Monthly Archives: January 2015

The Church I long for

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A reflection by Lindsey

It is now the Wednesday after the Gay Christian Network Conference. I love this weekend when I gather with people so obviously different from me and so eerily similar to me at exactly the same time. Call it what you will, but I can’t help experiencing it as a feast of humanity that warrants its own octave of reflection.

Mostly I reflect because I’m angry and frustrated almost immediately after I get home. It doesn’t take long before leaving the protective bubble of GCN Conference before I get that cold cup of water to my face that puts me back squarely in reality. It doesn’t take long to remember that GCN Conference is a special place, simply because the GCN community has learned to say, “I’m so glad you’re with us,” to every single person who decides to come join us. I get frustrated and angry that few local congregations know how to extend that welcome.

Leaving conference is always hard for me because I catch a vision for what local churches could be… and what I think local churches should be. Don’t hear me wrong: the GCN conference community could be a complete farce; people could be on their best behavior for a weekend before returning home to say the things they wish they really could have said. I’ve come to believe otherwise though since I attended my first conference in 2008. The connections I’ve made through GCN have been shockingly supportive, loving, and amazing during some of my most trying times. GCN has been there for me as God has guided me along arguably one of the most counterintuitive spiritual journeys known to humankind. I wish that more local congregations encouraged people to be children of the Church where people could ask really hard questions within a community of faith. I wish churches were the kind of places where people could wonder aloud, learn how their Christian tradition approaches theological inquiry, and grow in wisdom and in strength. I mostly wish that more churches embodied Jeff Chu’s hopes and dreams for Christian community:

The table I long for—the church I hope for—is a place where we let others see where the spirit meets the bone and help heal the wounds. The table I long for—the church I hope for—has the grace of the Gospel as its magnificent centerpiece. The table I long for—the church I hope for—is where we care more about our companions than about winning our arguments with them, where we set aside the condescension that accompanies our notion that we need to bring them our truth. The table I long for—the church I hope for—has each of you sitting around it, struggling to hold the knowledge that you, vulnerable you and courageous you, are beloved by God, not just welcome but desperately, fiercely wanted.

It’s a bit odd for me to be writing this post because I belong to a closed-communion Christian tradition that I love incredibly. I strive every day to live into the fullness of what my Christian tradition teaches, however short I fall. Within my Christian tradition, I was able to find the space necessary to discern my own vocation. It’s certainly never been easy, but I’m so appreciative of the ways this tradition helps me look at God, Christ, myself, other people, and the world at large. And it’s hard for me to know that many people in my own tradition wouldn’t touch a space like GCN Conference with a 10-foot pole. Sometimes, I think that if my fellow parishioners spoke about GCN, their words would be dripping with contempt. That makes me sad because I wonder if people unintentionally close doors to others genuinely seeking Christ because they’re just different enough where it’s impossible for them to blend in with the woodwork.

Chu’s vision of the conversation table is marvelous, compelling, and inspiring in so many ways. But this vision only partially captures Christ’s radical welcome to the table. Consider what we read in Luke’s gospel:

When one of those who reclined at table with him heard these things, he said to him, “Blessed is everyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!” But he said to him, “A man once gave a great banquet and invited many. And at the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’ But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. Please have me excused.’ And another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to examine them. Please have me excused.’ And another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’ So the servant came and reported these things to his master. Then the master of the house became angry and said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame.’ And the servant said, ‘Sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’ And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet.’”

This is one of those parables where I catch a glimpse of the radical welcome of Christ. I see Christ going out to the ends of the earth to bring every type of person who will permit themselves to be invited. I’m struck that Christ’s welcome goes far beyond the sea of humanity I see on any given Sunday, including the Sunday I spend attending the GCN Conference. I know that this parable also appears in Matthew’s gospel specifically as a wedding banquet, and I’m grateful for the way my Christian tradition has called my attention to the importance of a wedding garment. Nonetheless, the table I long for and the church I hope for is filled to the brim with the poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame, the near, and the far off. The table I long for and the Church I hope for constantly bursts at the seams because of the people already inside while simultaneously expands itself to add more seats at the banquet. The table I long for and the Church I hope for is full of people who consider themselves the luckiest people alive to be present at such a feast and so refrain from judging anyone else present.

