Narrative and Nuance
*What follows is part one of a story, my story. It is rather long, but the details are important and humbly I offer that it all needs to be said. I have talked privately with many over the years but, for many reasons, I have never shared openly in a public way. What’s changed?
We are in a moment, a cultural moment in our society and a reformation within the church. The sexual revolution is moving at warp speed and the issue of homosexuality is threatening to drown out the stories of individuals in need of love! The church has not proven itself ready and after years of privately wrestling with God’s call, Casey and I have decided to step out in faith start a ministry to help bridge the gap that exists within the church between the individuals in need of love and the readiness to shepherd and counsel well.
The church has largely treated individuals in the LGBT community and those in their families as an issue to be won rather than people to be loved. The history of ministry to LGBT persons has been mostly tragic, wrought with misunderstanding and hands off approach. For this and other reasons the church risks irrelevance!
So, I have resigned from the career I have loved for the past decade as a Christian school teacher and coach, to hopefully expand the kingdom by coming alongside the local church and helping them become the primary place of counseling, care and discipleship for those living with and impacted by same sex attraction and gender identity. Hopefully, this will lead to more stories of individuals choosing to identify with Jesus and the resurrection life that comes with that identity. We will be saying much more about this as we move through this story. This is the first in a three-part series that hopefully gives you real insight into the persons behind this need and the journey of preparation God has brought me through.
(Part One)
The morning of September 30, 1999 was different than any other I had ever experienced. I had plenty of late nights partying and staying out until 4am. Most of the time that led to calling noon morning and Ibuprofen a friend. However, this morning I awoke early after having slept a mere 3 hours. The energy I had was palpable. This day was different because Jesus Christ had just changed my life and everything was different!
I had new eyes, new vision, new dreams, new energy, new hope, living hope, freedom, an uncommon happiness. The day before had been anything but! The day before was spent in tears, drunk, high and mostly depressed. The day before was not unlike many days I had experienced over the decade leading up to it.
Coming to terms with your identity can be a painful process. Nobody is immune to identity struggles and thus we all share a common journey. However, at times, we are all prone to think we are alone in this private battle.
Middle school, High school, single, dating, college, adulthood, marriage, all have identity struggles in common. Some would argue that from the day we are born to the day we die life is about the identity that will come to define us. If this is true, there is cause to understand the joy and pain it can bring. For most of my life, my identity brought me pain.
Growing up there was never a time when I did not privately deal with the inward reality that I experienced same-sex attraction. This led to many questions and fears. Like many boys in the 1980’s, growing up in the South, in a Christian environment, the fear of exposure led to a private hell of questions and confinement! All I wanted was what anyone wanted, to be accepted. I wanted my parents to be proud of me, my friends to think I was cool, other guys to see me as equal, girls to be attracted to me, and most of all for God to accept me. The reality was, at least at this point in time, that very little acceptance would be offered if they knew what I privately felt.
I kept quiet and began to live dual realities. I became the three-sport athlete, outgoing, opinionated and a highly conservative person that was respected in a small southern town, attending a deeply fundamentalist Christian school. Privately, I was all those things but I was also this other reality and I did not know what that made me, but mostly, I knew it made me unacceptable.
I lived in quiet shame knowing that God did not really accept me and that he stood opposed to me on a fundamental level. This view of God leads to plenty of white-knuckle effort and exhaustion. Ultimately this leads to plenty of inconsistency and hypocrisy.
The problem of not knowing who you really are and failing to connect your identity to the purpose you were created for leads to a dysphoria that produces plenty of dysfunction. I had plenty of that going on!
This reality continued through college, as the double life became harder, the self-hate became stronger, the desire for acceptance was a dream and drugs and alcohol became the more faithful friends I could count on. One evening everything changed, I was exposed and accepted all in a matter of minutes!
I decided to go to a club to drink and meet people and was confronted by a group of students from the college I went to. What began as terror quickly turned into the answer I had been looking for all of my life, acceptance. Naturally this led to me finding hope in the identity that I was gay. After all, this was the first time in my life people knew me for who I was and they accepted me without conditions. That type of feeling is hard to find and even harder to imagine that it could be anything less than true.
Over the next few years, I would walk into my new identity with increasing confidence. The only area that I lacked that confidence was between God and I. Somehow I knew he stood opposed to me. I never doubted that he was real, that Jesus was his son, that sin was real and that God loved us deeply through Jesus. But somehow that did not connect with me personally. So I continued to give faith lip service but never really allowed myself to experience a relationship with God.
It was not long, and the joy I once felt and the acceptance I believed was king, began to betray me. These things are not ultimate and experience (if that is all that it is) will ultimately betray you. The joy and pain had led me through a number of relationships and to Los Angeles and back to North Carolina. This long road and journey saw the acceptance crumble and the private heart darken. The drugs increased, the alcohol soothed and the misery set back in. But why? Certainly this is not the experience of all gay and lesbian individuals, not even the majority. So what about me, why could I not come to grips with who I was?
I tried, with intensity to come to terms with Jesus and my homosexual identity. I began reading revisionist scholars, progressives, and theological liberals, all of whom gave me a place at the wedding table of Christ and his church. I became good at making the argument and yet privately I never believed what I desperately wanted to be true!
The evening of September 29, 1999, I found my way into a church in Raleigh, NC. I was desperate, I was high and I was miserable. Something in me knew I had come to a breaking point. That evening the church I stumbled into was dealing with issues going on within their church body. I was disheartened because I believed that God had something to say to me. As I was about to leave a couple slid over in the pew to say hello and apologize for the unusual service. I decided to sit longer out of their courtesy to acknowledge the awkwardness.
At that moment, the pastor said something that would change my life forever. He addressed the tension in the room and said, “Some of you in this room are hurting and you have accepted short term joy and traded it in for long term pain and separation from the peace offered you in Christ. You need to experience the short term pain of acknowledging your sin and separation in order to gain the long-term joy of peace with God.” Tears rolled down my face, This. was. my. life! God was speaking to me as clear as he had ever spoken.
I went home that evening with palpable tension and the need to wrestle through this no matter how long it took. I went into my room, shut the door and called a friend of my parents who had attempted to talk with me months before. Eric had walked away from a homosexual identity and accepted Christ years prior. This was a thought that just 24 hours prior, I found repulsive! However, everything had changed.
Christ had arrested my heart and given me a fixation upon his grace and mercy that carried with it a real need for change. That evening I was on the phone with Eric for roughly three hours. When I hung up the phone my heart was converted and a new reality had taken root!
I was unaware of the journey he had prepared for me that would begin with an important phone call to the two people who had loved me through it all, my Mom and Dad……..
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