Eve Tushnet
doin’ my thing! (a much more personal, less Charles Williams-y version of my Charles Williams piece):
…For a long time after my conversion I focused almost exclusively on accepting church teaching. But there is another struggle for acceptance, which for many gay Christians will be even more challenging: the struggle for self-acceptance.
The self too is a gift from God. Your life, with all its weirdnesses and inexplicable longings, is a gift that it is your duty to receive with gratitude, trusting that God has given it to you for your own good. Self-hatred, self-rejection, self-deception are all ways of rejecting that gift.
And yet when I finally started meeting more gay Christians, I found out how many of them had been trained by their Christian upbringing to hate themselves and fear their deep longings for love and intimacy. I was lucky: It was easier for me to know God as a loving, cherishing Father because I didn’t grow up Christian. That should be an indictment of our churches.
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