And I can name that vision and ache because I can’t think of a single venue where we’ve managed to be this kind of community. I wonder if this kind of community can only exist at the end of time when Christ has come to restore all things. So many communities seem preoccupied with what people are wearing. In Matthew’s record, the king realized a man wasn’t wearing a wedding garment. The king exercised the judgment. Making decisions in the here and now about who can participate fully in the sacramental life is a fearsome task, and I pray daily for all those entrusted with this power to use it for spiritual good. I don’t want that job for an instant.

I find myself wondering how to live into how Christ has extravagantly welcomed me. I wonder if it’s right to view myself as still walking towards the feast, coming into the door, or sitting at the table. Perhaps I’m doing multiple things at once. I can’t help but wonder if it’s gratitude that compels banquet guests to throw on their wedding garments with glee. I can’t help but wonder if it’s gratitude that compels guests to squeeze just that much tighter to create room for more people. I can’t help but wonder if it’s gratitude that brings out the very best of human behavior.

How can we be a grateful and welcoming community? What needs to happen such that no surface-level qualification keeps people out of our local churches? How can we put on Christ who is Light, Love, and Truth? What can we do so that the Holy Spirit has room to guide, comfort, encourage, and convict us all as necessary? How do we create that much more room for others to join in the feast?

And so I continue to wonder…

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

The Love Mandate

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A reflection by Sarah

Today is the Tuesday after GCN Conference 2015. After a weekend of joyous reunions with friends I haven’t seen since last year, beginnings of new friendships, and an overwhelming sense of safety and comfort despite the fact that Wesboro Baptist showed up, I’m back home. The new semester began this week, and I met my new students today. The first to introduce herself to me was a transgender student who arrived early to explain why the name on my roster would not match the name she would like to be called and to tell me that she might be late to class on occasion: she’s staying with a friend and commuting from two hours away because her parents kicked her out over winter break.

It is the Tuesday after GCN Conference, and I’m sad. Maybe it’s the annual post-conference blues. Maybe it’s that winter break wasn’t long enough and I’m not quite ready to put my professional face back on yet. Maybe it’s that maintaining the energy required for the conversations we have here is challenging. But whatever it is, it seems to be sticking around for the day.

This weekend, I experienced grace beyond measure. It was the first time I’ve attended conference without any interaction that I’d consider negative. I was met where I am rather than chastised for who I am not, I was challenged when I needed to be challenged, and I was loved even when I wasn’t feeling very charitable myself. Vicky Beeching, whom I had never heard of before GCN announced that she would be a conference speaker, turned my world upside down. I couldn’t hear on the day of her keynote and I’m not advanced enough in ASL to have understood the interpreters fully, so today I listened to the talk for a second time. Despite my theological training, I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never understood Evangelical Protestantism because that is not my tradition. I didn’t know what a small group was until about two years ago, I’ve struggled to see how praise and worship music could be God-centered rather than human-centered, and the first time I heard the word “Hillsong” I wondered if it was a Broadway musical. In general, I’ve been skeptical of Evangelical traditions and judged them harshly. But as I listened to Vicky telling the story of her early experiences of God and continuing faith development as an adult, I realized that much of it resonated with me. Through her gentle and compassionate words, Vicky helped me to see that there can be much more depth in Evangelical traditions than I had originally thought. I did not get the opportunity to tell her this in person, but she left me with a heap of conviction about my less-than-charitable interactions with Evangelical friends. I’m as grateful for that as I am for her reminder of how much God loves us.

As I reflect, I see that my sadness today is, more than anything, related to love and all the ways we as the Church fail to show it – the ways I fail to show it. It’s easier to be harsh, judgmental, and dismissive than it is to be loving. Justin Lee’s talk on Sunday reminded me of how poorly I manage righteous anger. I would rather become livid about Twitter trolls and dismissive clergy in my Christian tradition than ask myself, “What am I doing to show Christ’s love to others today?” It’s difficult to clean my own side of the street when I can point to the piles of vitriolic garbage across the way, but cleaning up my own act is what I am called to do. It’s what all of us are called to do as Christians.

