I'm Out, Now, What?
Listen. I want everyone to visualize what I am about to write. Imagine having grown up with your best friend and knowing all of each other’s secrets.
Imagine that best friend being the person that would lie to your parents for you when they knew you were out doing something wrong. Imagine having had a crush on this best friend since you were little and one day, they finally admit that they have these same feelings back.
With all of that going through your head; imagine that you propose to this friend after figuring out that they are “the one” for you. And you propose to them in the most dramatic way possible. I mean SUPER extra.
And it is beautiful.
So now you are planning the wedding and you begin to reflect on the fact that this friend has literally been in every part of your life for as long as you can remember. This friend has become a part of you and you don’t know how you can live without them anymore. So the stage is set.
I waited at the altar for my childhood friend to come down and finally take my hand and declare that love would finally win in our lives today. When they came out and made their way down the aisle I literally fell to the ground crying at how beautiful they were.
My mother got this guy named Jesus to do the wedding.
I didn’t know him ridiculously well but as long as I could prance off into the evening with my loving mate I didn’t care who was doing the wedding.
“Do you have any vows?” Jesus asked.
Knowing that I cry easily I slowly recited, “I do not know what I would do if you ever left me. I love you enough to have followed you and listened to you all of these years. This is because you bring me a pleasure that is far past what many people can do for me.
I believe that you can fulfill every empty piece of my being so I just want to say goodbye to the old me. I am about to be new with you.”
Immediately after I spoke that vow Jesus said, “thank you for your words.” And it was almost as if he felt the same pain that was about to pierce my heart as he cried saying, “you two cannot join together in a union. That is not what I created you for.”
Suddenly the arches above us fell over, the music stopped, the vases that once held roses only held dirt, and all of the people were gone except for the love of my life and Jesus. A flash of light all of a sudden made me blind and I could only hear each of them asking me to follow them.
This is one way to look at how it feels to be a Christian that struggles with same-sex attraction.
Growing up in the church was very awesome for me. Everyone was very loving and community oriented. But the preaching was always very direct and to the point.
My pastor often used to say, “God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve” with no real explanation. Similarly, at home, I heard and was taught this. And statements like that and a few others from different preachers that I heard when I was younger made me feel so removed from the “regular” sins that people committed.
You know the ones.
Like adultery, lying, cheating, greed, gluttony….essentially all of the sins that preachers were able to say with a soft tone while there was always a fire and brimstone yell when homosexuality came up. And they always acted like not being homosexual anymore was as simple as saying a salvation prayer.
Things like that made me feel as if the only way to stop a chaotic outbreak in my life was to not talk about how I felt. So to be accepted in society I dated women, I played sports, I wore what “men are supposed to wear” to keep the spotlight off of how hard I would stare at some of my friends.
But one thing that all of those things never provided me with was peace of mind.
I could never actually express my feelings or talk to people about what to make of them.
Luckily, when I got to college I met two VERY vital characters in my narrative. The first person was a Christian man who believed living a homosexual life was wrong but loved me all the same while I was still trying to work through all of those feelings with a backdrop of scripture.
The second person was a Christian woman who had the same exact struggle and knew what the homosexual life was from experience. I believe that these two people are ABSOLUTELY VITAL for anyone who is trying to sort through same-sex feelings and/or a homosexual lifestyle while still wanting to be in line with scripture.
I had many debates, prayers, and crying moments with them but they always stood on Scripture while they wept with me.
They would explain the context surrounding scriptures like 1 Corinthians 9:11, or Romans 1:28-32 and not sound hateful while doing so. Because the bottom line was, the only reason they were able to speak to me like they did is because they were doing so in a very loving and light hearted way.
They understood that to be free from homosexuality meant changing your whole life. And it seemed like they wanted to understand my side of the story, and they wanted me to understand what Jesus had to say about it instead of them just bashing me. Through this, I knew biblically that I could not claim to love Jesus but ignore his word just because I had a strong lust for men.
A lust that even felt natural. Acting on feelings that were in direct violation of the man and woman mandate that God put on us as humans meant that I was willing to pervert my meaning of love to satisfy my personal desires.
I realized that me being born in sin meant that my sin could have manifested itself in any way but it chose me liking men. And that didn’t make it right, it just made it another way I could fall if I acted on it. The same way someone could fall if they acted on a desire to lie, or cheat, or steal, or kill, or overeat, etc.
So let’s get back to my original analogy.
Listening to both my the love of my life and Jesus saying, “follow me”, I wondered why Jesus would even let me get all the way to my wedding just to say this. Why would he let me fall in love like this just to tell me that I couldn’t have it?
Then I realized…..that I planned the wedding.
I proposed.
I bought the ring.
I made every provision for my lust.
So I couldn’t be upset if Jesus interrupted it. Jesus didn’t make me do anything. But even standing there I could hear him crying. Because although he knew that he was about to give me life like he did Lazarus in John 11, he understood the pain that I would continually feel after being deprived of something that I felt was innately in me.
Jesus felt the pain with me.
So understanding that I couldn’t marry my lust anymore. I grabbed the hand of Jesus. He took the dirt from the empty vase that once held roses, and he began to create a new me the same way he created Adam. But believe me when I say that to this day, my lust hasn’t stopped trying to re-plan the wedding. Because now it realizes that on that day…with Jesus…I did let love win.
P.S. → I am now happily dating a wonderful woman. And I am also delivered from all of those things that plagued me when I was younger. They do still try to tempt me at times. But I am washed clean by the blood of Jesus.
Just in case there was any confusion.
This post also appears on "The millennial Christian".