I’ve been thinking about writing this post for over a year now. I started imagining what I would say in my head countless times. I still have no idea where to begin, so maybe the first thing to do is just come out and say it.
I’m gay. Queer. I like women. Romantically. Physically. Emotionally. Most people’s first question is “So what do you identify as?” or “What’s your label?” The real answer is that I’m still figuring that out. The “for now” answer is that I am somewhere on the bisexuality spectrum and somewhere on the asexuality spectrum. I definitely lean towards being attracted to women much more than men and still identify as “aspec.” Maybe I’m ace. Maybe I’m a lesbian. Maybe I’m demi. Maybe I’m bi. Maybe it doesn’t actually matter. What does matter is that I am definitely 100% not straight.
For some of you, that may be all I need to say. For many, it may be a surprise (it was for me!), and for some it may be less of one (as one friend told me, “We thought you already knew, and it was deliberate repression!”)
If this new information doesn’t change your perception of me or how you feel about me, you’re welcome to stop reading now. However, if reading that makes you confused, makes you feel like you don’t know me anymore, perhaps makes you want to know more about my journey to this discovery or fills you with any sort of emotion, then this post might be for you.
However, if you are not willing and ready to listen to me talk about my experience with openness, if you are not willing to engage with this new information about me in a loving and respectful way, then you should probably stop reading now. I’m not asking everyone in my life to immediately understand or be excited about this, but I am asking that those who love me make an attempt to understand what I have felt my whole life and what I’ve worked through for over a year. I am asking that they make an attempt to see how I have finally come to a place of acceptance of who I am and who I am attracted to.
I didn’t always know that I like women. In fact, I spent most of my life completely oblivious to the fact. I never considered it as a possibility growing up. I had no frame of reference to understand that attraction to women could be something that I was born programmed with. Being gay was a choice you made if you decided not to follow God. I wanted to follow God, so there was no way I could be gay.
Of course, that’s not actually true, and I’ve learned that very slowly over the years. I learned from friends also raised in the church that they knew at a very young age they felt attraction to the same gender and felt great conflict and shame as they grew up in an environment where they were told this was wrong and sinful. The older I got, the more it seemed that many of my friends realized they didn’t actually fit into the heteronormative expectations that our culture, particularly our Christian culture, tried to box us into. I started having some friends who were gay and celibate as well as friends who were gay and affirming, and I spent many years saying “Yes, I love you both, and this isn’t about me, so I’ll stay out of the fight.”
I spent a long time assuming that I would have known if I was gay, because that’s just a thing you should know about yourself. Since I didn’t, I must not be.
But I also spent a lot of time wondering how someone knew they were gay. Where’s the line between finding women nice to look at and wanting to date one? Surely everyone finds women very nice to look at, right? It’s not unusual to take multiple screencaps of an actress in a scene where she looked particularly hot, share it on tumblr and then look back at it multiple times over the years, right?
When I looked at the time stamp on that tumblr post, it dated back to 2013. In 2015, I reblogged it and said that sometimes I liked to pull the post back out to look at the pictures. To be clear, I did not realize I liked women — that I was gay — until the summer of 2019. The first time I said it out loud was July 1, 2019, and I was still in shock about it, as all the pieces came together for me that had been building for years.
For a while, I felt like since I wasn’t carrying some hidden secret about my true sexual identity for three decades, I must not be queer. And then, when I realized that I was in fact very gay and had very much been in a deep repression about it, I felt like my story didn’t fit into the textbook understanding. I felt like people would assume that I had been keeping this secret from them for years, deeply ashamed and lying to cover it up by dating men, or that I was just making it all up.
Of course, that’s not true. There is no right way to realize you’re gay, and there’s no right time. Everyone’s story is their own, and this is my story.
