When I was in law school, the church I attended had a presentation one Sunday. A young married couple, probably in their early 30’s, came to speak. He talked about the years he lived in what he described as a sinful homosexual lifestyle. And then he spoke of how he had been redeemed and healed of his sinful lusts and met and married the young lady he now called his wife. But after their marriage, he was diagnosed with AIDS, as was she. They were both mostly healthy at the time they spoke to us and I remember thinking what an amazing redemptive story they shared. Several years later, I heard he had left his wife and gone back to his homosexual lifestyle and ultimately both had died of AIDS. I remember thinking how sad it was that he had died away from God.
I hadn’t thought about that presentation, or that couple, in years. Until a few months ago when I started reading more about the heartbreaking stories of LGBTQ people who have struggled with shame, confusion, and pain over their sexual orientation. It was then that I learned about conversion therapy. It was then I remembered that young couple and realized that was probably the experience the young man had been through that had convinced him for a time that he could deny who he was and be what others found acceptable of a young Christian man.
And with the maturity I have gained over the past 25 plus years since then, and with the change of heart God has been working within me over the past 10 years or so, in my view of same sex attraction, I thought of that young couple again with sadness. But a sadness different than the one I first felt.
The sadness now isn’t that the young man may have died far from God because of his sin. The sadness now is that the young man may have died not knowing how loved he was by God, because of the damaging message of judgment and intolerance he had heard his whole life. The sadness now is that the young lady died of a disease she should never have been exposed to because she should have never been in the relationship she had been in with the young man, and wouldn’t have been, if he had just been allowed to be who God created him to be.
I had the opportunity to go watch the movie Boy Erased last week. A movie about a boy much like the one I heard speak all those many years ago. A son of an evangelical conservative pastor, who upon coming out to his parents as being attracted to other men, was sent to conversion therapy to change him into the person his father felt God intended him to be.
It was the most painful movie I have ever seen. It made me sad, angry, and sick, all at the same time. What made me so sad, angry, and sick wasn’t just the abuse this boy and more than 700,000 other LGBTQ youth in this country have been subjected to.
What made me so sad, angry, and sick is the fact that for so many years, I bought into the lies that this therapy espoused. That same sex attraction is against God’s purpose. That it’s a result of family dynamics, childhood abuse, or is simply a voluntary lifestyle choice. That homosexuality is anything other than part of the perfect plan of God for God’s children.
I am beyond grateful that God has changed my mind and changed my heart. At the end of my life, when I face God on God’s throne, I hope to be able to say that in all the times of my life where I didn’t know what to do or how to think, that I always chose to err on the side of love.
I pray that there will come a time when no LGBTQ person ever has to experience the damaging message that they are anything other than exactly as God created them to be. Fearfully and wonderfully made. In God’s image and with God’s perfect purpose. Until that time, I will continue to pray for God to open hearts and open minds. To replace judgment and intolerance with love, acceptance, and affirmation. To help people to see others as God sees them. As precious, cherished, made for love, and made to be loved.
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