“When Side B is the New Ex-Gay”.

Oh Constance…what a poignant and well written post awaits you behind the above link!  Please head over and read it, and while you do, keep in mind something:

As John Pavlovitz says, it is no longer possible for you to bury your head in the sand of platitudes and assumptions about what it means to be gay or lesbian or transgender and be in love with God all at once.

Let me be clear with you all:  my gender journey is not like the one that gay and lesbian christians are on, in that my journey is not about who I feel sexual attraction to, but rather it is an adventure that involves living out my female being in this body that is biologically male…okay?  It is important you know that.

I also want to again reiterate and confess something:  much to my great sorrow, before I was personally confronted by Mama about my gender identity, in inescapable ways, before that incredible and sacred day?  Well, I really didn’t do a whole lot more than mouth platitudes myself.  I didn’t really think about it much.  Oh, I have talked with many gay men who have sought me out to confide in me…but while I was kind and loving to them?  I really had nothing to offer other than the same old junk that I had been taught myself.

I was not capable of walking in their shoes!  I had no true empathy with their plight and path.  And thus I had no true motivation to really discover what their life is!

We made friends with a lesbian couple who have become very dear friends…in fact, they were the first people I came out to…but even in that friendship, I still didn’t know.

Well, I do now.

I do…cus I get it now, I get the same discrimination.  I get the same hatred.  I get the same rejection.  I get judged the same way with virtually the same judgments.  I pay some of the same prices, and I pay additional different ones.

But besides that?  What I got was a huge dose of Humble Pie from Them…because it was so absolutely clear to me that I had not been truly like Jesus when I thought I was being like Him.  I was so blinded by my own arrogant preening righteousness.  I was so certain that the people that I talked to were just trying “to justify their sin”…as if every single other f***king christian in history hasn’t done the same g*dd*m thing!!

Every.  Single.  One.

Friend…you who “prays for me, that I will be delivered from this deception”, you should rend your own hearts and pray for yourself, that God would send you to Damascus and perhaps knock you off your ass and the scales from your eyes.

You just don’t know.  You think you do…but you don’t.

People deal with all matters of interaction with God in all manner of ways…and you aren’t qualified to pass muster on them.  But you are qualified to lay down your weapons, lay down your platitudes and easy caricature-arguments, and simply love…lift…and laugh.

Point to Jesus, not at sin.  Point to the Cross and not to anything else.  And then actually spend some time with people.  Go to the Gay Christian Network Conference…Go to a Reconciling in Christ Meeting…Go to a welcoming of LGTBQ church…talk to the clergy…talk to the congregants…listen…listen.

And when done listening…well, listen some more.

Do Justice.  Love Mercy.  Walk Humbly.

Charissa Grace