Flashback to the summer of 2019: I was trying to understand the concept of sexual attraction again. I had for a while been openly identifying with demisexuality and the asexuality spectrum, which basically means I knew I didn’t seem to experience sexual attraction the way other people did, and sex didn’t seem like that big of a deal. Not having sex was really easy, and I kind of preferred it that way. And I never really wanted to start kissing my boyfriends, but once we started kissing, I was like, “Oh, this is nice I guess.”
A friend likened feeling sexual attraction to a lightbulb sensation going off, similar to one you might have if you see a dog or a baby and immediately want to go smile at it, pet it, make it laugh, play with it, etc. Except with an adult human. I immediately understood the idea better than I ever had before, because I’m the type of person who always wants to go smile at babies and pet dogs. But I was struggling to identify any time in my life I had felt that way with an adult. I realized that only two times I could think of having something close to that at all involved women.
I panic texted a few close friends one morning in June 2019:
Do you ever start having a sexual identity crisis as you’re falling asleep thinking about sexual attraction and wondering if maybe you have felt it but only towards girls but you’ve conditioned your brain to not interpret it as that lolololololololol
That summer I also read the book Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston and wrote a paper about it for an LGBTQ social work course in my Master’s program. There’s a quote in the book that reads: “If he were into guys, it would have felt scary to be with one, but it wasn’t.” I also panic texted about that.
This morning I’m thinking about how I’ve never, not once, with any boyfriend, felt safe or comfortable being held by them and it’s always bothered me and I’ve assumed it’s just been because of my control issues, and then about all the times at the dance studio we would curl up on the couch in a heap and how safe that felt and how I once said back when I thought being gay was a choice that I could see how someone could convince themselves they’re gay because I could, because physical contact and closeness with girls is safe and comforting and with boys it’s scary and uncomfortable and hard, but that’s just because relationships scare me right.
That’s just because relationships scare me, right?
In the book and in real life, friends responded that it’s not supposed to be scary.
It’s not supposed to be scary?!
I started really diving into this feeling. It’s something I had struggled with a lot over the years. I have always very much wanted to be in love, have a family, and have some sort of picture perfect love story similar to my parents’, but I never felt at peace or comfortable inside of one. Twice I dated wonderful men for over a year who were everything I said I wanted on paper, and I never felt in love with them. I cared for them, and I even thought I wanted to marry them, but I never felt fully relaxed or comfortable. I never felt fully myself.
I wrote about this feeling at length in multiple entries in a prayer journal from 2017 while in my last relationship with a guy.
I’m afraid I don’t know how to relax into [my boyfriend], into a relationship. I don’t know what is holding me back, why I feel.. I dunno… I feel like I know him but that… some piece of me is holding back? IDK. He has been so good to me, and I fear I haven’t in return. I don’t know. I want to fall in love, but I have no idea how to do it, and I’m afraid I don’t know how. I don’t know how to be a girlfriend, or one day a wife. I know how to be just me- but I know I don’t want to stay just me. I’m afraid I’m overanalyzing. And also afraid I’m falling in love with ideas more than him, and I want to fall in love with him. And I do love so much about him- so I don’t know what’s holding me back other than just fear.
—
I don’t know how to fall in love with someone or even what that means or feels like… I know I don’t feel it yet, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. And I get frustrated with myself for knowing I’m holding back something but not being able to identify what and why. Please give me clarity and please let my heart be able to love romantically. I feel like I’m messed up. I feel like a disappointment or a failure or… broken in some way. But I also feel like I’m sort of just placing too much pressure on myself. I don’t know. I feel like my mind doesn’t make sense.
—
He’s amazing and wonderful and so supportive and he’s funny and he fits in with my friends, and I like him so very much… but also, do I like him enough? Or in the right ways? Do I even know what that means? I feel like there’s something missing or that I’m holding back. … And I’m so surrounded by everyone else’s approval of him and their good opinions and hopes and expectations and it puts so much pressure on me somehow? The weight of feeling like I’ll let other people down if I can’t figure it out- or that if it doesn’t it’s because something is wrong with me.
