Destroying the Illusion of Being Unlovable

   After I started going through a divorce a few months ago, I found myself living completely alone for the first time in my life. During this transition, I also found myself fighting the ability to finally be introspective without shaping myself up to an outside standard. I felt utterly lost. I found myself thinking why do I always end up single, usually because of my choice to quit a relationship. I then heard the lie I had believed most of my life: because I am unlovable. I convince myself of this so much that I turn my partner's words and actions, or inaction into a personal offense. I believe they cannot love me, and I quit. Until this point, I have mainly shaped my value and my worth on what people thought about me, my achievements, and religion. I think this is what many go through during their personal growth. However, when it comes to being gay and growing up as Christians in the Bible Belt, I think many of us also go through the muck and mire of drifting through the dark swamp that is the lie that we are unlovable because we cannot get rid of this SIN. This happens when our attraction, our longing to be loved, our longing to love someone in return romantically, physically, holistically; and all of these feelings that straight people also go through during the throes of  adolescence gets pasted with that word: SIN. We stumble through this dark desolate swamp beating ourselves with Bible verses that we have found ourselves, or our loved ones have handed to us with their good intentions that we all know the path it can lead to. Our wounds fester because we are stuck in this mire, and finally, after years of  trying to "give it to God," "pray away the gay," and to get rid of this SIN that seems to completely dominate our lives, we believe we will never get out. When we are stuck here, fighting our longing for love, we find ourselves believing we are indeed unlovable. Our insides crumble, some even get sick because we are constantly fighting ourselves, so our body follows suit and attacks itself. Some choose to attack themselves physically with cutting, or in my case in high school to stop eating, just in effort to know that we can control SOMETHING if not our will to love and be attracted to the people we are "supposed to love." 

   I will never forget when a little sunshine first appeared in my own swamp. A friend of mine introduced me to someone who told me what would be my first glimpse of hope: I could be gay AND be a Christian. Before I heard this glimmer of hope, I had tried to live life as being gay and not being a Christian since I could not believe blending them was possible. I was still in the same swamp, just more alone. I also lacked the beauty, comfort, and peace that comes with spirituality, and being connected to the divine. It took someone from the outside telling me I could indeed be both to even believe it could have the potential of being possible. I clung onto it like a rope that guided me through this darkness, but it was still in the muck. I did not know where it led, but at least it was a start. Slowly and surely, I met more people with this belief. I am completely convinced God brought people into my path to love me back to a place where I could reach enough sunshine to grow, heal, and begin to love again. I have been offered enough love through others to get me to a place where I think God is leading me to finally learn how to love myself without depending solely on others and outside sources. This is a scary place for me, but a necessary one if I am to ever be able to fully love myself and others as God has called me. 

   There are many ways others can help LGBT Christians begin this journey. If you are straight, and you know someone who is gay, or even if you don't, figure out what you believe. Whatever the outcome, if you know someone who is gay, let them know that you care about them, that they are indeed lovable, that God loves them no matter what, and that they matter to you. LGBT Christians are usually scared to reach out, so please, give them that hope. If you are LGBT and a Christian, share your story. We need to hear that there are MANY of us who have found a way to bridge the gap of being gay and a Christian. We need to hear that we are not alone in our struggle to find a way to love ourselves JUST AS WE ARE, because our Creator certainly does.

