Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (3 page)

In conversations with roommates, whenever the topic of dating came up (as it did with unsurprising regularity), I would chime in with names of girls I pretended to find myself romantically attracted to. My sophomore year, I took a girl out to a concert—my first date ever—and it felt awkward and strained. I was relieved when I dropped her off at her dorm.

But the following year, I met a girl whom I was shocked to find myself genuinely interested in. I quickly got past a false first impression that she was distant and aloof, and I started looking for natural, unforced ways to hang out with her—casual phone chats, long lunches together in our college dining commons, late-night talks after meetings with the discipleship team we were both members of. After each conversation, I found myself wondering if maybe this would be the remedy I had been looking for, the solution to the problem of my homosexuality. I started praying earnestly and frequently that God would bring us together, that something beautiful and lasting would work out between us. When she finally told me she was interested in another guy, I went back to my apartment and cried harder than I had in years.

During the same year, my friend Jenna, one of the most free-spirited and life-giving people I knew at the time, started battling depression. I didn’t find out about her struggle until months after she had found help and was recovering well. Over lunch one day, Jenna described that dark time and told me something that has remained with me ever since: “I just wanted to be whole again, Wes, and I thought that by pretending it wasn’t there, the depression would just go away. But ignoring is not the path to redeeming. If I wanted this depression to be redeemed, I had to face it head-on.” I tried to swallow the lump in my throat, realizing those words were for me.
Ignoring is not the path to redeeming.

I knew that the time had come to seek help. My attempts to stuff my sexuality away somewhere, while at the same time paradoxically trying to “fix” it through some spark-filled, magical romance with a girl, were not working. But who should I talk to? I quickly ruled out my family. Though loving and sensitive,
they were still very conservative. What would they think if their near-perfect firstborn admitted to being gay, even if he did make it clear he was abstinent? I also ruled out my roommates; it would be too confusing and difficult to try to explain away all the masks I had worn and tell them that, no, I really wasn’t quite attracted to all those girls I talked about in the way that they thought I was.

I finally decided to talk to my philosophy professor, who seemed to be the wisest person I knew at the time. He not only could talk intelligently about the Enlightenment and postmodernism, but he knew about
life,
about the angst and existential struggles of college students like me, “about what it is to be human and hungry in a fallen world full of wonders,” to use Barbara Brown Taylor’s haunting phrase.
¹
He seemed to have a genuine, growing trust in God, moving naturally and effortlessly in class from discussing Locke and Hume to talking about his love for Scripture and his struggles to believe in God’s sovereignty and goodness in the midst of his own partial paralysis. He was constantly giving us interesting advice that made us roll our eyes in the moment and turn it over and over in our minds long afterward as we lay in our dorm rooms in the dark.

I remember one class discussion in particular when he told us with disarming openness about an experience he had had years earlier. “I once faced a temptation that was so persistent and so overwhelming that I literally believed my whole world would go dark if I refused to give in to it,” he said. “All I could do was scream to the Holy Spirit to keep me from it.” I knew at that point that, at the very least, this professor would understand my struggle better than anyone else I could think of, and with a nervously beating heart, I pounded out a vague email asking if
maybe, at some point, possibly—that is, only if he had the time, of course—could he and I meet to talk about something really important to me? After several failed attempts at getting together, we finally settled on a time to meet in his office.

When the afternoon arrived, my heart was beating so hard it felt like it might explode out of my chest. More than once, I considered bringing up some other topic for discussion once I got there and pretending that it had been the reason for my visit all along. The walk from my apartment to main campus west along College Avenue took about ten minutes, and I remember a strange feeling of inevitability, as if there was no turning back, as I squinted against the bitter Chicago wind. Someone—the first person in the world—was finally going to know my biggest secret. I
wanted
to do this, and yet I wasn’t ready. Maybe I could hold off a year or two more and my homosexuality would mysteriously disappear and no one would ever have to know?

