The Road to Healing
Society holds up the athlete, the jock, the handsome hunk as the ideal man. Believing that lie, I didn't stand a chance while growing up. I was average in appearance, awkward as an athlete, and short. Physical education classes in junior high and high school were nightmares. I was always chosen last. When we lost games, I was often the scapegoat. The gym teacher at my Christian school once joked about my lack of coordination in front of the class. My peers laughed. My heart sank. My already poor self-image was battered with the abuse. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.
It was during those years that I started struggling with homosexual desires, beginning when I saw two male classmates in my Christian junior high school engaging in sex. Even though I had been attracted to girls when I was younger, my feelings for males intensified. In high school, the guys ridiculed gays. On the outside I laughed, but on the inside I was dying.
No matter how much I battled, suppressed, and prayed against these feelings, they not only didn't go away, they strengthened. At times I would cry out to God, begging him to change me. But no change came. God was silent.
Thoughts of men occupied my mind every day. Sometimes I fought them. Usually I gave in. Not only did the fantasies bring pleasure, but they were also a convenient escape from the pain of life.
When I saw an attractive guy on the street, I took a second look. I regularly scanned men's clothing ads in the Sunday paper. When I went off to college, I began to peruse porn at newsstands and then visited adult bookstores, looking for a picture of the perfect man.
While I had never acted out my fantasies with another man, I knew my desires were something I couldn't share with others. My Christian ...
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A Fractured and Beautiful Faith
Streaming This Weekend, May 24, 2013
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Brandon
This is an awesome testimony of God's grace and how it must be expressed through His people. Healing and deliverence like this is found every week in churches with healthy Celebrate Recovery ministries.
Brandon
This is an awesome testimony of God's grace and how it must be expressed through His people. Healing and deliverence like this is found every week in churches with healthy Celebrate Recovery ministries.
Caggie
Althought I understand the internal conflict between what the Church says and what we say as individuals, isn't it more about being happy with what we think we are and not what others - The Church, our friends, God, think? We were all born with brains, we have the capacity to absorb information, articulate it, push its boundaries and test its validity. I am a gay man and I still struggle with my identity. But I know that the relationship I have with God exists on respect and understanding. Why? Becuase we are both individuals with the capacity to think, articulate, and push knowledge. As beings, there is that understanding that we differ, but we can co-exist by negotiating, and not obliterating, each other's points of views. After all, we do that with our own birth parents, don't we?