The Road Ahead

So, I met a lady at a party the other night.  I will just let that rest there as you predict the potential outcome of this post.

Some of you are praising God that your prayers have been answered, while others of you are immediately beginning to pray that this mystery woman has patience.  A larger portion of you are waiting for the punch line.

So, I met a lady at a party the other night.  Her name is Jenny.  She introduced me to another woman named Jenny; her wife.  When I hear a women talk about her wife or a man talk about his husband, it hits a part of my brain that is less shock and more intrigue.  I have been introduced to plenty of same-sex wives and husbands.  It is simply the sign of the age in which we reside.

Meeting the two Jennys led me down a path of retrospection.  If things had been different, I would have married my longtime boyfriend in 1996.  And 20 years later Iwould be introducing my husband, Joseph.  That gave me pause for thought.  To be honest, my first thought wasn't "thank God I didn't get married to a man."  My first thought was more selfish in nature; "Thank God I didn't get married, because I wouldn't have enjoyed the freedom of a single life for the last 20 years."  Whether I had married a man or a woman, is inconsequential when it comes to freedom.  Life decisions are different when it's you alone at the head of the board room, rather than you, your spouse and a few kids all weighing in with their opinions.

While the world is celebrating marriage for one and all, I have to say that each time I see a gay couple together, my heart aches for them.  Label me a hater, I don't care.  It's isn't a judgment call.  I have been where they are and beyond.  I know that gay marriage is not in God's plan for His creation.  I know the human desire to live a normal life intermingled with the complications of homosexual desires.

In case you were wondering, I didn't wake up one day and want to marry a man.  By the time I got to the point, I had been through a myriad of conversations and decisions about my homosexual desires.  Wanting to marry a man came after a thousands of compromises, daily shame and heartbreak and many acts of settling for less.  I never thought I could leave homosexuality behind.  I didn't want to live in the Christian worldwhere they seemed to hate me, so I made the best life I could in the mess of my broken sexuality.  I look back now and know that it was only the prayers of my father that kept me from succumbing fully to the deception of homosexuality.  If you are a praying parent, do not stop praying and fighting for your child.  The bible says that the effectual, fervent prayers of a righteous person avails much.

I think that in today's culture, there is so much acceptance promoted and demanded for all things gay, that gay people get to the marriage decision a lot sooner than I did.  I am thankful I had time to wrestle between the religions of homosexuality and Christianity.  All these years later, I have a faith with Jesus and a walk out of homosexuality that were forged in the fires of trial and error; safe from angry, belligerent gays and angrier Christians who took "the bible is a sword" scripture way, too, seriously.   The gay community goes after anyone with even an inkling of sexual struggle these days, expecting them to claim citizenship under one of the ever-growing collection of initials in the LGBTQ+ moniker.

This year I celebrate that 19 years ago on December 22, 1998, I said no longer will I run from God.  No longer will I believe the lie that I was born gay or that gay is a reasonable compatriot of heterosexuality.  No longer could I continue to believe something about myself that God didn't believe or orchestrate.  I didn't leave homosexuality behind easily.  I had to take action.  There was a point where I had to stop waffling between the two great ideologies raging within me and freakin' PICK SOMETHING to believe in.

In the gospels, Jesus appears to his disciples after his crucifiction on the beach.  After the death of Jesus, their friend and teacher, they had returned to their old lives as fishermen.  I imagine that they were paralyzed with hopelessness and grief.  What I find compelling and encouraging is Jesus's actions towards Peter.  The weight of what Peter had done weighed heavily on him.  He carried the weight of his sin into his interaction with Jesus.  Jesus, in turn, brought something unexpected.  Jesus reminded Peter of their bond and welcomed him to the next season of growth, despite his sinful past.

The Lord is doing the same for me.  I am currently spending time some time on the shore with Jesus.  He is calling me to a new season of growth.  To lay down over 40 years of struggle and follow Him with a renewed spirit.  He has called me to make decisions to free myself of the obstacles I have allowed to take root in my heart and to trust Him to do the necessary surgery on my soul.  He is reminding me that before I was an earthly son, a minister, an ex-gay or an executive director, He is my savior and I am His chosen disciple.  I feel the freest I have ever felt.  Considering the Lord delivered me from the idea that I was gay for 27 years, that is saying a lot.  As I divulge myself of the things that have kept me bound, I step into a new season, a new beginning and land where excuses stand between me and my ultimate purpose.

This new season is best described by an idea my pastor birthed a few weeks back.  The life of a Christian is simply this.

Jesus.  All day.  Every day.

