The Preacher’s Daughter

I was talking with coworkers the other day about dating and different cultures and religions… they started to comment on a couple one of them knew who had a long distance relationship in a very strict Christian culture. This couple had just married, and they hadn’t even kissed as part of their dating. As my coworkers commented on how unrealistic of a lifestyle that was for them, and what they had coming, I felt compelled to share an experience with them. One that I hoped would open their eyes, and show them how different religions can be, and how influential it can be on a person. Sometimes even when it seems oppressive, which in many cases, it does.

When I was 22, I began dating this girl. We’d met at a community PFLAG event and we seemed to have a lot in common. I connected with her eyes, very quickly. I knew instantly there was something about her from a past life, something at the soul level, that I needed to connect with here. We began hanging out and quickly became an item. She went by Jess, and she was the daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher. Her family was very sweet and they welcomed me, until they found out I was her girlfriend. They kicked her out and left her homeless and struggling. Jess floated from place to place, also living in my car, until we moved into an apartment together. Her family came around, and helped support us in having a place to live and being able to afford being on our own. But through this whole time, Jules struggled with being Saved, and being a lesbian. She felt very strongly that we were living a life of sin, and this caused a lot of stress in our relationship.

She and I searched for churches who would accept us. We went to a United Methodist Church and were kicked out. It was a horrifying experience as they separated us, prayed over us, and tried to tell each of us that the other was dragging us to Hell with her. I remember sobbing in the narthex of the church because I couldn’t make it stop. At the end, I got in my convertible with the rainbow sticker on the back, turned up an Indigo Girls CD, and drove off as fast as I could. Thankful it was over. Thankful I had her and we could comfort each other. But we couldn’t. Jess was too scared by her upbringing in the the Southern Baptist Church, that this rare, unaccepting group of Methodists convinced her that we couldn’t be together and be Saved by God’s grace. We argued that night, we cried, she broke up with me, and in the morning, we began to heal. Together. We clung to each other, feeling forsaken, like we had nothing else. And we looked for another church…

We went to her father’s church for Christmas Eve that year. We walked in together and sat with her mom and siblings and listened to a very nice Christmas celebration. I sung the hymns and thought things were going well, until I heard the whispers. People were approaching her mom and apologizing. “I’m so sorry about your daughter,” they’d say. One by one, as if in a funeral procession, paying their respects to the body as the exited the sanctuary. We left, saddened by the evening. Jess, once again, feeling alone and full of sin. I’m convinced if I hadn’t gotten really sick that night, she would’ve broken up with me again in search of her salvation.

A few months later, Jess ran into someone she knew from her childhood. This woman had fought addictions and won, and had been Saved by the Lord Jesus Christ. Jess desperately wanted to accept Him back into her heart, and so she went to church. I stayed behind, tainted by our last experience, leery of a church I didn’t know, and confident that I didn’t need a building full of people to tell me that God loved me because I already knew. Her friend soon realized that Jess wouldn’t continue to come to church unless she got me to come as well, so she invited us to see “The Passion of the Christ” with Mel Gibson. It had just been released in the theaters. Afterwards, there was a Bible study to talk about the symbolisms in the movie. I was all-in for this. It sounded noncommittal and very interesting. So we went… I sat in the Bible study with my baseball cap on, just listening as the conversation quickly turned to nightmares and blood prayers. Praying for the blood of Jesus to save one from terrible dreams. And then… she outed Jess. Told the whole room that she wasn’t living right, she was living with a woman in sin, and that was the reason for these nightmares. My head sunk as I began to hide my face with the brim of my baseball cap. I sensed this was going horribly wrong. The preacher’s wife was sitting in the room with us as they all talked about overcoming addictions and being saved. And then it happened… she outed me. They compared loving women to laying in an alley, covered in blood and sweat, waiting for your next high. Strung out on cocaine and heroine. These weren’t the same things! The love I felt was beautiful, it was pure. It wasn’t to be compared to a high given by an illegal drug. I’d done cocaine, I knew the difference between loving a woman and getting high on cocaine. They didn’t compare. I got up and left, I told the friend that had brought us that this wasn’t what I had come for and I would be waiting on the front porch.

