Leaving The Religious Lifestyle
Essays, Featured — By Emily Timbol on November 7, 2011 at 10:07 amThe e-mails kept coming. More often. Longer. Before logging into my Gmail account every morning, I played a little game in my head. No messages today meant there was hope they’d change their mind. Unread e-mail sitting in my inbox indicated a chance to explain myself. Make them see the good in my intentions.
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The little bold black number alerted me to a new message. My heart raced and I held my breath.
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“I’m sorry if you’re offended, but I’m not sorry for what I wrote…yes, I’m concerned for your spiritual health and those you are trying to witness to.”
I let out a long, exasperated breath and shook my head. Rolled the button to scroll down the page..
“Did you hear me say, ‘I hate gays?’ Never said that. God hates them if they continue to live in sin, as he does any unrepentant sinner. You can’t disagree with Scripture, or can you? There is no such thing as a Christian homosexual, neither are there Christian fornicators/adulterers or Christian drug abusers/alcoholics.”
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My fingers hovered over the keyboard, itching to type a reply. Hit the “delete” button instead. Wasn’t worth another angry phone call, like the one received after my last attempt to “explain.” Went to check my blog instead. The “new comment” alert sent my stomach into an unpleasant flip.
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The commenter and e-mailer were one and the same. A new-to-the-family aunt who just married my divorced Uncle. She had met me twice. We clashed over politics, like I did with most of my family, but other than a few small arguments, the meeting had been uneventful. Her frequent, long, heated responses baffled me. They started shortly after my family found out my plans to attend the city’s upcoming gay pride festival.
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Leaning closer to the screen, my eyes scanned her words.
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“What is wrong with standing up for what the Bible teaches? It seems Emily is more quick to judge biblical Christians than haters of the gospel. If we really have a love for the lost souls of this world, we would at some point confront them regarding their sin, so they could repent and have eternal life.”
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“Confront them regarding their sin” stuck out. The “them” referred to the gay and lesbian people she so feared and despised. Friends of mine. People I’d laughed, cried, and shared meals with. They weren’t a “them”, they were Chris, Greg, Tyler. My aunt didn’t know, or care, that Chris was my best friend for sixteen years, since we were ten. Or that Greg’s mother told him at least once a week how disgusted his sexuality made her. She had no idea church brought Tyler and I together, and we’d spent hours discussing our faith.
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I turned off the computer, put on my sneakers and went for a walk, determined not to let the messages make my cry. Passing my old elementary school with a brisk pace, my mind played back to the events of the past year since Chris came out to me. All the conversations. Experiences. He, and Tyler and Greg, telling me they prayed for years for God to take away their feelings and change them. The more we talked, the more the doubt grew in my mind that being gay was a choice. I’d been raised to believe that sexuality was something God didn’t “mess up.” But, if it wasn’t a choice, that meant God, whose existence I never doubted, created people who were gay. That changed everything.
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The words from a previous e-mail flashed across my mind, stinging me as I plodded along the sidewalk.
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“Remember that many members of the LGBT have an agenda and they want to legalize their lifestyle on all of us. They want affirmation. They want the rest of us to embrace them and accept them regardless of our Christian principles.”
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I wanted to accomplish the exact thing my Aunt cautioned me against. Affirmation. Acceptance. Embracing, like the night I tightly hugged Tyler, after he told me when he came out to his mother, she threw up. Attending Pride wasn’t an act of disobedience to God. It was my understanding of what God is – love – that motivated me to reach out into this unfamiliar territory. It was doing what Christ commanded, loving the people that had been hurt and abused. Showing them that God loved them too, despite what the people who hated them said. What made it hard, was the people behind the hate, were the very ones who have been commanded to love. The ones I grew up attending church with. The ones that grew up with me, my family.
