Life sometimes offers new perspectives

I recently had the opportunity to host a lifelong friend for a long weekend visit. We had grown up together but over the past several years our paths seldom crossed and our contact was very limited. That all changed earlier this year when both of us had events that completely changed our own lives and the way that others look at us. I went through a heart breaking divorce and he accepted the fact that he was gay.
Since our news broke we have become very close. As different as our experiences have been there are some erie similarities in the feelings that we have gone through. We can empathize with each other in a way that no one else can...I feel like he can understand some of my pain, hope, and anxieties and vice versa. He can be sharing an experience with me about a break up or about alienation and I can relate.
No one else really understands us. They can try to explain our circumstances by reducing them to their lowest common denominators. "He can overcome these feelings of homosexuality, he's just weak.... so he was betryed by his wife, just move on". Life is much easier when it is reduced to black white; life is much more simple when it can be reduced to it's simplest terms. But is it really so?
He brought one of his girlfiends down with him (brief side note: gay friends have enormous caches of pretty girlfriends) and we set out to have a memorable weekend. We did things I wouldn't normally do (eating a vegan restaurants and visiting mystical readers in Sedona) and we had some incredibly engaging conversations (can anything in life be changed? how one deals with having faith in mormonism knowing that you are living a lifestyle contrary to its teaching. how to associate with someone who has hurt you deeply while still staying positive.)
Some circumstances in my life have truly prevented me from moving on with my life. Until my divorce is final I am prohibited from dating. Until my divorce is final my financial situation will remain somewhat precarious. I have been truly experiencing a crisis of faith lately. For the first time in my life I have begun to question some of my beliefs that for so many years had served as the foundation for my actions and hope. Sometimes I feel completely alone and abandoned.
This weekend I felt a strange companionship...like we were all lonely strangers whose lives brought us together to offer each other mutual support in our trials. It's strange but my newly minted gay friend has offered me hope and perspective that family, friends, bishops, and books could not.
My perspective is changing. While I feel confident that I will make it out of this abyss it gets so amazingly frustrated knowing that, for some reason, I am still wading neck deep in it. I am eternally grateful for my gay friend for coming down into my abyss and helping me swim in the darkness. It gets so lonely down here and it sometimes helps knowing that I'm not drowning alone.
The weekend soon left but as it ended I felt that my resolve was somewhat strengthened. I found beauty in unlikely new places. I didn't reduce things to their simplest terms but life isn't simple. We took certain issues and challenges and faced them head on. Life isn't black and white. Life is very gray and it is through confronting this "grayness" that we can really determine what is and what isn't meaningful and true.