To a Christian lesbian rejecting her love

Got in this email about two minutes ago:

I have been in a loving committed relationship with my partner for 4 years now. She is wanting to end our relationship because she is struggling to know what God wants for her. She is gay and Christian and is having a big battle with want she is and what she thinks God wants her to be. Her family is very Christian and had made this very hard on her, after reading and watching your video. [She means this.]

I was hoping you might be able to help. What we have is so amazing. I really don’t know what else I can do. I am not able to fight against the Bible and her family, but I know I am trying to have her see and believe what you have said. I know that God has a plan for us, He is the one that brought her into my life and I cannot see him taking her away. Please help in any way if you can.

Dear girlfriend of the young woman who wrote me this:

It’s no sin to be gay. None. Not a little, not in some ways, not under some circumstances: virtually, 100%, now and forever never. Being gay is no more sinful than is being red-headed, blue-eyed, or left-handed. It’s simply the way God, in his infinite wisdom, saw fit to create some human beings to be.

God doesn’t think the people he created are abominations to him. What I guarantee he does think abominable are people allowing their ignorance, fear, and anger to fuse into a bigotry which they then dare to ascribe not to their own lack of character, but to him.

God incarnated as Jesus so that ALL people might know how much he loves them–and then lots of Christians (being, you know, human) managed to turn that wondrous benevolence into a vehicle for hating people who aren’t exactly like them.

How rewarding God must find that as he looks down from heaven.

Being gay is no sin. You only think it is because you’ve been coerced into believing the despicable lie that the Bible says that it is.

Nowhere does the Bible say that being gay is a sin.

Jesus Christ told us what he most wants us to remember about who he was and why he came. Remember this?

The Greatest CommandmentOne of the teachers of the law … asked Jesus, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

That’s God, as Jesus, very clearly declaring that the most important thing he wants the world to know is that nothing is of more importance than loving others as you love yourself.

Do you think the people who treat you as they do, and who teach the condemnation of gay people they do, wish to be treated in the same way they are treating gay people?

Of course they don’t.

Those people–those Christians– are breaking the Great Commandment of Jesus Christ.

You have a choice. You can either believe the Holy Spirit within you—which, I promise, is telling you that you are perfectly fine just the way you are, and as deserving of love and respect as any straight person who ever walked the earth—or, despite the vast amounts of biblical scholarship to the contrary now available everywhere on line, you can believe that God thinks that being gay is a sin.

But that is a choice you have. And yes, it will probably cost you to choose to believe the truth that neither God nor the Bible condemns the kind of love you were born to give and receive. Your family may choose their fear and bigotry over their love for you. Your church may reject you. Some of your friends might suddenly prove cretinous.

But the total of those kinds of cost isn’t anywhere near as great as the cost of believing that those who would deny you love are right to do so.

They’re not right. They’re dead wrong. You don’t have to hate them for their wrongness; you don’t have to be bitter about it; you don’t have to fight them about it.

But you do have to quit listening to it. Because you, certainly no less than they, deserve love. And if you believe anything at all about the Bible, believe that God is love. To reject love, therefore, is to reject God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Bible.

Don’t do that. Don’t do it to yourself, don’t do it to God, and don’t do it to any of us out here who love you, just the way you are.