I got to the professor’s office on the fourth floor of Blanchard Hall, and as we made small talk, my words started to slur, as if I had had a piece of ice in my mouth for too long that had numbed my tongue. “Well,” I eventually began, swallowing and choking, “there’s something I want to tell you. I think I’ve been
needing
to tell someone about this, and I don’t know who else to talk to—”

There were no fireworks, no prophetic, life-altering message, no tears on my part, no liberating sense of floating on air for having bared my soul. After I finished, the professor thanked me for telling him. “I want you to know that I will begin praying for you regularly, Wes,” he said. We went on to talk about the possible causes of my homosexuality (he wondered if genes played some role), and whether—and in what form—I should expect
“healing.” I’m not sure what exactly I was hoping the outcome of our talk would be, but when I left the meeting, I felt a mingled sense of relief—
I’m not alone in knowing this about myself anymore!
—and dread—
The road ahead is too long and hard!
There were no easy solutions, no quick fixes, and oceans of confusion and struggle I would have to navigate.

A few weeks later, the professor wrote to tell me about a psychologist friend of his who had counseled many homosexual persons and researched and written extensively on homosexuality from an explicitly Christian point of view. Would I be interested in meeting with him? Yes, I said, I would like to do that. The professor called and set up the appointment for me. When I got to the psychologist’s office on Wheaton’s campus, his secretary welcomed me warmly. Slightly paranoid, I wondered if she knew why I had come. Did her eyes betray any awareness of my “situation”? Sitting down opposite her desk while I waited for him to finish a phone conversation, I looked through the narrow window in the door and watched students wearing backpacks jostle past, laughing and talking in between classes. I thought,
I sure hope no one who knows me looks in and sees me here. What excuse will I give for why I’m in
this
office?

In our meeting, my professor’s friend instantly put me at ease. His whole demeanor exuded kindness, grace, and dignity. I realized quickly that the professor had not told him why I wanted to meet with him; he had said only that I was asking some earnest, heart-searching questions about my life and that he thought the psychologist could help. As I began to tell some of my story, the psychologist’s brow creased in concern; I felt listened to and cared
for. “Having heard all this,” I concluded, “do you think there’s any possibility for change? What should my next step in this journey be?”

We talked about many things that afternoon. It wasn’t exactly a counseling session—“If that were the case, I would be listening more and speaking a lot less,” he said with a warm smile. But I came away with fresh perspectives and new insights. “If I could leave you with an encouragement, it would be this,” he said toward the end of our time together:
“Be spiritually adventuresome.”
I have thought about this on many occasions since that meeting—thought about it more often than acted on it probably, but it has remained with me as a ringing challenge. “Don’t be afraid to pursue multiple avenues for healing,” he said. “God has used everything from charismatic deliverance ministries to support groups to professional therapists to contemplative spiritual directors to guide homosexual Christians toward wholeness. Maybe one or more of these avenues is for you. If God directs you to one, step out in faith. Don’t let your background or commitment to your own tradition”—I thought of my fundamentalist upbringing and wondered if his words were more relevant than he guessed—“make you fearful of joining in the adventure the Holy Spirit prepares for you.”

After that meeting, my eyes were peeled. What avenues of healing did God want to take me down?

This is perhaps the hardest truth of any to grasp. Do we wake up every morning amazed that we are loved by God?

David Ford,
The Shape of Living

Near the start of my senior year, in August, I became friends with a girl named Tara. She had already graduated from Wheaton and moved across the country, so most of our interaction was via email. By October, we were writing long letters to each other, exploring random, rambling trails of thought, swapping stories from childhood and adolescence, and commiserating on the same existential quandaries. Looking back, it was pretty heady stuff for a college senior.

Early on in our correspondence, I wondered what was happening. I didn’t
like
Tara—in
that
sense that I had faked before with other girls. I wasn’t romantically attracted to her, or at least I didn’t think so. Could I be? Is there such a thing for a gay man as romantic attraction to a woman? I didn’t know. As I sat in my tiny, second-story bedroom, I clicked the Send button in Microsoft Outlook every night and wondered.

