God’s Work in Progress

October 13, 2008

The personal story below has been contributed by an anonymous guest blogger. Even in maintaining anonymity due to her love and concern for family, the sharing of her story, as the story itself, demonstrates great courage and integrity. I loved reading this story and I trust that you will too. Thanks to our guest blogger for the gift of her life and faith that she so generously have chosen to share with us.

Having just read Elizabeth’s story and being moved by it I thought I would share mine. I grew up in a rural area of Australia on a sheep wheat farm. I had a great childhood, stable and pretty much care free. We attended a local Presbyterian church where I went to Sunday school and later was fully involved in the youth groups and activities run by the church. Looking back, even as young as six, I can remember having a crush on an older girl. When I hit puberty I wanted to be like everyone else but I always felt awkward and ill at ease around boys and when I was fifteen I fell head-long in love with my best friend. I never told her about my feelings and they lasted at least four years until she moved to another state and we eventually lost contact. As a teenager I stopped going to church because it was too boring, too irrelevant, too fill-in-the-blank nor had yet made a commitment to the Lord.

In my early twenties I decided to travel and in the process while working in a resort met a woman from New Zealand. We began a relationship and I went back to New Zealand with her. Through a Christian at work I began to become interested again in the church. He was from a Pentecostal denomination and I became curious. To cut a long story short my girlfriend and I both ended up getting saved and making a decision for Christ. It was made plain that being gay and Christian wasn’t a possibility so we separated. It was very difficult and caused a great deal of pain. I had been friends with a young man where I worked who also became a Christian about the same time we did and we later worked together in a Christian drop-in centre. We decided to marry and I thought “Great! Now I’ll be normal.”

We had 3 children. The marriage was difficult from the start as he wasn’t emotionally stable. I gave my all for my children and family and remained faithful but as the years passed I often felt I was on autopilot. God continued to sustain me and I was committed to the church but I had this nagging feeling of something being wrong. I began to feel great discontent with some of the things I saw in the church especially things done to people in the name of Christ. After thirty-two years I made contact with my ex-girlfriend. She told me she had been to Bible college and for ten years had remained in the church but when she couldn’t change into the mold they wanted her to fit into she left. She said it took many counseling sessions after that to “put her back together again.” I began to have serious doubts about what the Church had said about gay people. One particular question was “If gay people can’t change and God doesn’t change them how can they be expected to live a life without someone to love or to love them?”  The church can’t fill that sort of gap and neither, I venture, can God with most of us.

I remained resigned to my life as it was. Life was a monorail to the grave and I hoped I would get there sooner rather than later. My marriage for quite some time had become two people who shared things in common living at the same address. Every year I had asked myself this question, “If you had a choice would you rather have been with a woman?” and the answer always came back the same, YES. I had made some wonderful Christian friends in the United States through the internet and had traveled there a number of times to see them. Through circumstances many of my friends got jobs or had other commitments and I didn’t speak to them as much as I once had. I thought I would try to make new friends and heard about MySpace. I opened a MySpace page and began to browse the profiles for people with similar interests to find friends. Among the smiling faces of strangers was the face of a woman to whom I was immediately drawn. In fact she leapt out at me and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I didn’t know it but in that moment my life was about to change forever.

We became friends. I was to find out that not only was she gay but she had children, had been married, and we liked similar things but there was something indescribable too that happened straight away and I can only describe it as a meeting of hearts. I didn’t look for it but it happened, I fell in love and she did too. It was a time of great happiness but also greatest turmoil. I told my children and their father. It was very difficult. I also wasn’t sure where I stood with God but was helped a great deal by reading a book by a man who was an Assemblies of God pastor for twenty years before coming out (his website can be found at freedom2b[e]). It is still very difficult with my children even after eighteen months, particularly with my eldest who is a Christian. My American partner lives with me and I can truly say I am happy. I feel every day is a gift from God and I love the fact I have someone I love sharing it with me. God has told me He loves me and my relationship with Him continues to be a work in progress. I feel blessed and alive.

Posted in Personal Stories