tenuous and public demonstration of the empowerment of grace, when one is caught straddling two worlds, a new reality unfolds. I also suspect his sense hope remains that ultimate blinding and binding destination. I’ll be praying for him, for his courage, and that especially during times of doubt, his faith will not tire.

Oh and one more thing. I’ll be praying that at least somewhere along the race, when he most needs it, he’ll find a Sonic Drive In. Because, nothing gets you through a crisis of faith better than an order of Onion Rings. With Fry Sauce.

To find out more about Mel White's organization Soul Force click here:

http://soulforce.org