Don’t Conform . . . Be Transformed

January 1, 2006

Ever feel like a black sheep sitting in a pew on Sunday morning? I have and it doesn’t feel good. I always felt more guilty and down on myself after having attended church. My solution - I stopped going. I was fed up with the hypocrisy and of having those authoritarian fingers forever pointing at me and feeling like I could never be good enough to please those people round about me, much less, please God and get into heaven.

I didn’t know God, I only knew of God. Truthfully, I didn’t want to know someone who sat up in heaven on his mighty throne, weilding a huge baseball bat, just waiting for me to get out of line, so he could hit me with it! I was so oppressed and frustrated with trying to conform to the church and be what I thought God and people wanted me to be, that I turned my back and walked away. By age 15, I was burnt out on church, religion, and all those goody-two-shoes. I didn’t want anything to do with any of it.

Twenty years later I had a crisis in my life and I needed some answers to my questions. Where was God? How could He allow such terrible things to happen to people He supposedly loved? Did He even exist or was He some myth made up to keep society in control? I started searching for answers. There was a lady I worked with, whom I had often seen reading a small pocket Bible during her breaks. One day I approached and asked her some of the questions that had plagued my soul. Although, I was very angry and hostile toward God and religion, she was always accepting of me and my feelings and didn’t get all shook up about the way I expressed it! She didn’t try to force feed me scripture or preach me down. She just made herself available whenever I approached her and answered my questions with sincerity. She extended an open invitation to me to go to church with her if I was so inclined.

Eventually God answered all my questions, began healing my heart, and led me to this little church, which happened to be the same church that the lady at work had invited me to attend with her. Here I found out I wasn’t supposed to conform to the church. I had been working to hard to change myself from the outside in, in order to fit in, instead of letting God change me from the inside out. This took a load off of my shoulders - all I had to do was invite Jesus into my heart to be my Lord and personal Savior, which I did! I then prayed, “Lord, clean me up and mold me into the person you want me to be.” “P.S. I apologize in advance ’cause Lord, quite frankly, you sure got your work cut out for you. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.”

Once I quit trying to conform and allowed Jesus to transform me, my life became a lot more pleasant and blessed. Now I have the wonderful experience of being transformed from glory to glory on a daily basis. Jesus is patient with us. He will complete the work He has begun in us, so why should we be impatient with ourselves and one another? I have learned to let go and let God be God!!

I am a recently “outed” lesbian. The first step in the process of coming out was to accept myself. The second step was to realize that Jesus had already accepted the “real me” long before I ever did. After spending the last 10 years of my life mostly celibate while I tried to pray away and counsel away my lesbian thoughts, feelings, and desires, I have finally come to terms with my own sexual orientation and Christianity. After all, Jesus said, “come to me as you are”, not as you would like to be or the way others and the church say you should be! The third step was for me to learn to love myself for who I am, in spite of the negative hurtful things other people tried to put on me - especially other well-meaning Christians. Nothing stings quite so bad or hurts so much as “friendly fire.”

The most profound and relevant thing that I have learned from my long hard struggle with my lesbianism and Christianity is that it is absolutely impossible to be honest before God until one can be honest with oneself!

This personal story of faith and reconciliation comes from the archives of www.christianlesbians.com and was originally posted in 1999.

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