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God started revealing the sad state of His church to me back in the late nineties, while I was still gay. Like many believers who’ve been convinced by life’s trials that God eternally upholds us, I wasn’t always as appreciative of His amazing grace as I am nowadays. It’s the reason I blog this way.
Camouflaged as Light, Satan’s covert slaves peddled a gospel of convincing confusion, as God’s unconditional grace tightly embraced me. His reassurance that He loved me in spite of His blinded pulpit bullies fueled a thirst for understanding Him even more. It also inspired my first literary journey, (1)“Love Lifted Me: In Spite Of The Church,” released in 2002. Then, three years later, God turned an unexpected corner on me. Reluctant at first, I followed, nonetheless.
The success of my first book didn’t bring with it total peace. My persistent prayer life still ended with one solemn, yet unsung petition posed as a question. I tacked it to the end of each prayer prayed.
“Since I’m eternally loved then why haven’t you blessed me with my most earnest earthly desire: a husband?”
During that predestined summer of 2005, I began discerning for the very first time exactly why my request waxed unrequited. Finally, God would answer my most solemn prayer using one word that would transform my thought life, eternally.
At the end of 2004, God began routinely gracing me with His presence again. During times of meditation, God would spark casual conversations within me. For six, spiritually blissful months, our random talks surrounded a common, natural pattern that was present at creation, in humanity and intertwined throughout the Gospels. Often, I’d be leisurely surfing the science, nature or biology channels and physicists, scientists and biologists would be confirming talks God shared with me. Then, when I studied Scripture or journeyed with gifted, even corrupt shepherds through sermons that same pattern would emerge, especially where Christ was found preaching. I still wasn’t sure where God was taking me. But I was fully persuaded that Elohim, who created the Heavens and the Earth, was definitely headed somewhere. Then, on that sweltering afternoon of July 19, 2005, like a teacher at the classroom blackboard, God began summarizing all we had discussed during the past six months. He asked,
“Can you find the common theme in all our discussions?”
“Yes, Sir,” I responded. “We’ve talked about things only You have made,” and only after His grace prompted Apostle Paul’s words within:
(2) “By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of His divine being.”
He replied, “You’re right. But did you catch the pattern in all I’ve shown you?” Then, He unveiled what to me had always remained a mystery.
“Every living, thinking, moving, breathing, growing, maturing and dying thing that crawls, creeps, walks, flies or swims…,” God said, “...begins and ends with opposites.”
He explained that humanity is created from, then only nourished and perpetually benefited by fruit, naturally produced from this phenomenon’s intangible, yet unrelenting collisions. God said negatives and positives; navigation and direction; Day and Night; life and death; Male and female, seed and soil. They all exist through the uniting of opposites. Then Elohim stepped to my student’s desk, bent down to my right ear and spoke:
“That’s why you cannot remain gay.”
Once His celestial explosion of truth settled in my heart, God inspirationally suggested,
“Now, go write a book about that!”
I was so overwhelmingly convinced by what God had unveiled to me that I eventually titled my second book, (1)“Why I Repented Being Gay.”
Before patiently escorting me out of homosexuality, for six months, God pitched tent in the mire of my life’s sinful choices. Like Christ, God lovingly convinced me, without once utilizing His Word to manipulate, intimidate, scare or bully me from remaining gay. If God’s zealous pulpit would have explained homosexuality half as loving as God unveiled it, I would have never identified as gay. Hence, my third inspiration, (1)“Why I Repented Being Christian.”
Like Christ preached against Pharisees, I passionately blog against how unjust, unfair and unloving the church - of all places - has inhumanely treated homosexuals. Radically, I do so because the worst state in which God’s pulpit could be is blind, but fully convinced it can see.
(3)‘‘A loveless world,’ Jesus said, ‘is a sightless world.’”
1. Please view my Faithwriters.com profile for more information.
2. Romans 1:18-23 (MSG)
3. John 14:23 (MSG)
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