I'm home from Vancouver now. We drove all Friday night, so I got to have some good talks with people. I talked to one guy about the Pentecostal thing (he grew up in it and believes in it) and heard a girl's life story. I should tell you about this detox center we visited on Friday. They had a "deliverance" session, where they cast off curses and demonic influences and so forth. It was kind of weird. Anyway, I also talked through my method of interpreting Biblical commands with a friend, and I think we may have resolved the gay problem. I'll have to think it through some more. I also had a great talk with another girl about prayer and God's will, which was really insightful. She helped me with the idea of just listening to God, and challenged me to take time to do that. She said it's important not to just fit God into our schedules, but give him priority and be willing to sacrifice anything else to communicate with him.

My idea for interpreting Biblical commands was basically that there are underlying principles which do not change (eg. love your neighbor) but that those principles are manifest in different ways according to our culture, etc. Thus it is neither necessary nor profitable to mimic every specific practice in the Bible (eg. women not speaking in church) as long as we maintain the principles behind those practices in a meaningful and relevant way. I believe the "gay problem" was something along the lines of this method of interpretation seeming to mean that practices such as homosexuality that were condemned in the Bible and which I still (at that time) wanted to condemn would then be condoned, as long as the underlying principles of those commands (whatever they are) were upheld. I have no idea what our solution to this "problem" was. And I've never succeeded in listening to God, my best intentions notwithstanding.