It took me until November of 2009 to finally separate from
my church. I remember sitting down and
looking at the church’s calendar. There
was a large multi-church prayer event that was going on during the first week
of November. I knew that I had to stay
with the church and get them through that event, but I also knew that I had to
get out before Thanksgiving and the beginning of the Christian holiday season. I wouldn’t have felt right leaving them in
the middle of the holidays. I just
needed to get away from all of it so that I could even begin to start sorting
through my own thoughts and try to get some sort of understanding of where this
left me with God or if this meant that my life as a Christian had come to an
end.
The moment the prayer service ended, people began moving
about, and I began shutting down my computer and light board. I looked down and saw the pastor standing at
the front of the sanctuary with people gathered around him. I really wanted him to be alone when I told
him what I had to say, but I also knew that I needed to do this tonight. My heart began to race, and I broke out in a
cold sweat. I slowly removed my church
keys from my key ring and stepped out of the sound booth at the rear of the
sanctuary. Trembling, I made my way to
the front. Some of the people had begun
to disperse. I approached the pastor and
I pressed the keys into his hand and told him that I had to go. Tears had begun to form at the corners of my
eyes. He asked me if we could talk, but
I again told him that I just had to go.
Then, I turned and walked away.
As I stepped out into the cool evening air, I had no idea
what the future held for me. That church
and the community of people within it had been my whole life for the past
thirteen years. It terrified me to walk
away, but I knew that I had to do what was right, and being honest with myself
and them was the right thing to do. I
felt so alone. I remember looking up at
the night sky and speaking to God as I walked to my car and saying, “I’m
trusting You. I’m scared, but I’m
trusting You.” I remember feeling the
warmth of God’s embrace and hearing in my mind the response of, “Do you think
I’ve brought you to this point to let you fall now?”
That was a very dark night for me. I had just walked away from everything and
everyone that I knew. I sat in my car
for a few moments, and I contemplated just going home, but I knew that it was
not a good time for me to be alone. I
remembered that another church was preparing boxed meals that night to be
delivered to families that needed them.
This church had similar views to my own, and I knew that they would also
not be supportive of my decision, but I also knew that they wouldn’t know yet
of my decision, and I needed community at that moment. So, I went and busied myself amongst friends
and packaged the meals with them to be taken out and delivered to those who
were in need.
Over the next few months, I began reading everything that I
could regarding Christianity and Homosexuality.
It quickly became apparent to me that, regardless of which path I chose,
someone with far more education than I had already laid out clear intellectual,
scientific, scriptural, and theological arguments. I began to get frustrated because I wanted
someone to just hand me the answer. In
fundamentalist Christianity, many believe that it is possible to definitively
know God’s mind on any number of issues and that there is only one correct
response in almost any situation, and I just needed to find the correct
response for this situation.
During this time, I avoided contact with people from my
former church. I knew where they stood
on this issue, and I knew that they would not be helpful with me considering
any other way. The few gay friends that
I had begun to make reacted differently than I expected. I had anticipated that they would try to
convince me that I just needed to accept the fact that I was gay and move
on. Instead, they would simply tell me
that they loved me and that they supported me no matter what conclusion I
finally came to. Their unconditional
acceptance spoke volumes to me.
Finally, one day, I was venting to a friend about my
frustrations with not being able to find the answer. He gently but deliberately, grabbed me by the
shoulders and said, “You can read all you want.
You can pray all you want, but, tomorrow morning, you’re going to wake
up, and you’ll still be you. Only you
can decide what to do with that.” I
realized that he was right. I had to
take ownership of my own life and seek a path that was right for me.
It did eventually end up being a book that tore down the
wall within me that told me that me homosexuality and my identity as a
spiritual person needed to be separated.
It was, of all things, a young adult fiction novel that I had stumbled
across. It was called The God Box. It was written by a man named Alex Sanchez,
and it depicted the story of a young man who struggled with having grown up as
a Christian struggling with his attractions to other boys and then finding
himself confronted with a new student at his school who identified as both gay
and Christian and didn’t see a conflict between the two. Essentially, on an adolescent level, it was
my story on paper. By reading this story
in a work of fiction, it was able to penetrate and speak to me in a way that
the well crafted and researched non-fiction books that I had been reading were
not able to. I was finally able to get
to a place where it wasn’t even necessarily an answer that I was looking
for. It suddenly stopped being about the
answer and became more about asking difference questions, living comfortably in
the tension that those questions created, and trusting God to make up the
difference. I was finding peace within
myself, but I was still leery of churches or anything that looked like a
church.
There were a handful of attempts at intervention on the part
of folks from my former church. One
evening, a couple of the guys from the church invited me over to one of their
homes. They asked me very pointed
questions, wanting to know if I was having sex with men or if I had a
boyfriend. When I responded “no” to both
questions, they became very confused.
They couldn’t understand why I would identify as gay if I wasn’t
committing gay acts. I tried to explain
to them that it was more important to me that, for me, it was more important to
work through the identity piece first before I began to act on it. There were also occasional confrontations
when I would encounter someone from the church in public. There were also some tense e-mails exchanged
between myself and the pastor of the church.
Having spent a number of years living from their perspective, I
understand that their actions are born out of a genuine place of love and
concern, but it just helped to clarify to me that I could not step back into
that perspective.
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