Reverent Love Burn Us Up

This week has been overestimates and underestimates.  Very few moments have been right on par with what I expected.  Mostly, my heart has pumped more adrenaline than I thought possible without going into cardiac arrest.

So Sunday night.  A typical one.  Went to WS at 5 for worship practice, then walked upstairs to the aptly named Upper Room to wait for youth to show up for Fuel.  They always trickle in over the first 20 minutes so most of that time is spent socializing and checking in with students on what they have going on in the coming week.  A lot of jokes, laughing, and social games.  I got a text in the middle of this icebreaker period.  It was unexpected to say the very least.

Michelle wanted to get together and ask me "about something very personal" and she was "a little scared too", but would be ok with anything I said.  Despite being one of my longest and most trusted friendships, Michelle and I had had fewer interactions and conversations over the past year or so.  If there was something personal she was scared to ask me about, there was only one thing I could think of that it could be.  All I could think was that there was no way she could be more scared than me.  I also remembered I still had two hours of hanging out with Christian high school students and this was no place to have a panic attack.

I made it through seeing the youth off for the night and after grabbing my guitar went out the back sanctuary doors into the darkness to find my car.  Finding myself outside without the threat of worrying the students and other leaders that something was wrong by collapsing to the fetal position in the middle of Stu's talk, I began to feel the gravity of the situation that lay before me.  I wish I were kidding when I said this was my worst fear brought to life.  It sounds foolish, but I was terrified of Jake and Michelle finding out I was gay.  I imagined losing some of my deepest friendships, my second family, my job even.  Man-alive am I a pessimist or what!

When I drive, I normally have a concrete block attached to my gas pedal.  This night, I drove 15 mph the entire  40 mph stretch of Aaron Drive.  I felt physically ill upon arriving at Applebee's for the designated meeting.  Bless her heart, Michelle greeted me with a smile.

After a couple minutes of light banter and me refusing to order anything that I knew I wouldn't be able to eat or drink anyway, we got on to the reason we were there.  She told me that people at work had been talking about me.  She didn't say who exactly, but rumors had been weaving through the Cuda lately and people were questioning her and Jake about me and she wanted to come and talk to me about them rather than continue the whispers and gossip.  She told me that she and Jake had become increasingly worried about me as they could tell I was completely miserable at work and torturing myself over something but there was no obvious cause so they knew it was something big.  She assured me that their love for me was unconditional and all they wanted for me was to be happy.  She asked me if I had thought about or was questioning my sexuality.  I don't know that there is ever really a "right" time or place for that question to come up in any situation, but in that Applebee's at 9:00 PM on a Sunday evening in the middle of a three-day weekend from work, it was the scariest and most honest question I had been asked in a long time.  And it was completely "right".

I told her what I was planning on telling her in the days or weeks to follow but could have just as easily pushed off for another month or year even had she not intervened.  I told her I knew I was gay and she didn't laugh at me, she didn't recoil, she didn't even go mute.  Though I could barely form sentences during our two-hour session, Michelle spoke to me in love and appreciation for being honest with her.  I had no idea such a reaction was possible.  She stressed I would very likely have a rough road ahead of me, but that all she and Jake wanted for me was to be happy and "freedom for my heart, soul and mind".

In no way were these the same people who had sat around their table one night years ago and joked with those present about the fags and dyke they employed at their coffee shop.  These were the Christian man and woman I looked up to and tried to model myself after.  These were the people I became friends with through missions trips and small groups.  These were the people I loved more than almost anyone else in the world.  And finally, finally, I was back to being me.  I am not exempt in this.  There were times I turned on them too.  I cursed their names and thought them terrible people.  For the most part, that was my own fear poisoning my heart.

This week has been hard.  I have gotten used to pushing my feelings aside.  I don't lie about or fake my emotions or ideas, but I know how to hide and avoid them.  This week, I have come out of hiding.  Over the past couple years I had built walls so high around myself even I had no idea where they ended and the open skies began.  I don't believe there has ever been a time I've felt more vulnerable.  However, I would not and will not go back.

Over the course of the next two days, I had personally told everyone at work.  They were completely positive and accepting and just glad I didn't feel like I had to hide around them anymore (have I ever mentioned how much I love my coworkers, cause I totally do).  Those feelings of misery and torture that Michelle had observed me having at work--gone.  I don't even know how to describe how freeing it was.  I kid you not, a brick the size of Texas was removed from my shoulders.  And more importantly the stone over my heart started to crack.  I hadn't realized how much anger had been inside of me and how sufficiently it was eating me alive.