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Exhausted, mentally and physically, I stopped walking, and bent over to rest my hands on my knees. Without noticing where I was going, I’d come to the park that Chris and I had spent every day after school in, when we were little. The smell of mulch filled my nose, and the sound of the decades old rusty swings creaking filled me with remembrance. I walked over and sat down on the swing that Chris used to push me on, underneath the tree that provided the perfect amount of shade. Slowly, my toes pushed off the ground, rocking me back and forth. My legs dangled. Closing my eyes, and tilting my face up to feel the sun peeking through the leaves, I started to pray.
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This is an excerpt from Emily Timbol’s work in progress, Leaving The Religious Lifestyle, a spiritual memoir of her journey from fundamentalist Christianity to loving and faith centered encouragement for gay rights.
Tags: Book Excerpt, gay rights, gays, LGBT, Memoirs, Relatives, Religion
19 Comments
Sounds like an interesting book, Emily. I look forward to reading it.
This is gorgeous Emily, and heart-igniting. As someone who is married to an alcoholic, those terrible comments speared my heart through, as I am sure they did yours. I have no words, in fact, you probably know what I would say, to you, and that person too. Thanks for being a love revolutionary, keep living and telling the story. Congrats Emily. You inspire me.
JO
Thank you for taking the time to write this piece! It is very to take a strong stance especially when family is involved. Please keep writing!
I meant to say it is very challenging to take such a strong stance… Thank you again!
thanks for the post. i can relate!
Thank you friend for writing this. The conversation will be ongoing wont it. Stuff like this takes years to digest and be honest about.
God’s grace.
Emily, this was beautifully written and thought provoking. Though I avoid talking about it because of the reactions you relate, I am one who has fought a life-long battle with homosexuality. As your friends say, the feelings never seem to go away. I can report, though, that with God’s help, a determined effort on my part, and a special, Godly wife, I have managed to maintain and grow a love for wife and family that has made the struggle worthwhile. After 36 years of marriage I can say that it as difficult as it has been, it was all worth it.
Loving those caught in the grips of homosexuality is extremely important. I don’t know why Christians find it easier to love those drawn to alcoholism or other addictions, but not those caught up in homosexuality. Thank you for taking a stand for all God’s children.
John, thank you for commenting and sharing your experiences. I respect your choice to fight your attractions, especially the fact you are open to your wife about it, and can’t imagine how much faith that takes.
While I don’t believe everyone who is gay should/has to follow in your footsteps, unless they feel that’s what God wants them to do, we can definitely agree that loving people who are gay is extremely important.
Hi Emily,
As a very non-religious follower of Christ I was eager to read your article just because of the title. I mean after all the only people that Jesus ever got angry with were the Pharisees in the “church” and he loved sinners. I love it when people “get” the fact that Jesus did not come to start a religion. He came to call people (sinners) away from habits, actions, thoughts, and behavior that were destructive and dark so that they could walk in the beauty of his creation in the power of righteousness and in the glory of holiness.
So, maybe you can imagine my disappointment when I read your defense of actions that the Bible clearly calls an abomination. I’m all for loving sinners – of all kinds – but I tremble when I consider the plight of those who call evil good and good evil. I fear you have not left religion, but have rather started your own. Please understand I say this without an attitude of superiority or judgment. It is simply a fact. Sin is sin and nothing will change that. If you love your friends who have chosen a gay lifestyle, then tell them to repent and come to God for forgiveness.
If a person were a swindler, I mean a real dyed-in-the-wool adrenaline junkie absolutely loved to con other people out of their hard-earned money, would you argue that he was made that way. He enjoys it. It comes natural. He might argue that it’s just the way God made him. You see my point, I’m sure. All of us have tendencies to certain sins. Let’s not excuse them.
Emily, as a follower of the Lord Jesus, I plead with you. Stop adding to and changing God’s word. He loves gays just like he loves swindlers and adulterers, but he calls us ALL to repentance.
Rob, from your comment, you appear to have no sympathy for the difficulty that must come from being gay. I’m not gay, but that’s my perspective.
Also, the part about starting her own religion is kinda extreme. Find me any two Christians who agree on the meaning of every detail of the Bible. We might as well just say we’ve all started our own religions.