"My Chosen Family"

When I was in my twenties Banana Republic came out with an ad campaign that, even for back then, pushed the envelope of societal norms.  The tagline of their three page photo spread was “My Chosen Family”.  Those words highlighted pictures of chiseled, male models holding hands with perky, yet elegant female models.  As one turned the page there were guys holding hands with guys and girls following in their same sex steps.  Those pages were life to my dead, lonely, closeted soul.  It was veritable buffet of emotional porn that the enemy used to entice and ensnare simultaneously.  They led me to believe I belonged somewhere. I don’t know if you are tired of hearing me pine on and on about what life was like back then, but frankly, I don’t care.  Today, in a world where modern technology prevents us from being alone on a toilet for more than two seconds, people are still love starved and desperate for meaningful connection.  People are still dying of interminable loneliness.  I was that kid.  I was that teenager.  And somedays I am still that adult.  A statement came to me last week that reverberated through the last 45 years of my life.

"I've never had a moment where I was alone, yet I've spent most of my life lonely."

As I hit the send button on each one of these blogs I feel like a scientist sending messages into outer space, waiting and wondering if I will get a response.  There are times I know that I am sending out a literary cure for loneliness.  Other times I know that I am letting someone know that Jesus has not forgotten them.  That God will never leave them, forget about them or leave them alone.  Then there are times that I feel this blog goes up like the Bat Signal performing multiple purposes using just one source of light.

I have been experiencing an awakening my friends.  Like the feeling generated when you feel the first gust of a fall breeze or see one tiny, unexpected snowflake delivered by the wind.  It has nothing to do with the physical seasons and everything to do with the spiritual season of my heart, my calling, God’s timing.

You may or may not know this, but I was born with a super sensitive heart; a blessing from God; a perceived weakness by some.  I have suffered great damage to my heart and that sensitivity at the hands of family and those close to me.  I couldn't choose my real family.  So when the idea that I could actually belong to a loving family, a family of my choosing came along, it tripped every sensor in the “YES, PLEASE” portion of my brain.

I have long since forgiven those closest to me for the atrocities, real and perceived, that were perpetrated on me.  Moving beyond the hurt feelings and the need for revenge prevented those who hurt me, from damaging me further.  On the other side of forgiveness though, I emerged a different man with responses and reactions that had nothing to do with who God created me to be and more to do with the broken man shaped by the world.  I spent the biggest part of my life wanting people to see me as smart, attractive, fun and accomplished.  And an even bigger part investing so much time in trying to look like I had finally ARRIVED that I quickly lost sight of the journey and the ever changing destinations.

This past week as hurricane Irma devastated island after island and eventually my home state, I was safely tucked away in Oklahoma visiting my father.  I was also blessed to connect with one of my oldest college friends.  We hadn’t seen each other in 13 years.  Our only knowledge of one another were the snippets of info and blurry pictures scattered across social media and the occasional search engine.  Sitting down with my oldest friend, I was confronted with just how much life has passed me by.  The passage of time revealed to me that neither one of us are the boisterous, boy crazy fools we were at Oklahoma State.  I realized that out of every other person in my life, Scotty knows me better than any human on the face of the planet.  That is partially because he has known me so long, but mostly because I decided long ago, he could be trusted and I let him in.

There are Sundays that I am feel like I am being more truthful than every other person in church.  I can spot BS from a mile away and smell it from 5.  I don’t make friends easily.  I don't trust easily either.  I feel like someone always has ulterior motives.  I imagine that most people as characters in a bad English spy movie.  I look for inconsistencies in their stories.  Every once in a while the Lord leads me to good people.  The Holy Spirit gives me the go ahead and I start a long and meaningful relationship.  satan is always stirring up the microscopic seeds of my past to spawn a fresh batch of sh...shtuff.  New people who remind us of people in our past, can often trigger old thought patterns, habits and responses.  I fight daily to maintain these new relationships with the newly elected members of “my chosen family”.

Different than the people in those Banana Republic ads, the chosen family of my life nowadays are 3 dimensional.  They have encountered sickness, heartache, divorce, rape and other atrocities.  Some of them have been crushed under the weight of it.  Their hearts may never love the same again.  But the God we serve is the same yesterday, today and forever.  The God we serve will always be by our side, and hold our hand even as He sees fit to allow us to walk through the fires of our everyday Hell.

I do my best to honor my father and mother as the scripture commands, but I will be damned if I will stay silent, keeping a lid on my pain and anguish, because those who have hurt me are now embarrassed by the truths that I share in the open.  It is often the victims who suffers fresh, daily death, even after the perpetrators have long since forgotten their crimes.