Tara and I tried to share with each other who we were. We talked about our families, our upbringings; we talked about our hopes for the next few years of our lives, our desires for what we wanted to be and to do. In one of her very first letters, Tara told me about her work one summer in San Francisco for a street ministry to male prostitutes. The ministry owned a couple of buildings on a block in the heart of the city, and she worked in the one that served as a kind of shelter for guys coming in off the street who needed a hot meal and people to talk to. “I’m not sure why,” Tara said in reflecting on her time at the street ministry, “but God has given me a concern for gay people. Homosexuality is not something I or anyone in my family has struggled with, but God has just put on my heart the people who do struggle with it.” When I initially read those words, I was confused. Was God
doing something here in my friendship with Tara that was bigger than I had anticipated? Could this be some sort of “sign”?

I decided, perhaps wrongly, not to talk to Tara about my homosexuality. And unsurprisingly, the romance I’d hoped for didn’t spring up between us. But I think of my friendship with Tara as a milestone on my journey. Painfully, threateningly (or so it felt at the time), Tara put her finger on a resistance to God’s love I didn’t know I was harboring. (I have since learned that many gay Christians wrestle with feelings of isolation, shame, and guilt that lead them to question God’s love for them or simply feel cold and calloused to it.) Through Tara’s emails, I came to see that my identity was rooted more in “having all my ducks in a row” and less in a personal sense of
belonging,
of being included in “the Beloved,” as Paul puts it in Ephesians 1:6, of being healed and made whole through God’s cherishing care.

Once Tara described an experience she had had while studying in England for a semester. She had been striving to understand and be what she thought she
should
understand and be. Finally one night, in a service at Coventry Cathedral, she relaxed and submitted to God’s wound-mending embrace. She felt that God loved her just as she was. I read Tara’s description of that night at Coventry several times, and I realized, with a cold, smarting sense of mingled sadness and helplessness, that I knew very little, firsthand, of what she was describing. My first thought as I got out of bed every morning was not,
I am the beloved of God.
I had not mastered the discipline, as N. T. Wright calls it, of looking to the cross of Christ and seeing evidence there that I am loved extravagantly and inexorably by the self-giving triune God.

Tara’s emails proved to be crucial for me. It has taken years for me to learn, bit by bit, this spiritual practice of meditating on the love of God and to understand that it is central to my struggle with homosexuality. I mark my correspondence with Tara as the time when I consciously began the daily effort to view myself as God’s beloved, redeemed by the self-gift of Christ.

But I also look back on my short-lived attraction to Tara (I had never been sexually aroused by her) as the time that showed me, once and for all, I could not count on a relationship with a woman to magically reverse my sexual orientation. Healing, if it ever came on this side of God’s future, would have to take a different form.

By then it was clear to me that I needed something more in this struggle to know how to live well as a Christian with homosexual desires. No one I lived with or talked to on a daily basis knew about my struggle, and it was no secret to me that this wasn’t ideal. So I decided to approach one of my pastors and ask him if he would be willing to meet with me on a weekly basis, “for prayer and accountability,” even though I still wasn’t sure what it would be realistic to hope for.

Denny was already an acquaintance when, one Sunday before the worship service started, he spotted me sliding into a pew near the front of the sanctuary, caught my eye, and, smiling, wandered over to give me a firm handshake and see how I had been doing. We chatted for a bit as the organist started pumping out the prelude, and then, screwing up my courage, I asked Denny if he and I could talk one-on-one sometime soon, maybe over lunch or a cup of coffee.

When the time arrived, I showed up at his office at the church and repeated what was starting to feel like a familiar routine. I told him a lot of what I had said to my philosophy professor and the Wheaton psychologist and then said, “Even though I’m not alone in this anymore, even though I finally told someone about this, I feel like I need someone to talk to on a regular basis, someone who can help me sort things out, someone I can pray with.”