Those of you who inhabit various Christian Usenet newsgroups will have regularly been encouraged by daily devotional/ inspirational posts by ‘Ninure’…

Who is ‘Ninure’?

Over the past few days I’ve been privileged to meet her, as we both attended a Tom Bandy/Paul Borden conference in Chicago (look ’em up: very good Church consultants).

We took some time over a few meals and between sessions to do almost a full-scale whole-of-life retreat – quite a rigorous exercise for both of us (see http://jmm.org.au/articles/8053.htm).

Where to start? Here are some random notes I took (they have been vetted by Ninure):

* Ninure (pronounced ‘Ninuray’, with an ‘acute’ over the final ‘e’) is a Nigerian name given to her by a friend 35 years ago. She is a 50-ish African-American, Gay, highly committed Christian woman.

* She suffers from some severe physical disabilities. Ninure is legally blind (and because she needs new glasses reads everything two inches from the print). She also suffers from neurofibromatoisis, which has produced many benign tumours on various parts of her body and causes chronic pain. (A 35-pound tumour – that’s not a misprint – was removed from her uterus a number years ago). She’s also slightly hard of hearing, and has severe pain in many of her joints.

* She’s on Social Security, and can’t afford a computer (she sends those emails and posts from a borrowed one). Her access to the internet is a result of an ‘exchange of services’). She also can’t afford urgent medical or dental help.

* Ninure’s father left home before she was born. Her mother was a chronic alcoholic, who spent most of their welfare money on liquor. Ninure doesn’t know how she’d have survived without her brother (three years older) from age seven doing jobs to feed both of them. Ninure got the message very early that she was not wanted by either parent.

* There was a lot of violence in the home: when she was seven Ninure’s mother tried to kill both her and her brother, and herself. As a teenager she came home one day to find blood all over the floor: her mother had stabbed her (mother’s) boyfriend.

* Ninure ‘dropped out’ of high school (later getting a High School Diploma by passing a Goverment requirement test), and at 18 left home, with 25 cents and two suitcases, and slept at friends’ places for about a year. During most of her 19th year she lived on the streets of Chicago (‘you could sleep for a dollar in a cinema during the all-night shows if you could cope with the noise’). She often scavenged for food in Supermarket waste bins.

* In her late tenns and early 20s she was a hippie, and for a while was a ‘black nationalist’.

* Ninure says she is not ashamed of her sexual orientation, ‘coming out’ at age 17. Her most public ‘coming out’ (when she was about 34) was on a national Oprah Winfrey show, where she and some others were invited to name someone publicly they wanted to tell: in a two-minute interview she named her father, and that ended whatever intermittent contact she’d had with him before then! The last time she was in the same place as her father was in 1975.

* Ninure is highly intelligent. As a child she was offered a full four-year scholarship to a special school for bright kids, but her mother vetoed it (she’d get a ‘big head’). Ninure took some basic computer classes and taught herself computer programming and software development as a young adult, and worked for a while in the computer industry until things moved too rapidly for her to keep up.

* At age 27, after years of alcohol abuse (‘I don’t know how I got home to bed a few times’) and being ‘lost’ (she was raped twice and attempted suicide six times), she ‘came back to God’, encouraged by one of the two key positive people-of-influence in her life – her grandmothers.

* She was ordained in one church/denomination as a pastor/clergyperson, and in the Metropolitan Community Church was appointed to be a Deacon for the last 17 years. She has led services, preached quite often and does quite a bit of incidental pastoral work. And despite her terrible eyesight, she is quite a voracious reader of books on Christian theology.

* Ninure’s mother died in 1997, but Ninure could not attend the funeral… Two of her best friends have died of AIDs. She is ‘on leave’ from her church for the time being (that’s another story) – which means she is really without reliable pastoral care at the moment.

* Back to her lesbian/gay orientation. We talked about that. I regularly counsel with homosexuals, and if they want to, we try to figure out the ‘aetiology’ question (the mix of nature/nurture/choice). Ninure is a classic case of not bonding with the same-sex parent (but Elizabeth Moberly is wrong: that’s common, but not always the case). I don’t want to pursue that here: Ninure can talk about it if she wants to.

* So… a very rich time with a wonderful person. There was a lot more, of course, but all that’s in the file marked ‘confidential’. When you read her posts or responses on newsgroups, please know that you are hearing from someone who’s experienced life at the bottom of the heap, who suffers a lot in many ways, and who, like the woman at Jacob’s well, has truly met Jesus, and like all of us (hopefully) is being transformed by him. (She has also met some modern Pharisees, who from their preoccupation with sexual matters have communicated hate. Sad).

I commend her to you all. Please pray for her, and treat her with the kind of respect Jesus would have shown. A truly amazing person!

Shalom!

Rowland Croucher April 2005