One December day, when I was seven years old, and alone in our house, I sneaked into my parents’ bedroom, hauled open their closet door, and found, fresh from the department store, just about every toy I had asked Santa to bring me that upcoming Christmas.

Aghast and transfixed, I then knew the brutal truth: far from being way up in the North Pole, Santa Claus was in the closet.

Har!

No, but seriously: I didn’t like my new reality. I liked my old reality, the reality in which I had believed for my entire life—the more imaginative reality. But what could I do? Try to somehow reconcile the unwrapped purchases in my parent’s closet with the whole idea of elves working away in their North Pole workshop?

Love the Santa, but hate the sales receipts? Try to pray away the pay?

Forget it. It was over. Adulthood had scored another knockout.

Perhaps you see where I am going with the metaphor.

That’s right: one day, when you’re home alone, and in no way prepared to deal with it, gay people are going to jump out of the closet and beat you up.

No, but just like the time was then upon me to accept that gift-giving Santa Claus doesn’t really exist, the time is now upon you to accept that gay-bashing Jesus Christ doesn’t really exist. But at least with your new understanding of the way things are, you get to keep Jesus Christ. I had to totally ditch Santa Claus: all of a sudden Smokey the Bear was more real. But you get to totally change your entire understanding of gay people, and still remain 100% Christian. Christianity will actually get better for you, because fully accepting gay people will decrease the amount of anger and stress, and increase the amount of love in your life.

Pffft. Upon learning there was no Santa Claus, I immediately dropped out of Little League and started smoking cigarettes. So. You know.

Here’s the thing: in days gone by, it was reasonable for Christians not to question conventional wisdom about the Bible. Because everyone used the Bible to justify slavery, for instance, Christians were okay with believing that some of their fellow human beings were just another species of farm animal they rightfully owned. Later, we Christians were entirely comfortable using the Bible to justify the atrocious idea that women are second-class citizens too simple-minded to be trusted with the vote.

And up until the Internet made readily available all kinds of previously inaccessible knowledge and information, we could be excused for believing that the Bible indisputably states that God considers homosexual love a moral abomination.

Today, however, anyone who can read, or simply watch YouTube videos, is forced to acknowledge the absolute credibility of the universe of scholarship, and the reasoning based upon it (here’s mine), which unequivocally proves that the Bible does not, in fact, oblige Christians to believe that homosexual love, in and of itself, is necessarily any less moral than is heterosexual love.

That closet door is now swung wide open. The truth of the matter is now there for anyone to behold.

Christians today who take seriously the search for truth must admit that the old axiom that homosexuality is a sin has been forever reduced in status from objective truth to subjective opinion. From fact to belief. From beyond question to unquestionably dubious.

Believing that homosexual love is a condemnable sin, in other words, is now a choice one must make.

And what Christian—what person at all?—would choose ignorant condemnation over enlightened love?

So what if there’s no Santa Claus? We still receive all the gifts. And we still get to hold hands, gather around the Christmas tree, sing all the beautiful songs, and feel all the beautiful love.

(I last week received this very moving letter.)

Dear John,

Sometimes I think that being able to see from the perspective of a mother what my daughter (who is now my son) went through before his admission of his true self shows why God is with us, no matter what.

My son was never an ordinary daughter. I did not, for instance, ever know what the current fashion style of teenage girls was, because “she” didn’t wear teenage girl clothes. But the darkness, the two years of depression, and of wondering if I was going to come home to find a suicide attempt or worse, was very real and frightening. But once my daughter admitted who he really was, the one thing that I knew in the back of my head—even though at first I couldn’t quite come to terms with it—was that a great relief had taken place. All of a sudden, the eyes of my child were more alight, the shoulders no longer hunched over. And the laughter was back. The beautiful belly laugh that was silenced for two long long years was back.

Although that great happiness came back, the change was still hard for me to come to terms with. I wondered what Christian friends would think. My son sent out a message to all the people whom he wanted to know, and they have been nothing but supportive and loving. That is what being a Christian is all about. Accepting the person. Loving them through the dark times, and supporting them when and if they come to terms with who they are.

We are all children of God, and for me to say that my child will not get into heaven because he cannot live with the body assigned to him is ludicrous. His heart for God, although having been shaken, is strong, because of the wonderful Christians in his life who accept him as the person he is.

Galatians 3:28: There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Hi, guys. So remember the aborning book of mine I wrote about in LGBT Christians: Tell Evangelicals (and the World) Your Story ? (For those of you who are … normal, aborning is a weird but I think cool-sounding old word meaning being born or produced.) I’ve got to finish that book. The whole world feels like it’s bending toward that book being completed. And I’ll never finish it as long as I keep logging in the time I do with my blog. So I’m hereby fully unplugging for the next seven days in order to fully dedicate myself to finishing this wonderful, wonderful book, the time for which I have every last reason to know is now. Right now.

Later friends. I’m off to be the best writer and editor I know how to be.

Annnnnnd unplugged till next Friday! (Celebrating 30th wedding anniversary.)

Whenever someone asks what I do for a living I tell them I’m a writer.

“What do you write about?” is the inevitable response. And that’s when I start hemming and hawing. (What with being a writer and all, I should probably learn what hemming and hawing actually is beyond having a vague sense that hawing is something best done alone.) If you follow this blog, you know a better question is what don’t I write about.

In the last three or so days I’ve received a fair/odd number of emails from people asking what I write about. I think in the main they’re people going to Comic-Con? I dunno. But hemming and hawing face-to-face is bad enough; I refuse to do it over email. So I thought for any new visitors to my blog wondering what I write about I’d throw up the list below, which is simply my twenty-one most viewed posts. Happily, it seems pretty representative of what I do overall.