We’ve written a lot about celibacy mandates and our opposition to them. Invariably, this leaves both progressives and conservatives demanding that we state whether or not gay sex is a sin. I can’t think of a question that is shallower and less meaningful for discerning what fullness of life in Christ means for me as a gay Christian. Why is it that instead of walking alongside the faithful as they ask, “What does it mean to love, and how can I do that?” churches seem more interested in behaving like political movements? Why are we intentionally splitting the Body of Christ even further? Why do we respond to opinions different from our own with, “You are the enemy. You are an oppressor or colluding with the oppressor. Because you aren’t nodding in agreement with every bit of the party line on my side of this issue, you’re dangerous and I can’t learn anything from you”? We can do better. We are called to do better. And we can do so by living into the love mandate.

My Christian tradition teaches that love is the greatest of all virtues. We are meant to love one another because God loved us from the beginning. Absence of love is absence of God, so without love one cannot have spiritual life. When we do everything we can to treat others well and ensure that they are able to thrive, we are living into the kind of love known as agape. But what does that mean exactly? In the abstract sense, it is one aspect of how we help each other progress toward complete union with God. What it means in terms of lived experience is much debated.

If I empty my pockets and give all the contents to the homeless man I have seen every day on my morning commute for the past four years, am I treating him well? Am I doing everything I possibly can to attend to his wellbeing? I use this as an example each semester when we get to our morality unit in introductory theology. Though the majority of my students are Christians, there are about as many perspectives in the classroom as there are names on my roster. Of course you’re doing everything you can to treat him well. You’re giving him all the cash you have on hand. No, you’re doing him a disservice. What if he uses that money for drugs? That would run contrary to promoting his wellbeing. No, you’re both wrong. You haven’t done your Christian duty to this man until you’ve found him a place to stay or at least some way to get help… continuing on and on until every person in the classroom has offered a perspective and defended it using some principle of Christian morality.

The same sort of differences of opinion arise in discussions about how best to love people we believe are doing something that is harmful. What are we called to do in these situations as Christians? Are we to avoid saying anything because doing so might come across as shaming? Are we to preach at them about how wrong they are and how many people they are harming? I’m no wiser than you, but neither of these strikes me as an expression of love.

From where I sit — and I’m no priest, so take this as a lay person’s opinion — the love mandate calls us to see and affirm the image of God in others. It compels us to listen to people who are different from us and learn about what we do not understand. It requires humility, patience, and willingness to walk alongside the people God brings into our lives even if the reason for this is unclear. It means that we need to be in meaningful relationships with our brothers and sisters before offering admonishment lest we inadvertently make false assumptions and commit sin ourselves. [Points finger back at self and offers thanks to God for Vicky Beeching.] I believe one of the most important ways we can live into the love mandate is by supporting each other as we discover our vocations, not just to marriage or to celibacy, but also as sons and daughters, parents, teachers, engineers, writers, providers of shelter to homeless LGBTQ teens…

Today is the Tuesday after GCN Conference, and I am doing my best to pour my sadness into prayer. I pray for the coming of a day when every person is known and loved, grey area-dwellers are appreciated for their greyness, and celibacy and marriage mandates are artifacts long overcome by our shared vocation to love.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

“Jesus is not a frying pan” and other notable moments from #GCNConf

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We’ve literally just returned home after an amazing weekend at the Gay Christian Network Conference in Portland. We’re sure to write some more reflections in the coming week, but we wanted to share some highlights for now.

First of all, all of the keynote speakers were incredible. We’re so glad that they were broadcast on live stream. For a limited time, you can watch them here. Jeff Chu kicked off conference with one of the most poignant, compelling, and thoughtful addresses we’ve ever heard. He has graciously provided a transcript on his blog. He modeled vulnerability, graciousness, and generousness. The love Jeff feels for his mother was palpable in the room as all those gathered listened with rapt attention to Jeff discussing showing love across differences. We’re still processing Jeff’s address ourselves. What we do know is that both Jeff and Tristan would be very welcome in our home; we, too, eat family-style. We’d also be sure to find some sweet tea to put on our table for Vicky Beeching. Vicky opened her story to us with humor, grace, and authenticity. Anyone who thinks that LGBT Christians have a superficial appreciation for their Christian tradition and shy away from earnest theological inquiry would be well-served by sitting down to listen to Vicky’s address. By God’s grace, may we all continue to wonder at a loving God who rejoices in four-year-olds who want to reach up and share a cookie.

