A telling letter

I recently received an e-mail from a member of TfT who found a letter on the Internet from a disillusioned Christian, who said........

"Last year I went through a 40-week intensive course on overcoming homosexuality through a local charismatic church. You couldn't have found anyone more intent on change than me. I loved God more than anything on earth, and if my homosexuality displeased Him then it was worth it for me to seek change. After all I had been a leader in the church and even an overseas missionary. If anyone was going to do it, it was a super spiritual hero like me.

The support group during the 40 weeks was wonderful, deep, intimate, and very cathartic. However, when the course ended, I was not an inch closer to a heterosexual orientation than I had been when I began the journey.

A few months later I found myself standing in my bedroom with a bottle of pills in one hand and the telephone in the other. I was making a life and death decision to kill myself because my homosexuality displeased God and yet there was nothing I felt I could do to avert my feelings. I figured in God's eyes it was better to take my life than to put God through the agony of watching me walk into the gay lifestyle, the only remaining choice I felt I had other than death.

Fortunately the friend on the phone helped me to choose life and I have been engaged in the very slow and uncomfortable coming out process. I have been dating men and I have never felt so wonderful about myself. My closest Christian friends are actually happy for me because they were so concerned about my deep depressions, which have all but vanished now that I have embraced my true feelings. And yet I still cannot reconcile my sexuality with my faith and I feel like I am lost and cast outside of God's Kingdom.

I feel that given my choices the only reasonable alternative was to be a gay man rather than a dead man."

The TfT member himself wrote......

"I have been in contact with TfT since 1993, and over the last three years with Courage. It has been so good to share with members, make new friends, have great fellowship and draw so much from conferences, books, testimonies etc. They have been 'safe havens' to 'be myself', something you cannot always have on your own doorstep because society and the church on the whole still rejects gay people. However at the end of the day, I too feel no closer to heterosexual orientation than when I first contacted you. I still cannot reconcile my faith with my sexuality and often feel like giving up too. There have been times in recent months that I have felt so low and on the point of desperation. I have not been in the 'gay lifestyle' or had sexual relations with a man, but my gay feelings have been so intense recently, and if it was the time, place and person - who knows... I do know that if I did fall in this way, I would find it so hard to live with myself, because of my sensitive, honest nature, and would become another statistic.......

I'm not sure if I am alone in feeling this way - somehow I guess there are lots feeling like this. I know there are no quick answers, solutions etc. so all I can ask is that you pray for me and for others in my situation."

Both letters express a tragic, but not uncommon situation. Sadly, some Christians will view the first as simply an act of disobedience and a following of 'fleshly desires'. Whilst there is an element of truth in this, the letter also shows the desperate pain and frustration of the author. God has not created us to hate ourselves. The sadness and frustration I felt on reading both stories was in wondering if they would have been very different if a more positive Christian attitude to homosexuality had been encouraged. I don't mean through embracing a more liberal theology, but in seeing their homosexuality as less of a handicap and liability and more a part of their value, witness and ministry.