I’m terrified and I don’t know how to do this. I want to — but I feel like something is wrong with me, that I don’t know how.
Please help me see [him], help my respect and admiration for him grow — let me see him as the man you created him to be, and let me learn to love him. Let my heart be open to being vulnerable and open. I don’t know what is wrong with me. Help me get out of my head and to be present with [him].
I don’t even know who to talk about this with because everyone loves him so much. And I feel like it’s just me being stupid. But was I supposed to feel butterflies? Am I supposed to get tingles?
I crack under the weight of knowing I’m never going to be able to make someone happy. I don’t know, why did this same thing happen with [my first boyfriend]? I feel like I see people falling in love with me, and I’m just observing. I’m looking in from the outside and I don’t feel like an active participant but as an observer of my life and I don’t know how to change that. Can you want to fall in love with someone but just not be able to- and where does the fault lie? Is it me? Or is it just “not right?” And if it’s not right, then what will be? If [this boyfriend] isn’t right for me, then who will be? I don’t know, I don’t know. I love [him], I love so much about him. But am I in love with him? No. Do I know how to be in love with someone? No fucking clue. But I feel like it’s not supposed to be hard.
Lord, give my mind peace. My peace and hope and life is in you alone. Go with me. Give me guidance and assurance and peace. Calm my anxious spirit. I want you Lord, more than anything else. I want your plans for me not my own. So please, give me your plans. Help me trust and follow you. Help me not be afraid to open my heart to someone else but also let me not force something just because it fits my theoretical plans for my life. I dunno. Help me see [him] as a leader, as someone I can relax into.
This was something I had talked about in therapy a lot over the years, before starting to date again after an abusive relationship and after I started dating my last boyfriend. I had this overwhelming sense that I was supposed to be feeling something in a relationship that I wasn’t feeling. I also was very fixated on feeling that I needed to fulfill my “role” correctly and was worried I was not doing that.
I was trapped in a heteronormative box, trying to fit into my prescribed gender role, and I had no idea it was slowly suffocating me until I finally got out of it and started breathing deeply again.
I started making a list to gather all the reasons I thought I might be gay. I titled the note “I’m not broken, I’m gay?”
I gathered a lot of things there. How physical touch is my main love language, but casual touch from a boyfriend often made me feel overwhelmed or anxious. How I always wanted to be in love, but when boyfriends told me they loved me, it made me feel more anxious. How trying to decide if a guy was attractive or if I wanted to match with him on a dating app was confusing and exhausting.
I had spent so many years assuming that I must like guys because that’s the “right” thing, but also feeling that something was broken with me that made me not be able to fall in love or fully relax in a relationship. I remember saying in my last relationship: “I don’t think my brain knows how to fall in love. I have to wait for the alarm bells to stop going off and then realize, oh, I think I might be happy. I have to relax into love.”
Reading my prayer journal back three years later, I was really struck by the last paragraph I shared.
Lord, give my mind peace. My peace and hope and life is in you alone. Go with me. Give me guidance and assurance and peace. Calm my anxious spirit. I want you Lord, more than anything else. I want your plans for me not my own. So please, give me your plans. Help me trust and follow you. Help me not be afraid to open my heart.
I want to let you know overwhelmingly that this prayer has 100% been answered by this discovery, by everything I am sharing in this post. If there is one takeaway I want you to have from reading this, it is that God led me into a fuller understanding of myself and welcomed me into peace and joy I had not known before.
Because my faith is very important to me, and obeying and honoring God is very important to me, the first thing I did when all of this hit me was actually open up some books and listen to some people talk about affirming theology. I had been thinking about doing this for years but kept putting it off. I said that it was because it didn’t affect me, so I didn’t need to decide what my personal convictions were. I realized, though, that I was avoiding asking the question because asking the question meant that I would have to honestly confront the fact that I found women attractive in a way that I didn’t find men attractive.