My total apologies to those of you whom I know have already seen some/all of these.

Evangelicals and Muslims: Both Love Jesus

7 Reasons Women Stay in Abusive Relationships …

On Gays and Christianity

What Non-Christians Want Christians To Hear

How Is Being Gay Like Gluing Wings on a Pig?

Is Hell Real? What Are We, Six?

ThruWay Christians

An Open Letter to Famous Progressive Christian Jim Wallis

Mr. Wallis and His Big Gay Waffle

Come Out of the Woods, Christian Soldiers: World War Gay Has Ended

Top 10 Tips For Becoming a Better Husband

10 Key Qualities to Look For in a Wife

What Would Jesus Do If Invited to a Gay Wedding?‘

How I Lost My Virginity to My High School Teacher

Six Tests To Determine If He’s Mr. Right

Young Woman: This, Finally, Is Your World

What Francis Chan (And His Ilk) Get So Terribly Wrong About Hell

The Trinity Explained in Four Sentences: A Look at John 1:1-4

T-shirt & Books

The Smith Family Chronicles

15 Ways to Stay Sane Caring for An Elderly Parent

Mad Dad

Wow. Abnormally large thumb alert.

I hope this doesn’t seem too obnoxiously self-serving, but, if you haven’t yet, it would mean a great deal to me if you’d join/”Like” my Facebook page. People hitting the “Like” button on the top of that page is genuine encouragement to me.

Thanks! Bye! Next post from me will be … well, actually, I might bang something out from Comic-Con tomorrow; I will be bringing my camera, after all. But after that I want to get back to what I started with Your Inner Loser.

Thanks again, friends. (And enemies, even!)

I try to be humble. But there comes a time when a man just has to shuck his stolid business suit, don his cape, grab his big stick, put on his form-fitting tights, and declare for one and all to hear, “Verily, shall I rocketh Comic-Con!”

Or, really? Doubt I will? Then witness this listing of this Sunday’s Comic-Con confabs — if you dare:

Christian Comics: The Calling of the Artist, Sunday, 7/24/11, 2:30p.m. – 3:30p.m., Room: 23ABC
What unique challenges do artists face in developing work for both mainstream and religious audiences? How can “Christian media” avoid becoming just a pale imitation of its secular counterparts? Join panelists SERGIO CARIELLO (The Action Bible), ERIC JANSEN (Missions Press), STEVE BLOUNT (Kingstone Media), ROBERT LUEDKE (Eye Witness),

JOHN SHORE (I’m OK–You’re Not),*

MIKE SHIELDS (Blue Blazes) and moderator BUZZ DIXON (Hits & Misses) as they discuss the challenges and rewards of following the call of personal faith and the creative arts.

If you have anything you’d like me to communicate to the hordes of Christian art geeks certain to flock to Room 23ABC for a chance to sip from the fount of artistic genius that is me (and my fellow panelists, of course), speaketh it unto me now.

*(Slight font-buffing and coloring mine.)

Apropos of my Still Dreaming of Landing That Big Book Contract? is this, from the Association of American Publishers:

All major adult print segments—hardcover, paperback and mass market—showed a decline in sales in May, according to the AAP’s monthly sales report. While e-books showed a steep uptick of 146.9% for the month, bringing in $73.4 million in sales, adult hardcovers dropped 38.2%, adult paperbacks dropped 14.3%, and adult mass market fell 39.4%. For the calendar year, e-books brought in $389.7 million in sales, a 160.1% climb over the same period 2010.

To be clear: I take zero pleasure in the Titanicking of traditional book publishing. (Though I do like the way, what with book editors being hustled off stage and all, that we’re finally free to make up our own words.) How could I, when I’ve invested my whole life in getting well published? And I’m finally in the position to do just that: I have two top-tier agents (Deborah Schneider for the mainstream book market; Kathy Helmers for the Christian). Rob Bell’s editor at HarperOne — the most prestigious house in the world for exactly the kind of stuff I write — reached out to me to see if I was working on anything he might like to publish. (In a word: hell, yes, I was/am.) I was largely responsible for what may be book publishing’s last ever seven-figure deal.

I am in, baby. I finally got my linen, embossed invitation to the party. And just as I show up at the front door, tux and all, the party starts shutting down so fast caterers are asking me to help them load tables back into their trucks. It’s unbelievable.

So, trust me: I get no pleasure out of what’s happening to the book industry. It’s caused me some real and prolonged depression. I really have spent my life getting to a place that no longer exists.

On the other hand, I’m almost beside myself with excitement over what’s happening in publishing. It affords historically phenomenal opportunities for writers like me.

Anyway, we can talk about all of this any time anyone cares to. I just wanted you to know that I’m not cackling over what’s happening to book publishing, or anything like that. I’m basically just trying to alert my friends out there whom I know have aspirations to be a “published” author. I just want them to know — and I mean to really understand — that the word “published” doesn’t mean what it used to, at all.

(I certainly haven’t forgotten Your Inner Loser. I’ll be continuing that next time.)

As many of you know, for at least a year now I’ve been telling any writer who’ll listen to forget about selling a book of theirs to any “real” publisher, and instead get busy figuring out how to sell their own work to their own audience. My case has been that (for one) about the only real thing left that traditional book publishers can do for an author is distribute their books to book stores — but that, in the very near future, they wouldn’t even be able do that, since book stores were inevitably — and soon — going to go out of business.

You can’t distribute to a place that doesn’t exist — or that’s so small there’s no space left for you.

Welcome to the future, fellow scribes. Borders is gone.

If you’re serious about making it as a writer, it’s time to bust out a hammer and some nails, and start building your own platform.