Dear Doug,
I understand your emotional response. I really do. But, emotions tell us nothing about reality. They only tell us that something made us feel something (Ayn Rand). Will you please answer two questions? 1) Is there any inspired revelation that defines in absolute terms what it means to follow Christ outside of the Bible? 2) If your answer is no, then tell me what gives any of us the right to unilaterally revoke the prohibitions in the Bible against homosexuality?
Sincerely and humbly…
rob
My intention with publishing this excerpt was not to start (yet another) argument about how Christians should view and act in regards towards homosexuality. I’m not going to go into my views on what the Bible says in regards to the sin or not sin of being gay, because that was not the point of that excerpt, or my book.
The point was/is to show my desire to love people who have been hurt by Christians, and how that love does not involve telling them they need to “repent” of what many of them have been trying to run away from for decades. That love though, is firmly and deeply rooted in both Christ, and scripture. In my opinion, those two things are the foundation of Christian religion, not something “new.”
Rob,
To answer your questions, 1) no. Although, I’m assuming that by “absolute terms,” you don’t mean the Bible provides us with a specific answer to every question we’ll face in life. 2) I cannot tell you anything that gives us the right.
I think you assumed I want to prove you wrong…but my comments are more directed at what you HAVEN’T said.
Will you please answer my question? What do you think it would feel like to be a Christian who only feels same sex attraction in America today?
Also, I might understand what you were aiming at when you wrote that emotions tell us nothing about reality- because emotions can definitely be deceiving- but it’s too broad a statement for me to agree. Emotions can tell us about the reality of what’s going on in a person’s mind…they’re deeply impacted by how we think and what we experience. Memories are formed in the same areas of the brain that seat our emotions, which has to do with why we so vividly remember intensely emotional experiences and forget mundane details that don’t interest us. Emotions are clues that can help us understand each other. Although emotions shouldn’t be our sole or even primary guide in most of life, I don’t think they should so easily be disregarded…unless you don’t include people in reality.
Dear Emily and Doug,
Emily…
1) If “Christians” felt a sexual attraction to very young children, would that not be alarming to you? There is no quantifiable difference. Regardless of our feeling, certain guidelines for sexuality have been define in the Bible. (If you don’t accept the Bible, there is nothing to discuss). Homosexuality is defined as an abomination, as is witchcraft, adultery, lying and even cowardice. You’re right we need to show sinners (we are included in that group) the love of God, but lowering the bar is NOT showing them love.
What if a “Christian” had an overwhelming urge to lie? To sleep with the wives of other men? or the husbands of other women? To be a peeping tom? To take what did not belong to them? There are many evil desires in the hearts of men. That is why there is a call to repentance and promise of ‘deliverance’ for those who have faith!
Doug…
Perception (emotion) may have nothing to do with reality. I understand, however, that it is very real for the person having the perception/feeling. It is “their” reality. I think that if I were a “christian” attracted to the same sex the first thing I would do is what the apostle Paul commended to the Corinthians. (Believe me I have done it in my own life many times for “smaller” things) I would check to be sure that I was “in Christ”. I feel for these people. I really do, but the way to freedom is not in denying there is a problem.
Grace and peace in a desire for holiness…
Rob,
I sincerely hope that you do not truly believe that there is “no quantifiable difference” between homosexual sex with a consenting adult and the victimization of a defenseless child. This is one of the silliest and most disgusting strawman arguments against homosexual behavior and makes your whole post sound inane because it was written by someone ignorant enough to bring up such a point.
I understand your ideas for a good book and your need to be free from “religion.” I call myself a “spiritual” Christian not religious one. I don’t know if you have written your book yet, but I think you should read Beth Moore’s Book on Praying God’s Word. It has a powerful message about this stronghold. I do believe gays can be Christians at the same time. I don’t believe God creates people to be gay and then calls it a sin. That would set them up to utterly fail. Beth’s book really helped me love gays and understand some of what is going on in their lives.
I tried looking at your web site on my ipod touch and the structure does not seem to be correct. Might want to check it out on WAP as well as it seems most smartphone layouts are not really working with your website.