For a while, a tension had been building in my faith that I didn’t quite know how to reconcile or address. I knew that my queer friends and trans friends were beautifully and wonderfully made and wanted to delight in that, but I felt that there wasn’t room to love them just as I knew God made them in the churches I attended. A friend dragged me to an affirming church in the summer of 2018, and I was struck by how wonderful it felt to attend. To worship next to very out and proud queer people. It challenged my ideas of what worship and Christian community could look like. Even before I realized I was gay, I felt at home and filled with the Spirit in a way I hadn’t in a long time.
Here’s the thing.
When you get to know and love people who don’t fit into the heteronormative gender roles that our society and our culture has tightly built around us…
When you get to know people who are queer or trans…
When you are lucky enough to get to share in that journey with them as they come out, transition, and start living more fully into who they are…
You see just that. They are more fully themselves as they step into their truth.
When you see someone come to life as they get to present as the gender they identify with or as they date who they are attracted to and fall in love, you see their beauty and their joy.
Fundamental to my faith is that God made us each a unique and beautiful reflection of Themself, and that God delights in us. God made us and said we are beautiful. God, who is three in one persons, who is outside of gender, perfectly encapsulates everything we attribute to masculinity and femininity. God made each of us differently; God knows each of us intimately; and God delights in who They made us to be. And God is deeply heartbroken when Their creation is out of order — when we hurt one another and when we hate, when we live in a way that is not true to who we were made to be.
Scripture is often used as a tool to hate, judge, and condemn the queer community. Scripture is more than how it has been used to oppress and hate, though. Scripture is full and life-giving. Scripture is alive and comes alive as we dive deeper into it. There are so many “clobber” verses that came alive in beautiful ways when I allowed myself to dive into them. Scripture doesn’t ever talk about consensual, monogamous same-sex relationships. It does talk a lot about how sex and relationships should not be used to coerce or exert power over someone else, to demean or control someone else. People love to point to Paul’s words in Romans 1, but I was struck by his idea of what is natural and what is unnatural. I was struck by how unnatural it felt to try to date and love a man and how natural it felt to think about dating a woman.
I was raised to know that you use scripture to interpret scripture — that is, scripture is not understood in a vacuum, or in pulling out one word or sentence or paragraph, but that it is to be understood together. I was taught to think about who wrote this book, to what audience, in what type of culture and environment, what is the heart of this passage, and how does what this passage says match with what other passages say. I was raised to know that no question is too big for God, and therefore I can bring any question before God safely and should never be afraid of what answers it may bring. I have learned to start always with the central, fundamental truths of who God is and ripple out from there to the nitty gritty specifics.
I was raised Presbyterian, in the South, surrounded by a lot of Southern Baptists over the years, so there are a lot of nitty gritty specifics in the church culture I was raised in. We like to argue about if it’s okay to dip communion bread into communion wine or if they need to be partaken separately, and what sort of art is allowed to be in the church bulletin. We have strong opinions about the right way to baptize, and I have been through several discussions about the merit of dunking vs. sprinkling and infant vs. believers baptism. The order of the church service is a big deal, and there are a lot of opinions about what kind of music is the best kind of worship music. We also like to argue about how much of a voice women can have in the leadership of the church. And of course, we like to argue about if you are allowed to say you are gay, and, if you do admit to being gay, whether you’re allowed to be in the church at all.
In college, I learned about primary, secondary, and tertiary beliefs. Primary beliefs are the central tenets that are fundamental to if you are a Christian at all: God created the world, the world is broken from sin, and creation is out of order because of that. Jesus was both God and Human and he lived and died to restore us and all of creation into union and harmony with God. Secondary beliefs make up big divides like Catholic vs Protestant, as well as divides within those branches that mean you cannot worship in the same church together, like if women can preach or are infants allowed to be baptized. Tertiary beliefs are ones that should not mean we cannot worship in the same church community (but many, especially in American church culture, act like they should). This includes things like what instruments play on Sunday or if you prefer grape juice or wine with your communion.