When Wednesday rolled around and my madre made it back from her 10-day trip to Mali, God had already set up a prayer network around me for telling my parents.  I was also given amazing perspective on my issue when Mom told us about the looming drought in Africa and how farmers are eating their crop seeds just to survive.  Just like in school where you don't want to follow the thought out and wrenching presentation just given on the Holocaust with your 5-slide power-point on the Iron Curtain, I didn't want to follow starving children in Africa with "hey guys, I'm gay".  But there was no way I could go another day without telling them.

I plucked up the courage.  They looked me in the eyes and told me they would always love me.  My dad said, "you'd better thank your Uncle Randall (my dad's gay brother) because if I hadn't known him I would have a lot harder time with this."  I told him I thank God everyday for my Uncle.  After giving me a hug, my mom followed with, "well I guess I had better stop looking for a boyfriend for you then".  And then without missing a beat, "don't think this doesn't mean I don't want grandkids!"

Ladies and Gent, my parents.

Now don't you go thinking I forgot the brudder.  I told him six months ago.  He loves me and is a "modern" man and we haven't spoken about it since.

There's still people I need to tell firsthand.  But knowing that most of my closest friends and family know and don't think any less of me is incredible.  I am dead serious when I say I do feel free.  I had completely underestimated the hold hiding this had had over me.  I also disregarded how this was affecting my relationship with God.  This entire time I have felt Him, and tried to figure out where He was trying to lead me in all of this.  But at some point I got so focused on me and my confusion and pain that I stopped following the plan he was laying out for me.  Even though it has only been a few days since I've come out, His hand has been in it all.  I feel like I make Him proud again.

I know there are people who would say I am wrong, that there is no way God would create me this way let alone want me to live an openly gay life.  I understand that, I do.  Some of the people I told this week are struggling with that very same thought.  I used to struggle with that very same thought.  But after years of wrestling, I am at peace in the knowledge that God loves me.  I ask, why would anyone worship a God of love if doing so means denying them the possibility of experiencing love?  His love is broader than any of our minds can imagine.  It's possible the Bachmanns and Phelps of the world are right and I and everyone like me are going to Hell, but what loving God would decide that.  The God of my heart wants me to be happy and rejoice in Him in every aspect that He created me to be.  My heart is saturated in thanksgiving and grace and I am so very blessed to be alive in this time and in this place.

The same person I always was and always will be,
-KL

Savoring This Heart That's Healed

A Testimony  23.01.2012

I always thought that in order for people to love me, I needed to be perfect.  This wasn’t necessarily an overt thought, but it has in many ways hijacked my life regardless.  I have always tried to be everything that everyone expects of me. The place I’ve tried the hardest to exceed expectations is within the Church.  I went to every youth group activity and spent a week at a Protestant camp every summer.  In high school, it was not uncommon for me to physically be at church 3-5 nights a week.  I played guitar in the youth worship band, even led for a few years.  I went on amazing mission trips to Oakland, Costa Rica, New Orleans, Mississippi, and Albania.  When I graduated from high school, I continued going to mid-week youth events as a leader all through my college years.  I served on a nominating committee responsible for hiring an Associate Pastor for Youth Ministry.  I worked a summer as a mid-high intern.  My life was almost exclusively school and church.

As I look back now, I wonder how much of that was for other people and their expectations of me rather than my own free will to dedicate my time.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved and still love most of the activities I take part in at church.  I truly love worship and singing praises to God—stressful as the background has been at times.  I love all of the amazing youth I get to work with and have gotten to know over the years.  Some of those kids I have been a part of their weekly lives and mentored from 4^th or 5^th grade into their high school years.  That is such an amazing and life-touching experience that I am unfathomably grateful to have been a part of.  I have gotten to know some of the most influential people in my life to date through my time and work at the church.  These people mean more to me than they will ever know. 

Even with all of this involvement within the Body of Christ under my belt, I always felt different, like I didn’t quite belong where I was expected to fit.  I felt isolated, separate from my peers--Church going and not alike.  It seemed to me almost like I had some piece of me that was biding its time in the recesses of my being.  I had little clue or words to describe what this mysterious part of me was, but one thing I knew for sure, I didn’t want anyone else to know about it either.  I pulled away instead, taking any difference with me.  Little did I know that these feelings would only intensify, especially once I solved this elusive mystery.

I more or less figured it out when I was 17; a senior in high school, an overwhelming time bomb of hormones, anxiety and life.  It hit me like a swift, heavy punch to the gut one day, though I wouldn’t even admit it to myself in my journal for months.  Regardless, I knew I was gay.

