Out of the Box

January 1, 2006

I am 31 and the oldest of two girls from a family that began in the Midwest and then migrated south (I have since returned to God’s country - Minnesota!). I know it sounds cliché, but I always knew I was different. As a kid of 6 or 7 years old, I would invite girls over for “kissing practice,” a fact that I recently shared with my now mortified mother! My best friends were all boys, and I loved to play different sports with them. Actually, I was the only girl that the boys even wanted on their teams!

It was in high school that my faith really began to develop. I was a member of a few youth groups at various churches, and all I listened to was contemporary christian music - people like Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, and Petra. One of my high school teachers told me that she could see me having lots of kids when I got married, and I remember thinking that she might be very wrong, but I was still completely unaware of why I thought she was wrong. When my friends talked about marriage, I never knew how to fit in to their conversations, because I just had a deep feeling that I wouldn’t end up married to a man, and that can be hard to explain at 16 or 17.

After high school, I attended a very small, private, Catholic university 1,000 miles from home. It was here that I first really entertained the thoughts of entering a convent. I was certain that this was God’s plan for me. During my second semester of my freshman year, I had my first “relationship” with my roommate. I thought it was a fleeting thing, and continued to pursue the convent idea at full speed. Needless to say, the convent never knew of that “relationship”, and I joined them at the ripe age of 20. Looking back, I know that I only entered the convent to run from the fact that I was feeling things that confused me to death. And I find it ironically funny that I thought a CONVENT - full of women! - would be a good place to hide from those feelings! Isn’t youth funny? And yes, you guessed correctly - I left the convent a year and a half later. But I still wasn’t ready to admit anything as far as my sexuality was concerned! No, I still had to suffer through a few more “relationships” before I was ready. And I am putting that word into quote marks because it’s difficult to define them as relationships when neither of you can admit that maybe…..just maybe…..shhh……you might be…….lesbians!!

Over the next few years, I was slowly able to reconcile things within myself. I had a lot of help along the way, both from friends in similar situations and from this web site and the women I’ve met here. I have come to realize that all my life, I’ve tried to make sure that God fit into this particular box that I had made for Him, and now I know that no box, no matter what the size, could ever contain God and His mysteries. I don’t understand why we’re all different, and I’ve stopped trying to figure it all out and just accept that God is in total control and that everything is going to be all right. I can love another woman, and the sun will still rise tomorrow morning. A girl named Jean can become a boy named Dean, and the moon will still continue it’s cycles. Our grandparents might be rolling over in their graves, but God is welcoming us with open arms……and who better to accept us as we are than the one who created us! Yes, God is good all the time. All the time, God is good!

This personal story of faith and reconciliation comes from the archives of www.christianlesbians.com and was originally posted in 2004.

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Posted in Personal Stories