Like me

I’ve been a Christian for more than 40 years and a Southern Baptist. I met David and Goliath in VBS, was the middle-schooler who bounded off the church bus and came home from the revival with a new life, the teenager in Training Union quizzing the teacher over parfaits at the Dairy Queen, the emerging young man finding his voice on youth choir trips, the determined BSU summer missionary to Bangladesh. As an adult, I was the Sunday School teacher, chairman of the deacons and elder, all in Southern Baptist churches in Oklahoma.

I am a husband and a father of five children who are: a business owner, a graduate student, an Army Ranger, a police officer, a college student. I have four daughters-in-law and six grandchildren.

And yet, I struggle with unwanted same-sex attraction, have engaged in homosexual behavior in the past and must be on constant guard against the temptation. I have wanted to die, but more often, I just wanted to live, without this pull towards sin. I am your brother in Christ.

Hidden as I was, I knew others in church battled wrongful desires for satisfaction and fulfillment through homosexual relationships, pornography or other forms of sexual brokenness. Single and married, with or without children, they maintained the secret, living in fear, praying for a way out. We struggled in isolation, praying no one would ever find out and that we would overcome in private. I’m sure they feared as much as I did the prospect of being condemned, ridiculed and ostracized.

I fed the brokenness of the past. It bled into the present and projected into the future. Still, God knew me in my destructiveness and deception, just as He knew me when I was productive in service to Him.