I’ve always found it most centering when I’m dealing with a big question about God to go back to the center truths and work back out. And this is what I did as I started wrestling with these questions of “Am I gay?” and “If I’m gay, what does that mean about how God created me and how God wants me to live?”
I’ve already mentioned that one central truth is that I know God made me uniquely to be me and God delights in me. I also know that creation is broken and that humans are broken. I know that sometimes humans do things that are evil and wicked, and these things hurt nature or hurt other humans, and it causes pain, shame, despair, and hate to thrive. I also know that suffering sometimes exists outside of intentional human hatred and evil, because creation is still out of order. I know that God enters into our suffering so that our suffering is not the end of the story. I know that God is always with me. I know that my chief calling is to glorify God and to love Their people and Their creation. I know that when we are rooted in the life-giving love of God, good fruit is created that brings life and joy and peace and restoration into the world. I know when we are rooted outside of God, there is emptiness, hatred, and despair.
As I thought about these truths and the truth I knew from watching queer friends find life and joy when they lived into their truth, along with how I felt as I started to have openness to the idea that I find women attractive, it became overwhelmingly clear to me that the God I know to be true cannot be connected to the hateful and harmful teachings and practices done by the church to stamp out and diminish the light and truth of queer people’s identities.
A life-giving God is fundamentally incompatible with life-taking teachings that silence and shame queer people. The stark reality of the harm conversion therapy causes is fundamentally incompatible with the God I know. The suicide, self-harm, depression, and substance abuse rates in queer and trans communities due to the shame, stigma, and hate they face in the world is incompatible with the God I know.
One of the oldest names for God is Yahweh. This has been said to be representative of breathing in and out. God is breath; God is life. Finding life in God is finding the centering stillness, the deep breath of fresh, clear air, often in the midst of chaos, confusion, and pain.
We all have different ways we can feel the Spirit tugging on our hearts when we still our minds. There is truth to be found in our stillness when we allow God’s Spirit to guide us. For me, that tug of truth is always connected to breath. What feels trapped and suffocating, and what feels open and like a deep, refreshing breath.
Realizing that I like women was a deep breath of fresh air. It was a breath of promise, hope, excitement, wonder, and joy. It was stepping into a more complete version of myself, one that didn’t feel boxed into needing to find a partner for whom I could successfully mold myself into the perfect, good, Christian wife. Instead, I felt like I could fully live into the strengths and gifts God had given me.
Realizing I like women cannot be separated from my walk with God because it happened during my walk with God, and God was there saying, “Enter into this truth, and let me show you how much I love you and how beautiful you are, and what good things I have still to come for you.” God saw me say, “I think I might be broken,” and responded with: “My beloved child, you are just as I made you, and that is beautiful.”
As I moved through my gay panic last summer and into slow acceptance and discovery of my full sexual identity in the following months, I was overwhelmingly struck with peace and joy. I remember thinking that surely I should feel more anxious than I did given how drastically this truth could affect my relationships with a large number of family and friends. And I did have some anxiety and fear as I thought about sharing this newly discovered part of myself more widely. But I didn’t feel any fear or anxiety about the fact that I like women. I felt lightness, joy, peace, and hope.
I never felt like I wasn’t myself before, but I feel more myself now. I feel that so much in my life makes sense now that didn’t before.
Old memories and experiences all fall into place at different times when you realize you’re gay.
One of the first things I realized was that when my last boyfriend broke up with me, he said a lot of things that were confusing to me at the time, but the heart of what he was saying was: “I can tell that you don’t love me the same way that I love you, and I can’t move forward like this.” He didn’t have the words to say or reason to know that the issue was I wasn’t in love with him because I wasn’t attracted to him, but I now see clearly that was the problem in our relationship.