The Dichotomy of Love

I am convinced that the beauty of love is in the dichotomy of selfishness and selflessness. Sometimes we get too caught up in the guilt that seeps into us when we are focusing on being selfless with our love. Guilt is a poison that attacks our ability to love fully which can be seen as an exchange - no, a mutually existing flow of giving and receiving. Love should flow in and out of our hearts to the people we are blessed to care for. Guilt makes our love one sided. We live in a world of commerce - we pay something and EXPECT something in return. We end up adopting this lens when we love. Sometimes we even find ourselves keeping tabs on who has loved us well so we can "return favors." Christianity teaches us to die to ourselves and give without expecting anything in return so when we are given a gift out of love, no matter the form: words of encouragement, money, acts of service, etc., we feel guilty because our selflessness makes us forget how to receive love.The guilt becomes a dam and we are left feeling empty. We feel empty because this dam makes us send acts of love out of guilt instead of the mutual gentle flow of receiving, giving, and accepting. What we may forget is that when the flow of love is not hindered by the dam of guilt, the people we love receive a gift of love as soon as we gratefully ACCEPT their love gift. That is what I mean by the mutual flow. Imagine love as a circular flow of water from one human being to another. Imagine the act of love is flowing from one person's heart to the other. Then the person sees that love gift and takes that flow into their own heart. As the heart is nourished and replenished by the love water flow, the gratefulness they experience flows back to the other persons heart replenishing them. Both hearts are then mutually loved, and replenished. The selfishness and selflessness happens at the same time when love is given, received, and appreciated. That is the beauty of the dichotomy of love. It is the most selfish and selfless act we can create. Let's love unhindered by the guilt dam and embrace the freedom we experience when we love this way.

Remembering our Freedom

Freedom. Freedom is something we seldom think about, and something we sometimes feel is as allusive as water running through our fingers when trying to grasp it. We distract ourselves so often with worries about our future and guilt about our past that we forget how much power we have inside of ourselves to change, to grow, and to fully exist. Madeline L’Engle described freedom as a Sonnet. God gave us the structure (what we commonly call “God’s Will”), but he left it up to us to fill in the words. We have the power to write our life verses, but so often we let others write it for us because of our insecurity. We let media, institutions, the government, and other people’s opinion of us, tell us what is right or wrong, what is good or bad, and we adjust accordingly. We do this so often that we throw ourselves into a cycle of what we assume are circumstances beyond our control. We are the authors of our story. The people who float into and out of our lives are our teachers, support systems, or challenges to make us stronger. They are not meant to be the authors of our stories, and only WE give them the power to write our stories for us. God lives inside of and outside of every one of us. God’s love is the source of the energy that is permanently available. It is found in every beautiful entity that God created, including YOU. Let’s tap into this energy and remind ourselves of the freedom it gives us, write our own stories, and encourage others to do the same. 

Love Your Neighbor as YOURSELF

Oh the two great commandments. We are taught them as children and while they are always remembered, they slowly fade into the background of our lives. In the second: Love your neighbor as yourself, I believe we have often lost an essential focus: the YOURSELF. How can we love our neighbor if we do not know how to love ourselves? Media usually reinforces a belief that we are not good enough: we are too fat, too thin, not muscular enough, not healthy enough, not good enough in bed, our faces are not good enough unless we buy this or that product, the glory of age; which is admired in some cultures, is deemed undesirable, and the list goes on and on. Sadly, some churches also reinforce the belief that we are not good enough. We do not depend enough on God. We are still too sinful. We need to do more good works. I believe there is too much focus on what is BAD in us that we are unable to accept and revel in the GOOD in us. We are called to love and accept God and each other, but how can we if we cannot love and accept ourselves? There is indeed value in learning who we are, who God made us to be, and how to love ourselves. We often look for others to love us because we cannot ourselves. We look for self-love in our families, in our relationships, in our churches, in our communities, but we are usually disappointed. We do not feel loved enough, and I think this may be because we have not learned to love ourselves. We therefore find ourselves unable to love those around us very well because our cup is always empty and if we always expect our cups to be filled by love from others...how can we fill other's love cups? Let's take a few moments every now and then and revel in our goodness, in our uniqueness, in our identity, and in our essence. Let's remind ourselves who it is that God created and how we are essential to God, the universe, and how we have so much to offer the world. Let us look in the mirror and think: 'Wow, I am beautiful: every single curve, wrinkle, freckle, and scar.' Let's enjoy and enhance our strengths, so we can balance our incessant working on our weaknesses. Let's become reacquainted with ourselves, positively, so we can learn to love ourselves again. When we do this, we can constantly live in the full circle of loving our neighbor as well as ourselves.

