A long-ago friend recently wrote to me by e-mail, and now we’ve reconnected too on Facebook. He mentioned the church where I was an intern—the Vicar—for one year. He has returned several times, but says he didn’t find “the warm feeling I had there years ago.”

Of course, years ago he was a teenager, in a faithful family of the church, and all of life’s adult challenges and problems had probably not exploded yet for him. I re-read his message several times tonight, and the words that snagged me each time were “the warm feeling I had there years ago.”

What is that “warm feeling”? And where did it go?

I am mindful these days (writing in this very last hour of 2010) how much the world keeps changing. I reflect on a lifetime of remaining faithful to the Christian church — the Lutheran church — even in those decades that I knew I wouldn’t be loved if they knew the real me. But I remained faithful because I believed that God was faithful with me and that was all that mattered.

But “the warm feeling” is so much the creation of culture and emotion, which both change, be fickle, or disappear in a New York minute. Over the years I have seen so many of my own contemporaries disappear from the church, or at least from making a commitment, because they didn’t experience or maybe didn’t even want a “warm feeling.” But I am happy to say that I’m seeing this again in our time. It’s a vastly different warm feeling than our families and our childhood/youth culture provided. It is more honest, more grounded, less religious but more spiritual. It has nothing to do with social conventionality, and everything to do with personal integrity and the search for values over sensations.

For me, I think a new “warm feeling” started the day I realized that— if there is a God— God knows me all the way through, and in fact knows all the secrets I was trying to hide from myself and others. The realization caused me brief terror (like “OH NO!!”) until I saw this awareness of God’s knowledge in the same frame as God’s love: I am known by God who is omniscient, as I really am, and yet God loves me. That’s what is so shocking and revolutionary — that, being known fully and deeply, we are still loved.

There is an old phrase in the “red book” (Service Book and Hymnal) that I grew up with, I think, maybe in the Confession of Sins, that said of God: “from whom no secrets are hid.” In psychological terms, this represents true intimacy — when my guard is down, my pretense is gone, my vulnerability is at the maximum, and yet I genuinely sense that I am loved.

Well, maybe it sounds like a lot of theoretical crap.  This goes back decades now, but I think about the time all of this was working through my mind/heart, I was also having many new conversations with troubled young gay people — who never had any “warm feeling” but instead felt “that sick feeling” of rejection and fear of judgment. And my heart went out to them.

I remember sitting up very late many different nights with people who were terrified and wanted to run, if not from God, from any expression of the church. The fear of exposure was a wall too high to tear down merely on the promise that love awaits us all on the other side. But deeply and consistently I heard the secret equivalent of a “Voice” saying to me: “It’s true. Trust this. Follow this. God loves you as you are. It’s okay to come out of hiding.” And so I did. And ever since I’ve keep encouraging others to do likewise. Come out of hiding. Claim the love that Jesus promised.

—Pastor Dan Hooper