Second, there were so many people. We’ve never gone to GCN Conference with the intention of counting chairs, but this was the first conference where “I’ll see you in the General Session” was much easier said than done. When two-thirds of the room stood up after Conference Director Trey Weaver called for first-times, we knew something had happened. As conference veterans, we did whatever we could to make connections with people who really need the GCN community. We connected with so many people who aren’t out to their parents, who don’t know which letter of the LGBTQ-alphabet-soup works for them, and who feel torn by worry that they have to choose between their faith and their sexual orientations. We also met first-timers who are straight allies committed to doing whatever they can do to make the church a safer place to wrestle with questions of sexual orientation and gender identity, who are parents committed to loving their kids who came out to them over the holidays, who are LGBTQ Christians from Open and Affirming traditions trying to understand experiences of other queer Christians, and who are seeking to converse with authors and speakers who have done so much work to help them reconcile their faith and sexual orientations/gender identities. The rich tapestry of humanity was on full display.

Third, there was love. Honestly, we don’t remember the last time we were wrapped in day after day of love. It was something else to walk around and see scores of parents wearing “Free Mom Hugs” and “Free Dad Hugs” buttons. People constantly checked in with one another to see how things were going. We saw so many people taking the 5 minutes, 10 minutes, hour, and hours to talk, hug, pray, and cry things out when another person was hurting. People loved without asking permission. It was a beautiful thing. We can’t remember the last time we heard so many earnest questions of “Do you need any help?” People got creative when it came to showing love, including dear friends who helped us out by livetweeting our workshop.

This year, we presented a workshop on Celibacy and the Church. We wanted to support dialogue about celibate vocations in general while helping people living and discerning celibacy access quality pastoral care. We shared about our own journeys into our celibate vocations and identified various dimensions of helpful pastoral care. One way to talk about helpful pastoral care is to talk about distinctly unhelpful approaches. The title of this reflection came as Lindsey was giving some suggestions about how to re-frame a particularly difficult and unhelpful approach: the celibacy mandate. When pastors think the only thing they need to say to an LGBT person is “Gay sex is a sin! Just be celibate,” they have embraced the celibacy mandate.

We regard the celibacy mandate as akin to hitting LGBT people over the head with a frying pan. It’s dangerous, dehumanizing, and destructive. Lindsey has been on the receiving end of many different pastors wielding the celibacy mandate and eventually got better at dodging the frying pan. Eventually, Lindsey realized that the message “Gay sex is a sin! Just be celibate.” is not the Gospel. Lindsey’s pastors who were delivering this message were not preaching Jesus. The frying pan approach excuses pastors of their pastoral responsibilities and cheapens the beauty of celibate vocations. We earnestly believe that LGBT Christians who experience a call to celibacy should be free to cultivate that vocation and have support in doing so. Choosing to follow a calling is choosing freedom in Christ. While Jesus calls us in ways that are challenging and not always immediately apparent, he also journeys alongside of us every step of the way. The Incarnation tells us a lot about how Jesus views the role of pastoral care. And Jesus is not a frying pan.

[For those interested in a more complete summary of our workshop, we’ll be posting one reasonably soon. If you’re interested in seeing our notes from our Celibacy Involves Family workshop from Chicago’s conference, feel free to take a look.]

We left Portland feeling refreshed, renewed, and revitalized. So many people we met took time to hear our stories about the difficult parts of this past year, to pray with us, to encourage us, to cry with us, and to hug us. GCN is truly a family for us. We’re so grateful for everyone at the conference.