Dear Straight Christian Friends,

Dear Straight Christian Friends,
These are the voices of your Christian Lesbian friends who have recently entrusted you with the information that we are in fact attracted to other women and still Christians. What we want when we entrust you with this information is for you to remind us that our friendship is still valued and that you won't abandon us - because that is our fear. We are afraid that if we tell anyone this secret we have tried so hard to pray away that we will be left alone in the desert wasteland of indifference, good intentions, and/or harassment. We want to know that we are not any different than the person you knew before we told you, and that you support us in the way we feel God has led us, even though it is different than the way God is leading you or if you disagree with our discernment. Your love will cultivate our growth during this vulnerable time for us, and we NEED this. We have starved ourselves of love because we have spent most of our lives in self hate because we could not naturally be attracted to men - believe us, we have tried. We want to be like you, but we can't, so please love us like you always have so we can relearn how to better love ourselves. What we don't want is for you to treat us differently because of this information. We do not want you to "hate the sin and love the sinner" because the way we love is part of who we are. Please don't harass us by showing us Bible verses that you think is evidence that being gay is wrong. We have read them and whipped ourselves raw with them for long enough and have learned to hate ourselves because of them. You make us feel less human when you tell us our love for another woman is evil or sinful instead of legitimizing our courage and validating our seeking to embrace ourselves just as we learned from our Creator. We do not "choose"this lifestyle just for sex. We have grown up just like you have hearing that sex before marriage is bad, and we would not endure harassment, terror of someone finding out and abandoning us, and being excluded from social, familial, and church communities just for sex - no, we seek love, just as you do. So please, love us for who we are and who we are becoming. We have told you because you mean a lot to us and we trust you. Thank you for being our friend and we hope we can still be an important part of your life, you certainly are to us.

The Chains of Expectation

Expectations. Expectation is the lasso of our longing to reign in the beautiful dynamism of life during our time on Earth. Expectation is the language of that lasso that is expressed in institutions of any form: religious, socioeconomic, cultural, marital, etc. We chain ourselves to these expectations then wonder why oh why are we so complacent, so lifeless, so unsatisfied. We create these pictures in our brains of how each expectation should be accomplished or fulfilled and are dumbfounded at the injustice we feel when our expectations are not met, because we are all different and will add our spice to any understanding of an institution. Sometimes we go so far as to knit these expectations we have adopted from institutions or that quiet but very alive entity called "Society" and paste them onto our very character and are constantly frustrated or disappointed in ourselves because we cannot measure up. Then we become puppets to these lifeless, soulless entities and constantly look for anything that will give us what these lifeless, soulless entities cannot give us: LIFE. We are living breathing creatures who cannot get life from these soulless entities that we have given so much power. So why are people surprised that we get so much LIFE out of hearing anything that goes against them in the tragic, scandalous, or atypical stories in what we call "news." Why do we have this constant battle with our "sinful nature," to spend money we don't have, to go against the grain, to think impure thoughts about people who are not our spouses? Because we are chained by expectation and have forgotten how to embrace life as it comes, instead of trying to control it. Little surprises await us every turn if we can just allow ourselves to exist, to be, to embrace nature, love, and God in whatever form we experience him, her, it. We can offer each other and ourselves so much if we allow ourselves to be who we are instead of trying to react to the chains of expectation.

Fear Exposed

Fear. Fear binds us so close to ourselves that we become nearsighted. We are only able to focus an inch in front of our faces while we seek that which will ease the pain fear inevitably causes. Our self prescriptions vary depending on how we choose to handle our fear. We may want to escape or run away from our fear. We may want to sit with it because we find sadistic comfort in its familiarity. We may want to numb the pain it causes. The bravest of us look it in its ugly face and recognize it only becomes something that can choke us when we give it permission. We are more powerful than we think we are. May we react to the love we feel for people we care about instead of our fears of what they may or may not think of us. May love be the lens we look through - not the lens of fear that makes everything blurry and ugly. Why do we place these chains on ourselves? Why are we sometimes so convinced there is no other way to live? May we refuse to let fear distort our ability to see the beauty of creation and community that surrounds us and suffocate our ability to love.