AD Watches a Revoice Session From PCA Youth Pastor

It started developing to where we realized, okay, we're family, what's that mean? And Nick started feeling more and more called.

Like, I remember this one day specifically, I was like crying about the weight of celibacy, like coming home from work and having no one to like sit down with after a long day at work.

And I'd gotten like attacked at work that day. It was just the worst. And I just had no one. And Nick's calling me and I'm like crying.

And I remember you going like, well, it's really important to me that you wouldn't just come home to no one every day.

And I'm like, well, that's great, but like, what does that mean, right? So over the past two years, we've developed kind of our vision for what life's gonna look like.

And this friendships became a family and then became a household. So it's been a lot of time together and a lot of hard conversations, but we moved in together 10 days ago, 10 days ago, which by the way, if you struggle with insecurity, a two -year lease is such a great way to lock someone in.

Highly recommend, like a legal contract and his security deposits in my name. So like I got his money.

He's staying, like he's mine. But we consider each other brothers.

We're deeply committed to each other, which has taken me some while to trust that, but it's really cool that now I can.

But we're planning on sharing life together for the rest of our lives, which we're not totally sure what that looks like. Obviously Nick is straight and he does plan on getting married, but we're totally committed to finding a way to live together and function as a household.

And there's different ideas of what that looks like, right? There's a lot of details we don't know. Do I live in a house with them or do

I live next door? My dream world is to have a hobbit hole out back, like an actual hobbit hole. And I just like go retreat to my hobbit hole every day.

Also, I don't want to live with screaming kids. So that sounds awesome, but no offense to anyone with kids.

Kids are a blessing from the Lord, just not for the sale of the man. So, but we've got a few things worked out, which is that we don't move without each other.

If he moves, I move. If I move, he moves. And we make decisions together as a family, whatever like big, like if we get a, if I get a job someplace and that means a change of location, that's a decision we make as a family.

When he has a wife one day, she'll make those decisions with us. Yeah. Yeah, I like that.

Well, I'm Art. This is Nick. I'm Nick. I'm gay.

I'm celibate. When was the last time I went on a date? Like four or five years ago. I'm 29. I'm a youth pastor in New Jersey.

I'm Nick. I'm straight. And I'm also a youth pastor in New Jersey. Yeah. Yeah, we did a lot of weird

Q and A beforehand. So if you missed that, I'm really sorry. There's a lot of deep things discussed already.

But so we wanted to start with telling you guys a little bit about the story of how we became friends, just to have some context, kind of where we're at now.

And so we're gonna do that, but we're gonna talk about some challenges in our friendship, and then we're gonna wrap up by talking about some practices and principles that we have that help us navigate friendship.

And we hope you have a bunch of questions. Feel free to ask them in the chat, and then we'll do Q and A at the end.

So we're really excited about that. But I'll start by telling you a little bit about the story. We're gonna interrupt each other a lot.

So just be expecting that. But we met in college. My last semester at our college was

Nick's first semester. We went to a school called Nyack, tiny little Christian school outside of New York City.

So I was a senior and Nick was a sophomore transferring in, and I was really intentional about getting to know the younger guys in the youth ministry department at our school.

We both studied youth ministry. And there's this thing that would happen sometimes where I was always praying for God to show me like who to invest in.

And sometimes I would meet someone and God would just give me like deep, deep, deep love for them.

And we happened to have that happen when we met. I met

Nick because we were hosting a bunch of the younger guys in the department in our dorm and Nick showed up and instantly I was like, oh,

I love this person and I'm supposed to like have a friendship with them. And I felt really called to him, but it was pretty one sided for a while.

Nick wasn't really looking for strong friendships. He spent a lot of time with his girlfriend. He spent a lot of time off campus, but we both enjoyed time together.

But there was some ebb and flow. So I'm like, oftentimes people meet me and then they like trust me, which is really cool and really helpful in ministry, but has created some weird dynamics.

So like really normal situation in college was like, I make tea for someone, they cry within an hour of meeting me.

And like, it just, it can be pretty intense. So that happened with Nick. He comes over for tea, ends up sharing way more than he planned.

And then like, don't hear from Nick for like two or three weeks. I'm like texting him like, hey man, let's hang out sometime. Yeah, I was like,

I was definitely, like I was, remember I was coming in as a, like in the spring semester.

And so it was kind of hard for me to find people to like get involved with. And so I kind of let life happen to me a little bit.

I was a little bit unintentional, but like there was more at play than just unintentionality.

For me, there was kind of this like outpouring of like we'd grab tea or grab a meal and then like that thing would happen and you would pull all this stuff out of me.

And then like, I'd feel like I can't do this again. And like, there was kind of this ebb and flow of like experiencing that vulnerability and then like being afraid of that.

And so like that would happen somewhat frequently where I would like, I would just kind of disengage.