From that point forward, I took Jess to church and picked her up. We talked about being Christians often, and she questioned her ability to be a Child of God and a lesbian. To be Saved and be gay. The oppressive nature of her religion made it impossible for her to be in a relationship with any woman and be happy. She was a tortured soul, and it broke my heart. Eventually, she chose her relationship with Jesus above everything else, including me, and she left. She called me a few weeks later, begging to come home. This “friend” who had outed us in the Bible study had taken everything that she wore to define who she was and replaced them with feminine and “straight” looking items. She wouldn’t let Jess cut her hair, or wear a men’s polo or shorts. She bought her skirts and darted button up tops. My heart broke, but I knew somehow she would always make this choice and I let her go for good.

She later went to a Bible college and pursued her dream of being a youth director for a church. We don’t speak and I don’t know if she ever came to terms with herself or not. I moved on from this experience and learned to look for open and accepting churches.

Faith Based

Yesterday was an exciting mark on history for the lesbian and gay communities of Maine, Maryland, Washington and Minnesota. We have a long way to go, and I have had many conversations to support equality in my home state. Through the past few months of these conversations (which still continue even after marriage has been passed) it continues to amaze me that people small sections of the Bible to say what they want it to say rather than taking the document as a whole and using it for what it is. The truth is, if we followed the book in its entirety, we’d all live very different lives. A friend said to me today, if we all followed Leviticus as it is written, we’d be in jail. She’s right.

Our faith and what we believe is what’s inside us. It’s the knowledge that what we can’t see and touch and feel. It’s not in a book full of old laws, its in the stories and lessons the book teaches us. Its in the lessons that we learn in our everyday lives. If you listen, you can hear God speaking to you and working through you.

This isn’t to say that knowing where your beliefs come from isn’t important. I wouldn’t dismiss the Bible completely, but I have to believe that this book was written by men who were inspired by God. They wrote laws that made sense to govern their people in their lifetimes. The world has changed, we have changed, and God remains. He continues to teach us through the world we live in and hopes that we become the best followers of Him that we can be. To me, this means opening our hearts and minds to everyone in our world. Opening ourselves up to other cultures, beliefs, and other ways of life.

To be Christian is not to judge, but to accept and to welcome. That’s what it’s always meant to me.

 

Share your thoughts with me on your comments, on facebook http://www.facebook.com/hispromiseourrianbow or through email at hispromiseourrainbow@gmail.com

A Call… Quite Literally

About a week or so ago, I got a facebook message from a friend of mine who remembered I’d started this blog. This friend and I went to church with a few years ago. She’s working on her doctorate (she’s wicked smart) in Pastoral Counseling and is putting together a presentation on the GLBT Community and Faith based issues. When she contacted me, I wondered what it was I could have to offer. Yes, I have quite an interesting past with “The Church” and I’ve started this blog as a way to talk about that past. Then I got to thinking, that’s exactly the problem! We don’t talk about this! We as Gay Christians either stopped going to church, or we go to blend into the mainstream congregations. In the broad spectrum of churches, there are very few churches that are like MCC and are specifically “gay.” So, I agreed to meet with her to help in any way I could.

We talked and talked as the hours passed and I believe that she helped me as much as I helped her, probably more. We talked a lot about what would make the GLBT Community comfortable in any welcoming church, and what a welcoming church looked like, versus what it could look like. What would make our community keep going back to church (in numbers)? What makes church uncomfortable for the GLBT Community? I learned about Reconciling United Methodists and Jesuit Catholics, and we talked about how churches differ from the churches we grew up in. I went home with some literature to read, a head full of thoughts, and an inspiration that has transformed itself into a new project. There will be more to come, in time, about this new project. For now, I would LOVE your feedback on the above questions. Post your comments below or email them to hispromiseourrainbow@gmail.com

Like me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/HisPromiseOurRainbow

And I would like to extend a million THANKS to my friend who has inspired me!

Tell Me All Your Thoughts of God

So you’ve read all about me, what I’ve been through, and how I became the Christian I am. The purpose of this blog was originally to share stories of our faith as LGBT Christians so that other members of our LGBT Community can feel confident knowing that the Christian Community is an open and welcome place for everyone. God’s love is unconditional. I have never believed that God would forsake me, abandon me, or damn me to Hell for being the lesbian He created me to be. 