I broke up with my first boyfriend for the same reason, and I told him as well as I could at the time that I didn’t feel like I was in love with him the way he was with me and I didn’t think it was fair to him to keep dating. At the time, I assumed it was because our timing was wrong. Now I see more clearly that it was much more than that.
Dating was hard because I was never attracted to the guys. I was trying to figure out on a first date if this was a guy I could see myself marrying and having kids with, because if he wasn’t, I didn’t want to waste my time getting to know him and opening up to him. Dating was never about getting to know someone and enjoying the process. It was a means to an end, and my clear vision was “I want a family, and therefore I need a husband.”
Other things started making more sense, too, as I looked back over them.
One of the most transformative periods of my life was when I had a huge “friend breakup” in 7th grade and lost my entire friend group. I had a lot of personal growth in this time. I consider it as one of the first times I really felt drawn into and carried by God through uncertainty, loneliness, and confusion, and therefore a centering point to reflect back on when I enter into new periods of uncertainty and loneliness.
Even though I’ve found peace with that time in my life, I still could never understand why the fight happened in the first place. It was a weird series of events that, looking back, essentially boiled down to my friends trying to set me up on a date with a guy I had said I liked for years and me resisting their attempts to get us to go on a date so much so that I imploded my entire life.
I started realizing maybe it wasn’t normal to pick a crush so you would always have an answer, and never change it for seven years even though you clearly knew you would never actually want to date the guy you said you had a crush on. He was just your closest guy-friend.
I started realizing that, growing up, all the girls I was very intimidated by but also wanted to be near, the girls I wanted to know and wanted to like me but who I also felt like I couldn’t talk to because they were too cool and pretty and awesome…those were crushes.
I started realizing that all the female fictional characters I felt protective of and couldn’t talk about without saying that I loved them and would do anything for them…were crushes.
I started being honest about the fact that when I thought about the future, a husband felt like an afterthought, but thinking about raising kids with one of my best girlfriends and building a home and a family together felt blissful.
I stopped trying to forget or write off that my first kiss (around age 9) was with the little girl who lived down the street from me, in the closet under the stairs, because we both wondered what it would feel like.
I started wondering how normal it was to hang onto your friend’s clothes that she left at your place and not give them back because you loved that they smelled like her.
I thought about how most of my male crushes centered around their long curly hair or their soft and gentle eyes, and on nothing else about them at all.
I wondered if maybe the reason I couldn’t tell you the individual names of any of the members of NSync or Backstreet Boys isn’t because I’m just bad with names and faces.
I realized there were a lot of actresses I would watch anything they were in because I loved them so much, but there were no actors I would do the same for.
I started using dating apps set with a preference for women, and I felt peace, joy, and rightness. It felt easy and natural and fun in a way that trying to scroll through profiles of men never felt. I felt genuinely excited to get to know the women I went on dates with and was fine with it being one date or a few, or more, because I was just getting to know someone. I didn’t have to know if it was going anywhere more serious right away. I felt warm and giddy looking over some profiles. I started letting myself be honest when I saw a picture of a woman that made me stop and go “Whoa” in a way I never or rarely did with men.
I went on dates. My first date, I came back literally glowing. My cheeks hurt from smiling so much the entire time. I had never felt light and happy after a first date ever in my life. I felt more free and more present while dating than I ever had before. I was struck by how amazing it was to not be consumed with wondering if I was filling my role correctly or if I was letting the man be a leader and me be the responder and supporter. I was able to stop worrying and just be. Just be me.
I enjoyed asking women out, flirting with them, sending a like on a profile and hoping they would like me back. I felt completely different to how I’d ever felt before when dating guys. I had good dates, awkward dates, long dates, short dates. I finally felt like I understood what dating is supposed to feel like. I told my friends that I felt my heart could burst out of my chest with possibility.
