For the next several years, I would continue on this journey
to, through prayer and conscious awareness of my thoughts, seek to rid myself
of my homosexuality. If I found myself
being attracted to a member of the same sex or if I fell to the temptation of
pornography, I would heap guilt upon myself and struggle through the anguish of
knowing that I was a disappointment to my church, my pastor, and to my
God. As time went on, I would
occasionally, despite the pastor’s warning, share with others about my
struggle. The reactions were never what
the pastor had feared they would be. The
reactions were always positive and encouraging.
Knowing that I had this support, sustained me in my struggle.
I began to date women and believed that, if I could just
meet someone that that I had the right connection with, I could make things
work. If I took a girl out on a date and
it went well, and I maybe was even rewarded with a good night kiss, I would be
very excited to share the details of the experience of the straight guy friends
at the church who were my support network at the time. In retrospect, I realize now that the praise
and encouragement that I received from them was driving me far more than the
kiss itself.
In the fall of 2008, something happened. Two gay teenagers began attending our
church’s youth group. Not only were they
gay, they were dating each other and didn’t seem to show any strong motivation
to change. Convinced that my journey
could be used to help them, in the spring of 2009, I asked the pastor if I
could begin taking steps to establish an ex-gay ministry at our church to help
others rid themselves of their unwanted same-sex attractions. In order to do this, I figured the best first
step was to find someone who was already doing it. I looked up the website for the now defunct
Exodus International. The closest such
ministry that I could find was in Columbus; so, I began making the journey each
week to observe and participate with the group.
Up until this point, my journey as an ex-gay, had been
largely on my own. I spent all of my
time with people from the church. I
didn’t have other friends who were gay, and I certainly didn’t have any friends
who were trying to be ex-gay. One of the
men in the church had had a brother who had been diagnosed with AIDS and had
renounced his homosexuality before he passed away from complications related to
AIDS, but this had happened before I came to the church. I often wished I could have spoken to him or
had someone else to look to that was further along in this process that I
was. His story was a source of
encouragement to me though. Knowing that
someone else had walked this road before me gave me encouragement. My interactions with this group were about to
bring an end to my isolation in this effort to change.
As I began attending the meetings, I started to get to know
more about the lives of the men in the group.
Each week we would gather and listen to some recorded worship music,
watch a video, or hear from a speaker.
Then, we would go around a table and each man would be expected to share
how his “sexual brokenness” had manifested itself during the course of the
previous week. Many of them were
married. They had children. They had all of the pieces in place that I
thought would make me be content. Many
of the men, married and single, continued to find ways to connect and engage in
sex acts with other men. One poor soul
was a single man in his forties who had never acted out sexually with anyone in
his life because he couldn’t bring himself to me with a woman, and he couldn’t
accept himself as gay either.
Coincidentally, around the same time, I had reconnected with
two male friends that I hadn’t seen in years.
One was a former high school classmate.
The other was a former co-worker.
They had both gotten married to woman and each had had two children, a
son and a daughter, with their wives.
Also, they had both subsequently accepted that they were gay. Since then, they had each divorced their
wives and had entered into relationships with their new partners. As I looked at each of their lives, they both
had great relationships with their ex-wives.
They were both amazing dads, and they both had great relationships with
their new partners. While the belief
structure that I had at the time told me that they were still wrong, it was
becoming more and more difficult to understand why.
The moment that finally broke me occurred during one of the
meetings around August or September of 2009.
We were going around the table and one of the men was about to
share. He began sobbing. He struggled to get himself to a point that
he could share with us what was so upsetting to him. When he could finally speak, he told us that
he and his wife had been intimate earlier that week. For those of us in the room, this seemed like
something that should be taken as a good thing.
He went on to share that the reason he was so upset about all of this
was that he wasn’t able to be with her sexually without fantasizing about a man
while he did so. He recognized that he
was being unfaithful to her even in the midst of being with her. In that moment, something snapped inside
me. I remember sitting back in my chair
and asking myself, “What am I doing?” I
remained quiet for the rest of the meeting.
I knew that I couldn’t share with anyone there what was going on inside
of me. My whole paradigm shifted in that
moment. It stopped being about whether
or not it was right or wrong to be gay, and it started being about what it is
to live a life of integrity and authenticity.
The car ride home that night was filled with tears and
praying. I didn’t know what the future
held for me at that point. I didn’t know
if I could still be a Christian. I
didn’t know if I could still be a person of faith at all. All I knew that that I could not, with any
level of integrity, continue on the same path that I had been on. I had wrestled with that part of myself my
who life, but I could not drag some poor woman into some sort of social
experiment called a marriage in order to find out if I could ever love her in
all the ways that she needed me to. That
night opened the door to a whole new struggle for me. Over the next few months, I slowly began
separating myself from my church. Like
many churches of this type, they employed a lot of multi-media during their
services. I was responsible for
coordinating all of the media and lighting, and I had a team of people that
worked with me to do so. So, on the one
hand, my conscience told me that I couldn’t just leave. On the other, I knew that I couldn’t, in good
conscience, remain in my position when I knew that my views may no longer be in
alignment with the church’s leadership.
~ Culbs
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