Please share your stories with me at hispromiseourrainbow@gmail.com 
These stories will be shared on the blog anonymously and will help LGBT people everywhere know that they are loved for who they are. 

Unacceptable Leadership

Link

I found this on Facebook today and I was very hurt by what I read. When will this stop being okay? When will the leaders in the Christian world start acting like the Christians they claim they are? Jesus taught love and understanding, He taught compassion and inclusion. If Jesus were here right now, He would be having dinner with the LGBT Community, not excluding us from His Kingdom.

http://www.mlp.org/article.php?story=UMCGC2012

Christ has Risen! Alleluia!

Happy Easter everyone!

I have an Easter story for you, but not the one you’re used to hearing. Recently a friend of mine took a part time job as the Music Director at a local Lutheran church. She needed a choir for Easter and asked if some of us singers were willing to help out. I, of course, volunteered. I tend to find excuses to be in church and was eager to see how this turned out. The church choir thing was a fun time to revisit, and if she needs another volunteer, I would probably do it again, but I felt completely awkward. My partner opted not to go because she couldn’t sit with me and we didn’t know how it was going to turn out. I found myself hiding pronouns and limiting conversation so not to be judged by the congregation. Everyone was very sweet and welcoming, but only to the facade. I’d love to go back to church one day. It saddens me that I can’t walk into any House of God and worship freely.

Experiement, failed. :0(

Doesn’t Everyone Wear Comfortable Shoes?

I spent last night hanging out with a few good old friends, who have both read and shared this blog. I can’t thank them enough for their support. I’m so blessed to have a group of people in my life who accept me as I am, no questions asked, and no matter how often we see each other, we always pick up where we left off. Thank God for people like that. I hope everyone has that kind of love and support in their lives.

I shared some of my childhood experiences and my coming out experiences with them and I felt they would be important for you as well. I grew up in a good Christian home. I told you about my church life, this is about my home life. We lived in Baltimore City until I was 12, and then moved north to Bel Air, MD where I attended middle and high school. When we lived in the city there was a lesbian couple that lived down the street from us. I was enamored with them and their life. There was something that clicked but I was way too young to know what it was. All I knew was that I wanted that when I grew up. My parents forbade me to talk to them. I was told they “wore comfortable shoes” and that I was never to enter their home, it was unsafe. This didn’t stop me from talking to them, I just watched my back when I did. My best friend lived next door to them, so it was easy to see them out in their yard when I was at her house and run over to say hello.

As I grew up I began to understand what my parents were truly trying to tell me, but it still never made sense. It wasn’t until I was 20 that I admitted to myself that I was a lesbian, but I tortured my parents with the thought in my teens. I didn’t understand why they believed it was so bad. When I finally did come out to my parents (at the age of 21) I got exactly what I thought I was going to get, only worse. Not only was I kicked out of the house, but they were ashamed of me. They told me that they weren’t proud of me and that I shouldn’t be proud of myself, that I was an abomination to God and they didn’t know how I got this way because they didn’t raise me this way. This put me in a really bad space mentally and allowed me to make some poor choices in my life. My relationship with my parents is much better now (11 years later), but they’ll never look at my relationship they way they look at my brother’s marriage to his wife.

When I share this story with others, their response is always, what does wearing comfortable shoes have to do with it? This is how people referred to lesbians and gay men. Women who were gay “wore comfortable shoes,” and gay men were “light in the loafers” or were light on their feet. If you look up the phrases, they were offensive to the LGBT community in my parent’s time and before.

I will never forget how my parents referred to these women, but I will also remember the impact they had on my life. They taught me to keep my heart and mind open because you never know who you’re talking to. These women accepted me as the people in my life now do. They didn’t ask questions or shun me away. I was too young to know if I ever repeated to them what my parents said, but I’m sure if I did they still embraced me for who I was because I can’t think of a time that they wouldn’t talk to me.

