I grew up with my three sisters in a Christian home. We lived in Te Aroha – population, three thousand. It was in this town that my parents separated and eventually divorced.

After the split Dad did visit with us on weekends and at least initially made an attempt to stay present in our lives.

It’s a difficult thing to maintain a sense of connectedness when you are miles apart and eventually we ended up distanced emotionally too.

Some would and have said, “That, Megan, is why you are gay. An emotional hardship involving your Father deserting you which had you, through a complex set of conscious and unconscious choices, reacting by rejecting men”.

This was a message I was to hear in my struggle to reconcile my homosexuality with my faith, family and culture over and over again. It is something I wanted to believe because it made being gay fixable and it made it not my fault. I could objectify it as a dirty part of me that could, with God’s help, be made pure. I felt ashamed and broken, but excited that if I just did enough God would produce a wonderful testimony in my life.

However after years of closeted, and later open struggle, it proved my parents’ marriage failure was an empty correlation and not at all a cause. My three sisters who also went through this time along side me are all heterosexual.
My feelings for other women predated any knowledge of trouble in my parents marriage. My attempts to put right the “brokenness” that has been visited on me by my parents brought me nothing but hurt, confusion, shame and rejection.

I am so sorry I was ever led to believe that I needed fixing. I wish I had been brave enough to challenge myself and my traditional understanding of scripture long before I did. I was so paralyzed by fear of backsliding, rejection from God, fear of those people I had been warned about who would attempt to brain wash me. Turns out I was afraid of the truth and held captive by a lie that was man made. It was a lie that had brainwashed me into believing that a person could not be gay and Christian.

When my father left my mother with four children he knew what the Bible had to say about divorce. I long ago left the judging of his actions in Gods hands where it belongs. However, that my father uses the Bible to justify his never accepting my “lifestyle” is a great irony to me.

Mind you my Dad is not the only Christian who fails to look deeper into the issue. I guess because being gay is such a foreign thing to so many people that it is easy to read the Bible and think you know what it says on this.
Maybe Dad reads the passages about divorce with more understanding or empathy or critical debate than say I would having never been divorced myself.
Having never been gay and for a lot of Christians thinking they have never known anyone gay, poorly informed people continue to visit judgment, inequality, jokes and spiritual violence on gay people. A sad irony is that these things should have no place in followers of the way of Christ.

When I came out at 26, it was within a very right wing evangelical church. It was after years of struggle including biweekly meetings with the youth minister, exorcism prayer, self talk, accountability,celibacy,book reading, forcing myself to date men and denial.

I certainly did not want to face my religious parents and wider family with what I knew would be the worst possible thing for them to hear. I am not able to pin point at what stage I knew I was gay but it was well before I knew how very wrong it was.
I remember hushed talks from the older kids about someone or other who was a lesbian, I remember my Father who was not prone to swearing using foul language when ever the TV coverage was about a gay event or success. I knew this was something never to be. Needless to say it was not a happy realization for me that I was attracted to and able to fall in love with women.

Despite that reluctance of acceptance and the hard times that followed. Its is actually a part of me that is unchangeable. It is part of me and that took a long time to own when I had spent so much time starving and hating it.

When I came out my faith while solid in creator God and his Son Jesus had no where to grow. I did not know you could be gay and Christian, just that I was. I felt like the only one and could not reach out to others until I got over the fear associated with owning being gay. I had to learn to like me. When I was ready for that It was time to find out if there were others who had reconciled faith and homosexuality and I had to know how.
I had a lot of reading and learning to do. I had to know what the Bible did actually say on this. I had to be willing to face the fact I may never have a partner if I wanted to be Christian.

I was ready to do that for faith. I thought I would be the price. Both faith and homosexuality were entrenched in me, it was futile trying to leave either behind. I launched myself on a mission to listen and read anything on these themes. I joined internet groups and even moved to London where I knew groups were large and growing I met people who have walked the same road, I filled my Ipod with pod casts on all sides of the debate. Anyone who had a view on this was interesting to me, I became sharp in my understanding of scripture and easily saw holes in my old way of thinking.
I deconstructed and reconstructed my faith so that I no longer blindly accepted mans wisdom but instead prayerfully sought the matter out for myself.

Happily the price turned out to be far less than sacrificing this intimate love giving and receiving part of me. It was still a very high price and was paid by some hard conversations with family and friends. The loss of some friends, distancing of some family, hushed conversations and whispers this time about me, suspicion from others who did not understand gay as anything but a deviant, and some lonely days and nights.

In return now I have a robust and strong faith, a deeper understanding of the Bible, Jesus and God. A highlight of this journey has been exposure to fantastic thinkers through various Christian organizations who choose to accept and support gay people. And best of all wonderful partner whom I feel free to love wholly as God made me to do. Now I have peace and it is so good.

By M. R.