A few years ago, a person I love dearly wrote me a letter telling me they were gay.
At that time in my life, I believed the Bible held black-and-white answers to all of life’s problems— or at least the most important ones, like where you were going when you died, and why.
Yet, while the Bible seemed to say, “It’s a sin to be gay,” I couldn’t discredit my friend’s story, which included the fact that for years he had tried to pray his attraction away.
So I went back to the only real verses in the “good book” I could find that talked about LGBTQ+ people. You know, the ones in Romans. As I read and reread them, I noticed a pattern: first, people rejected God; then, God gave them over to… something like sex with people of the same sex. Honestly? It’s a really weird passage.
It so happened that this was NOT the pattern my dear one’s life had taken. My friend grew up believing in God and never quit believing in God. When he became a teenager and started having “attraction” dreams, they involved someone of the same sex. My friend was horrified and spent almost the entire next decade asking God what to do, thinking God had rejected him, imagining he was disgusting, and feeling lonely, isolated, and terrified at church.
If the Bible was literally true, then there was no way my pal fit into the Romans schema. I began listening to other coming-out stories. They had an eerily-similar sequence.
“I must be reading this Romans story all wrong,” I thought, “because a loving God would never damn people just because they arrived at puberty to find they were attracted to someone of the same sex.”
And so, my beautifully-boxed faith was ripped open and dumped out. I spent the next few years questioning SO MANY of the “truths” I’d always believed. Fast forward to today, and where has all of this led me? To so much more “out of the box” thinking about faith, life, spirituality, church, and culture— and to seminary!
If you're curious— I’m an unconventional mom of three raising my children in as liberative a manner as is humanly possible, a missionary/pastor’s kid, a “gig” worker, a reader extraordinaire, a lover of awe, a conversationalist, a collector of fine-tipped pens, and a questioner who loves to give and to get a good, hearty dose of wisdom every now and again.
And this newsletter? This newsletter is me, poured out on a page. It is unique and insightful and quirky. It will spark conversation that may sometimes even become a little heated; but I promise to keep things civil. Because in the end, everything comes down to love. But more on that later…
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