This discovery scared the shit out of me.  Here I was, quite arguably the epitome of a “Jesus Freak”—the Sunday school attending, worship leading, committee sitting, mission going, goody-two-shoes of a student and I was gay.  What did I do?  Exactly what most gay Christians do.  I hated myself.

I lived in denial for almost a year.  Told myself it was fleeting, it would go away, that my previous and barely existent crushes on boys would return.  I prayed for all these things and more.  Every day.  All I wanted was to be normal.

 When self-hatred and prayer and any other remedy I could attempt failed me, I stopped hating myself a tiny bit and instead began to hate who I thought was playing the sickest joke of all and had made me this way--God.  Why would He create a person to have feelings that they’re told from a very young age are inherently sinful?  Thoughts and desires the man standing behind the pulpit delivering the message of the Lord condemned time and time again to the ears in his audience, young and old.  For a supposedly "loving" Creator, He was doing a bang-up job.  With ideology such as this, I asked myself an endless stream of questions mostly centering on the thoughts:  What good are you? Why are you even alive? And my personal favorite, how could God ever love a creature such as you?

By the time I was halfway through college, I knew that I was not going to change.  I had always been gay.  I was always going to be gay.  Nothing short of complete denial was going to change that.  That became the first good milestone to my journey—accepting myself as I was.  Being on good terms with myself again, after so long, freed me up to reconcile myself to someone much more important.  Yep, the God that created me and according to so many conservative Bible-thumpers, wants me to burn in Hell for eternity just the same.

I refused to believe it.  I could put no stock in a God that knitted me in my mother's womb only to send me to a place of never-ending torment for something in which I feel I have no say.  So I began devouring books, websites, opinions, facts, my bible (I actually utilized my concordance which prior I thought just made my bible look bigger and more important).  I read everything.  Both sides of a cataclysmic argument.  I not only wanted to know what I was now standing for, but also for what I had previously stood against.  In my earlier years I had squirmed at the thought of gay people and would never have batted so much as a gloss-free eyelash at homophobic comments.

This post is not the time or place to debate the (few) biblical passages that speak on the subject.  Instead, I want to focus on another aspect:  why now?  I have pretty successfully (I think) hidden in the closet for five-years now.  And that is exactly why.  I have been hiding in fear from the world.  I’ve listened to homophobic slurs, jokes, comments for too long.  Some of the people I love most in this world have said some of the nastiest things about me--and they don’t even know it.  I once had a student tell me in the midst of a light-hearted conversation over coffee that if I ever “turned lesbian” she would “punch me in the face”.    A girl I had known and mentored on Sundays from the time she was in third or fourth grade was saying this directly to me and my heart has never been more crushed.

In truth, I’m exhausted.  I’m tired of pretending it isn’t a problem.  The problem not being that I am gay, but that hiding it makes me safer.  I’ve lived in the fear of rejection for so long and I don’t want to fight anymore.  I’m done making excuses.  If this is going to make people uncomfortable and possibly even get me ejected from their lives, so be it.  I will pray for them, but I don’t need to subject myself to them.  I need to take a stand for me.

At youth group one Sunday evening in high school, a leader ended the weekly talk with words I have never forgotten, but have also not put into the practice they deserve.  “What is fear doing but getting in the way of what God wants for me?”  I need to take a stand for God. 

I firmly believe I am exactly who He created me to be—from the color of my eyes, to which hand I write with, to my sexuality, to my small stature, to what I like and dislike, to every tiny fiber of my being.  I am His creation and I am proud.

There are very few people in this world who know this about me.  If you are reading this you may now count yourself among them, but you won’t be such a small number for long.  I’m not going to make some big spectacle of it or some trivial update on facebook.  What I am going to do is start having conversations, beginning with my parents.  I love them so much and I know they’ll love me and accept me for who I am, but that is still a small shelter for dropping such a bomb.  Perhaps I'm being dramatic, fearing the worst.  Where I'm sure it will come in handy, however, is for when word spreads at Church.  I have an unshakable premonition that I will be asked to leave worship and more importantly my youth leadership role.  It makes me sick to think of having to do that, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

As I said, I am ready for conversation.  It’s been a long journey to get here and I am more than ready to start a new chapter.  God has blessed me immensely during this time.  Many of these blessings I have only realized in retrospect, but I know He has been with me every step of the way and will continue to bless and love me up until the day none of this will matter anymore because we will be with Him.  

There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:2

-KL