Matthew 6:25-32
“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. …

And they’ll know we are Christian’s by our love

I grew up in a United Methodist Church. I went pretty much every Sunday from 0-22. I was told in Sunday School that everyone believed something a little different and that’s okay. I sang in the Junior Choir, Senior Choir, and a Contemporary Christian band called Standing Promises. I participated in youth groups and other church groups and I was continually active in my church. It felt right, it felt like where I belonged and it felt like home. I came out to a very good friend of mine in that church when I was 20 years old. He embraced me for who I was and still does but recommended that I not tell anyone else in the church. United Methodists weren’t all very open. I watched my church change and the band I sang in folded, so I left that church and searched for another church home.

The next church I went to was a church my current girlfriend was going to and had gone to for some time. We went one time, that’s all it took. It was a United Methodist Church, so I saw no reason why we wouldn’t be welcomed. This particular girlfriend was raised Southern Baptist, and was also the preacher’s daughter (this wasn’t Daddy’s church) so when the time came for everyone to take communion, she remained seated because she wasn’t “living right.” I was raised that an Open Table truly meant all were welcome, so I went for communion. Upon my return to our seats, my girlfriend was talking to a friend of hers about why she wasn’t taking communion. This “friend” was counseling her on her lifestyle choice of being an out lesbian. I asked them to continue the conversation after the service because talking during communion was rude to those praying, they agreed. After the service, this woman and her husband approached both of us and told us we were an abomination. The husband actually told me that “if I was going to live that lifestyle I wasn’t welcomed in their sanctuary.” With this, I walked out of the sanctuary, followed by the husband, while the woman and my girlfriend went to the parking lot. We were both being told that the other was leading us down Satan’s path and taking the other to Hell with us. We left that night after being torn down and prayed over vowing to never go back to that church. My ex went back, I never did. Two friends of mine were also kicked out of that church for being gay.

The next big church that girlfriend decided to attend, I opted out of. I did attend a Bible study at the pastor’s home one night. It was run by his wife and the topic was to be “The DaVinci Code.” Instead, it was the lesbians. Not only was I outed at this Bible study, but I was again told I was an abomination and that God could save me if I prayed for salvation. My ex wound up at a Bible college a few years after we split and I don’t know where she is or what she’s doing now.

Shortly after that I found the MCC church and I attended that church until it closed for lack of attendance. I have never joined another church and still don’t attend a church today. I’ve become one of those Christian’s that show up on holidays and when I truly miss the fulfillment I have gotten from church. I have met a few people recently who may convince me to go, but the fear of joining another church and making that home to have it change or close is too great for me to give myself as a commitment. In some ways, I’m hoping this blog and your support will help.

Hey Crazy Jesus Lady – Can God Save Me Too?

Hello and welcome to His Promise, Our Rainbow. I’m Heidi, a gay Christian who has struggled with faith and God’s acceptance since coming out. Since coming out, I’ve been shunned by people who consider themselves Christians but don’t believe that members of the LGBT Community belong in God’s Kingdom. The inspiration for this blog came from an encounter that made me realize that I need to tell my story. I was at work recently and met a woman whose occupation was to “bring people to Jesus.” She asked me how I was raised and told me it was a shame that United Methodist’s didn’t “get saved.” Then she asked me if I read her story. She noted that her story was “quite heavy” and a lot to take in on a small paper. After hearing her description, I felt compelled to read this story. I was amazed that this “heavy” story was that she was born Jewish, raised Catholic and as an adult was a successful artist with a husband who bought her great clothes and took her on amazing vacations. This was all until Jesus appeared to her one day and told her to walk away from her life and follow Him. Mind you, she was standing in my workplace dressed to the nines, so she clearly hadn’t walked way from it all. I thought to myself, that’s not a hard life, I’ve been kicked out of churches, I know people who have overcome addictions and spent time incarcerated. These people have surely suffered on their path to the Lord and should be heard to tell their stories. I have met many wonderful and open-minded Christians on my path. Where my path will lead me, I don’t know. I only know that the people I have met bring me closer to trusting again in the Lord and letting Him lead me.

This blog is a place for us to share our stories. The LGBT community is not forgotten and won’t be left behind, we are all God’s children and we all have a place in His Kingdom. Please feel free to share your stories as I will share mine. Together, let us build our own virtual community of Faith in which we can all find God’s Acceptance. I hope you’ll join me.