I started getting more involved with my new church. I joined small groups and got to know even more people who were queer and Christian. I started living out my social work paper that looked at the intersection of queer and Christian identities and the benefits when people can integrate those two identities. I got to see lots of families of different types worshiping together. I got to hear queer women preach the gospel.
Earlier this year, I joined a coming out support group through The Christian Closet and got to meet several women who were right where I was in my journey. I started getting ready to come out to my parents and extended family. I made a list of hard people to come out to and worked through it.
Several months ago, I matched with a pretty awesome woman on Hinge. We started talking…a lot. And then Facetiming…a lot. Almost four months ago, we agreed we wanted to make things official, and I have been very happily in a relationship since then.
I had all these ideas that dating a woman would feel different, but I’m still continually surprised by how different it is. The biggest difference is how present and calm I feel. I feel more fully relaxed and comfortable and myself than I’ve ever felt in a relationship. When big moments happen in our relationship, I don’t feel like I’m observing from the outside; I feel like an active participant.
I don’t feel like I’m needing to hold some part of myself back so that she can be the person she needs to be. We’re both two capable and autonomous mid-30-year-olds who very much know who we are and what we want out of life. And it just so happens that we want a lot of the same things, and doing things together is a lot better than doing things alone.
I feel more equally yoked in this partnership than I’ve ever felt before. When dating men, I remember that I always was trying to envision the man they were called to be, who they could be. I loved the potential I saw in them, the imagined ideas of what a future could look like. And I felt an intense responsibility to somehow be the supportive guide to escort them into their full realization of their potential. My prayer journal was filled over and over again with “Let me see him how you see him, Lord.” I felt like I couldn’t be what they needed without changing and limiting myself, and I never felt they were able to be what I needed.
But with Megan, I love who she is right now. I feel like I have a partner I can turn to for support and guidance and rest, and I’m excited to think about the future life we might have together and the future family we may build together.
I can relax with her in a way I haven’t ever before. When she holds me, I feel completely at peace.
I think about all the things that I was taught make up a Godly relationship. The importance of mutual love and respect, of putting someone else’s needs not before your own, but considering them as an extension of yourself because when you make a new family together, that is what they are. Their needs are your needs, and your needs are theirs, learning to mutually serve and honor one another.
I am protective of Megan’s past traumas, and she is protective of mine. We are both still early in our walks with merging a newly acknowledged attraction to women with the faith we grew up with. We both just finished Master’s programs in 2019 and are starting out careers that we are passionate about, that are focused on helping others and meeting their needs. She’s a social worker; I’m a nurse. It’s a great pairing, what’s not to love?
The phrases “it will all happen at the right time” and “the key is the timing” finally make sense to me. If Megan’s path had crossed mine at any point before now, we wouldn’t have been the person the other person needed. Neither of us would have been ready for this relationship or able to meet the other person on equal footing the way we can now.
When we think about what merging a home and starting a family might look like, there is no “supposed to” in what responsibilities and accommodations each of us might take on. There’s just what makes sense for the two of us at whatever point we are at. Neither of us has to fit into a role or play a part that we never felt we could mold ourselves into. We get to both be fully ourselves while loving and supporting the other.
I still don’t know a lot of what’s to come in my future. I don’t know how a lot of people are going to respond to this post. I don’t know how people’s opinions or acceptance may change over the coming months or years. But I know that no matter what is to come, I am more myself than I have ever been, and God is with me. I hope you will be, too.
— — —
Resources to start looking at affirming theology:
- The Reformation Project
- Scripture, Ethics, and the Possibility of Same Sex Relationships by Karen Keen
- Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debates on Same-Sex Relationships. by James Brownson
- Jesus I have Loved, but Paul? A Narrative Approach to the Problem of Pauline Christianity by Daniel Kirk,
- How the Bible Works by Peter Enns
- Peter Enns’s podcast “The Bible for Normal People” including this interview with Matthew Vines
- This Matthew Vines’ youtube video
- This The Liturgists podcast episode