It didn’t take much web browsing today to realize that we still have significant work to do such that all LGBTQ Christians know that they are fiercely and wholly loved by God. We know that there are LGBT Christians returning to congregations that post this article (that honestly needs to come with a content warning for extreme homophobia) front and center on their notice boards. Attending GCN Conference gives us the courage to keep sharing our stories, to press on towards Christ, and shine Christ’s light to all. And when we see intolerance and bigotry, we’ll choose to remember the love, the life, and the colors of #GCNConf in Portland while doing what we can to make a difference. When words escape us, we’ll warm up with the heavenly choir singing LA LA LA in rhythm and glorious harmonies.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

A Queer Calling at the Gay Christian Network Conference

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We have been having a phenomenal time at the Gay Christian Network conference in Portland. We relish in the time we get to spend with people here. We’d love to connect with you today in one form or another.

With over 1300 attendees, spotty internet access and temperamental cell phones, it’s been hard for us to finalize plans with people at the last minute. If we’ve missed your tweet, text, call, email or owl, please accept our apologies. We wanted to let you know how you could find us.

Visit Art Coming Out the Ears in the exhibit hall! Sarah is selling fantastic art prints. We have full-size prints, greeting cards, and postcards. The exhibit hall opens at 800. The best times to catch us in the exhibit hall are before the general session and during lunch. If you miss us in the exhibit hall or can’t join us in Portland, know Sarah’s art is also available on Etsy. Use coupon code GCNCONF to save 15% on Etsy orders over $30. The coupon code will be available for one week after the close of conference.

Attend our Celibacy in the Church workshop during workshop Session C in room C121. Our primary goal in our workshop is to help people living and discerning celibacy access quality pastoral care. Our workshop is not a theological apologetic, an attempt to convince you that you are called to celibacy, or the final word on celibacy in the church. If you want to follow along with the conversation, look for the #AQC hashtag on Twitter. We’ll be hanging out afterward to talk with folks who want to talk with us.

If you’re looking for some concrete ways to bless us today, please consider praying for us. We think it’s so important to be able to have different kinds of conversation about celibacy in the church. Sarah has also had an incredibly hard time hearing while we’ve been here. We’d love to have people fluent in ASL who can interpret our workshop. We would also appreciate some help staffing our booth in the exhibit hall, especially at 300 today.

Thank you so much for all you do to support us! If you’re new to our site, please be sure to read our comment policy before jumping into conversation with us.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

What “Being White” Taught Me about “Being LGBT”

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A reflection by Lindsey

One thing that I love so much about the Gay Christian Network Conference is that I spend a lot of time thinking about landmarks in my spiritual journey. Portland marks my sixth GCN conference in 8 years. I’ve grown and changed a lot in that time.

This year, I find myself thinking about reconciliation. What does it look like when two Christians with completely opposite life experiences sit down together at the table? How can we find common ground amidst profound disagreement, hurt, confusion, and misunderstandings? What happens when the axes of privilege and oppression intersect?

It’s not the first time I’ve considered such questions. When I was in college, I found a sense of spiritual home in a multiethnic chapter of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. I quickly plugged in, figuratively and literally, as a freshman by participating regularly in small group Bible studies and playing the electric bass on the worship team. I looked forward to participating in just about every Intervarsity-sponsored activity that I could fit into my schedule as an engineering student. Overall, our fellowship had a decent population of white students, Asian-American students, and international students. We were mostly content to continue on our course… until one day during Spring semester when a group of African American seniors expressed considerable frustration that our group had incredibly few Black students. I remember being absolutely shocked that my friends would feel so isolated, alone, and unseen in what I perceived to be a vibrant and thriving Christian community. Hadn’t the fellowship made a special and concerted effort to attend the university’s Gospel Choir concert? Didn’t we encourage every student leader to create a small group of his or her choosing? Were not all welcome to give their gifts to our fellowship as they saw fit? What were we not doing that we should be doing? Why was I so taken aback?

As I plunged into the questions, I couldn’t help but see the problem: I was white and I had never thought much about it.