I wrote a piece of poetry once that dripped with crimson rivers of vengeance.  I would never physically harm anyone in real life, but I could murder my foes a thousand times over in my literary ramblings.  When I laid down my right to vengeance and asked God for forgiveness and to cleanse my heart from the harm I had wished on my enemies, my chains fell away.  For the first time, I could look long and hard into the lives of my tormentors and feel a compassion and an understanding for a life of familiar despair.

God is not my co-pilot as an 80’s bumpersticker once decreed.  God is my life support system.  Jesus tells me this, "I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."  I sit here in the 2am dark of my Florida living room, praising God not that I found Him or He found me, but instead praising Him because I was never misplaced.  Each and every step,  each disappointment, each oopsy poopsy was known by my Father in heaven.  He saw fit to allow each member of my family and my chosen family to shape, mold, chisel and sculpt the man you see before you today.

I am reminded of a song I used to sing when I was a little boy.  “He’s still working on me.  To make me what I ought to be.  It took Him just a week to make the moon and the stars, the sun and the earth and Jupiter and Mars.  How loving and patient He must be.  He’s still working on ME.”  I most definitely have not arrived my friends.  Some days, I hand out more apologies than accolades.  Yet, as I sit here, in the wonderful space of Big Fish Ministry that my Father God provided to me as a refuge, I hear him whisper nightly to  “You are My son.  You are loved more than you know.  You are cared for.  You are my precious child.  You have not been forgotten.  And you will always be MY CHOSEN FAMILY.  Love, Dad"

He Chose Me

           2:32 am- I can't sleep. I just wrote to my cousin in Oklahoma.  He is much younger than me.  We tried to connect once when I was home, but he is gay and I am ex gay and he tells me I treated him like a project in our short interaction.  I have since apologized, but we don't exchange Christmas cards yearly.  I felt like I was supposed to share my day with him.  It was a great day in ministry for me.  Skype guy in Alabama: Cry, Pray, Encourage.  Skype guy in Kazakhstan:Learn Russian, Pray, Encourage, Rebuke, Love on him.  Received a call from a girl I know about a guy friend who is gay and was severely beaten by his boyfriend in a drunken rage.  It was severe enough that the guy moved out, closed down his facebook and is searching for God, spirituality or answers now.  I received a call to pray about this guy.  We'll call him Drew.  She didn't call me praising God that maybe through this trauma Drew will turn straight.  She called me hoping that Drew will now turn to Jesus. She called me to pray. And pray I did.  While we do believe that there is freedom from homosexuality, our prayer and ministry focus isn't "Get 'em Straight!" It's "Get 'em Jesus!". My second call of the day was from a dad who needed some advice about how to handle his son's homosexuality, porn use and lies.  The dad had cooked up some pretty dire consequences for the boy if the bad decisions and behavior continue.  I talked him down off a ledge and simply encouraged him to love his son in the midst of a situation that the dad doesn't understand.  I encouraged him to take the extreme consequences off the table and instead put forgiveness back on it and a little tough love.  Whether the kid is gay or straight, porn is not appropriate for anyone at any age.  Also hanging out in certain places on the internet where sketchy adults can lurk, whether you are a straight young lady or a gay young man, is not a good idea.  At the end of the day, any child under 18 is entrusted to a parent by God.  Like it or not kids, the parents are responsible to God for how they instruct and guide you.  If you don't like it, McDonalds is hiring and there is a nice apartment for rent next to the liquor store and local hoochie house.  As an added bonus, I have another friend visiting from out of town, who I will be watching the sunset with in 3 hours 33 minutes.  Once we have witnessed this amazing view that only God could paint, then we will chatting about Jesus and exactly what a surrendered life looks like.  I met this kid years ago at an Exodus Conference. I was his small group leader.  He started off his introduction by telling me that he didn't like small groups too much.  He didn't plan on sharing or talking and that was that.  Well the Holy Spirit and I worked our magic and I have had the privilege of pouring into this young man's life for many years now.  Praise God!

           So that was my day.  Better than any dolphin foot push, killer whale waterwork or the applause of the most affirming crowd I have ever experienced.  I didn't make one red cent for my work today, but I feel like a millionaire, because God chose me to do this ministry.  He chose me to love on gay kids who want out of the gay life and gay kids who don't.  He chose me to love on gay couples who have been together 14 years and those who have separated, because they have heard the call of God on their lives.  He chose me to share the love of Jesus, where the name of Jesus can't yet be spoken.  This is the best life ever.  He chose me!