Both Sentences.

A guest post written by one of us at Found Community. Name: Zion

I want to tell you something I have not learned how to say cleanly.

Not because I was hiding. Though I was.

Not because I was ashamed. Though sometimes I was that too.

Mostly because every version I tried sounded false.

Either it sounded like a confession.

Or it sounded like a performance.

And I have grown tired of both.

So let me try to be truthful instead.

I am a man who loves God.

I have spent years reading theology that most people would consider unbearably dense. I have read the Puritans. I have argued with books. I have sat awake long after midnight wrestling with questions that would have been easier to ignore.

I have prayed prayers that felt more like fights than prayers.

I have doubted.

I have believed.

I have done both in the same hour.

And I am also a man who experiences same-sex attraction.

There.

Both sentences.

Side by side.

Without one swallowing the other.

You would think that should be easy.

It is astonishingly difficult.

Not because the words themselves are difficult.

Because people hear one sentence and stop listening for the other.

And after a while you start doing it too.

You begin to imagine yourself primarily as a problem.

Not a person.

A problem.

Something requiring explanation.

Something requiring management.

Something requiring a position statement.

You stop entering rooms as yourself.

You enter them as your footnote.

As your disclaimer.

As the difficult paragraph everyone is trying to interpret correctly.

And eventually you learn a strange skill.

You learn how to make yourself smaller.

Not obviously.

Not dramatically.

You simply begin trimming pieces away.

You become careful.

Predictable.

Safe.

You learn how to translate yourself into a version that makes other people comfortable.

And because it happens slowly, you mistake it for maturity.

You mistake it for holiness.

You mistake it for taking up your cross.

I think I did.

For years.

But the cross is not the destruction of a person.

Christ did not die to erase people.

He died to redeem them.

Those are not the same thing.

It has taken me longer than I care to admit to understand that.

God.

I don’t know how to talk about Him without sounding either sentimental or ungrateful.

For years I thought the problem was that I did not understand His love.

That sounds respectable.

Theologically tidy.

The uglier possibility was that I understood it perfectly well and simply did not believe it was meant for me.

Not in theory.

In theory I believed all the correct things.

Nothing can separate us.

Christ died for sinners.

The Father receives those who come to Him.

Fine.

Good.

True.

But there is a difference between believing a door exists and believing it will open when you knock.

I believed the door existed.

I was much less certain about the second part.

So I spent years standing near God.

Studying Him.

Defending Him.

Writing about Him.

Sometimes loving Him.

But always with a strange reserve, as though I expected that if He looked too closely He would discover something disqualifying that I had somehow missed.

Which is absurd, of course.

An omniscient God cannot discover anything.

Yet absurd beliefs have governed entire lives before.

Perhaps entire civilizations.

Certainly mine.

And so when people spoke about God’s love, I often felt as though they were describing a country I had read about but never visited.

I knew its geography.

I knew its history.

I could probably teach a class on it.

I just wasn’t sure I lived there.

What rejection taught me was not that I was unloved.

That would have been easier.

What it taught me was something subtler.

That love always arrives with conditions hidden somewhere in the contract.

That acceptance is temporary.

That belonging is probationary.

That eventually someone will discover the thing that makes you difficult and quietly move you to the edge of the room.

I carried that assumption into friendships.

Into churches.

Into prayer.

Perhaps most tragically, into my understanding of God.

And because I expected rejection, I became very skilled at preempting it.

I apologized before anyone accused.

I explained before anyone asked.

I defended myself before anyone attacked.

I spent years answering charges that existed only in my imagination.

That is an exhausting way to live.

Recently I have begun wondering whether faith is sometimes less about learning new truths and more about allowing old lies to die.

Slowly.

Painfully.

One by one.

Not dramatic revelations.

Not lightning from heaven.

Just the quiet dismantling of things that have occupied a house for so long they started paying rent.

I have not arrived anywhere.

I should probably say that.

People enjoy endings.

I do too.

But this is not one.

I still have questions.

I still have fears.

I still catch myself shrinking in rooms where no one asked me to shrink.

I still sometimes experience God’s love more as a doctrine I affirm than a reality I inhabit.

But something has changed.

Not everything.

Something.

I am learning that being known is not the same thing as being rejected.

I am learning that honesty is not rebellion.

I am learning that a person can tell the truth about himself without disappearing.

And perhaps that is what unlearning rejection looks like.

Not becoming fearless.

Not becoming perfect.

Not finally resolving every tension.

Just refusing, little by little, to treat yourself as a problem God must overcome before He can love you.

I do not know if that sounds impressive.

I hope it doesn’t.

Most important things are smaller than that.

They happen quietly.

Almost invisibly.

Like dawn.

You look away for a moment and discover the darkness is no longer where it was.

That is all I have. It is, I think, enough for tod