I remain forever grateful for how that fellowship challenged me to grow spiritually over the next three and a half years by encouraging me to think about what my whiteness meant to me. I developed a relationship with my white heritage, learning to appreciate the various contradictions found in my own embodied history. I thought about how, as a direct descendant of those who arrived on the Mayflower, I regularly heard the story of my people in my American history class in an incredibly positive light. I began to see how, at so many junctures, my people came out “on top.” My ancestors were the “good people” who braved the American frontier as simple farmers, settling the wilds of Wisconsin. The good-people-of-the-North conquered the impossibly-oppressive-slave-owners-of-the-South in the Civil War. Industrialization continued to pave the way to the American Dream. I lived in towns with good schools where it was reasonably possible to earn a solidly middle class income by putting in hours at the factory. Most of my friends came from two-parent homes and avoided problems with the law provided that they made good decisions. I didn’t have much experience putting myself in the shoes of others who were different from me. And honestly, I had never considered the cost of my privilege until I was at a great university in Boston because of hard-won solid financial aid package.

I don’t think I would have started to ask questions about my own heritage unless my friends would have had the guts to tell me that I was blind to their experience. All of a sudden, I realized that I was missing out on something big and important about following Christ if I didn’t take time to query what it meant to be a Church of every tribe, tongue, and nation. I started by asking hard questions about what it meant for me to be white. In humanizing my history, I connected more with my own humanness. I saw, and still see, so much to celebrate in my history. There was something profound about coming to see my ancestors as flesh-and-blood people who made a lot of mistakes along the way.

It was also in college when I could no longer avoid the reality that I was definitely somewhere on the LGBT spectrum.

I’ll freely admit that I’m a nerd who grew up relatively sheltered. Ellen and Rosie were the first examples of real-life gay people I had ever encountered. The vast majority of adults in my life questioned why it could possibly be important for gay people to “come out.” Why would anyone make a public declaration of his or her sex life? Who could possibly be bothered by something happening behind closed bedroom doors?

Through a long and arduous process, I realized that I had to start thinking about what it meant for me to be LGBT (even though at that time “gay” was the catch-all category). I remember searching on AOL with different whisperings of “I think I might be gay…” Being a sheltered kid from Minnesota whose idea of a really good time involved going night skiing with my family, I was totally taken aback by discussions focusing on gay bars, gay dating, and gay sex. I searched and searched and searched, growing ever more bewildered because I felt trapped between an overarching sense of “This isn’t me” constantly trading with an overwhelming sense of “Oh God, I know that somehow gay describes something about me.”

The world I grew up in felt absolutely heterosexual. Every adult in my large extended family was married or had been married at one time. Nearly all of my teachers were married, unless they were totally eccentric. Each of my friends had a mom and a dad. The vast majority of my friends’ parents were together, but there was a handful who spent the week with their mom and the weekend with their dad or vice versa. Every bit of dating drama I heard about in high school was between a guy and a girl. The world was straight, and no one was thinking much about it…

Except me. I was thinking about it, and it was tearing me up inside that I couldn’t make heads or tails about why I felt so different.

Eventually, I came to understand that difference in a range of ways. Meeting people in the Gay Christian Network showed me so many different ways of being LGBT. I started sharing my life and asking my questions on GCN in 2007. For the first time, I met people who seemed okay with the idea that being LGBT had to fit into my broader senses of who I am. It was okay that my internal world differed significantly from the world I grew up in. GCN gave me space to ask my own questions and seek God’s illumination. I realized I struggled to make sense of marriage because, truth be told, I wasn’t that interested in getting married. Entering a marriage struck me more about conforming to social expectations than living my life. It took a few years before I was introduced to the concept of celibate vocations. When I finally saw people living out a celibate way of life, I dared to risk hope that I would find space to live out my vocation.

I keep getting to know myself better more and more every day. I’ve thought long and hard about faith, sexuality, gender, and my sense of self. I hope I will always have questions about living my life in Christ to the fullest.

The more questions I ask myself, I wonder to what extent people from every marginalized minority probe deeply into their inner universe to make sense of the world around them. I’m grateful that God has shown me the value of searching for my sense of self in my majority identities as well. Perhaps doing the work of reconciliation means listening to minority voices tell you about things you’ve never thought much about before. Learning to appreciate my whiteness gave me the courage to seek God in an effort to appreciate my sexual orientation, gender identity, and vocation. I’m so grateful to be learning still.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.