Ellie
When I was young, I felt called to love God and love others, and for years and years it was just that easy. I was confident in the fact that God loved me, and confident that others loved me too. Then one day in middle school, I began to realize that there was something different about me and I hoped it wasn’t true.
I was attracted to girls, and only girls. Growing up in the Church, I had always heard whispers that “homosexuality is a sin” and I did not want to be someone that “had something wrong with them”. I was so overcome with fear of what others would think of me and afraid that these attractions were some manifestation of sin, that I tried to bury these feelings.
Pronouns: he/her
Photo of Ellie
After a while, I realized that this part of me wasn’t going away. At this same time my church was going through a deep discernment process: whether or not to allow people identifying as LGBTQ+, to be leaders in the church.
During this time, there were sermons preached about the passages in Romans and Leviticus–the ones that have long been used as clobber passages to exclude the queer community from the Church–and I was starting to see how much of a gray area there really is in the bible. I was getting confused myself and for a moment, I wished that God had just said in the ten commandments, “You shall not be gay” or had Jesus say, “Queer Love is Love”. Through all this confusion, however, I couldn’t shake the feeling that God still loved me. So, I just had one question left for God, “If you love me so much, why would you make me this way?”, I knew that if it were true, being both gay and a Christian would be really hard. Over the years, God replied, “Oh child, I never said that life was going to be easy. I said that I would be with you”.
God still continues to remind me of the things that I knew when I was young, “You were fearfully and wonderfully made”, “made in my image”, and “created to Love God and Love others” and now I accept that I was made gay and I’m proud to live into the beautifully queer life God designed me for!
Photo of Ellie
