My Personal Path From Pain and Confusion to Hope and Spiritual Progression

     I finally have a break to write another blog post.  A lot of stuff has happened since my last post. I am fairly certain that many of the readers of my blog have had many discussions with friends, family, and others around the LDS church's new policy in regards to the Children of LGBT couples.  For me personally it felt like a stab in the heart.  I cannot adequately describe the pain and betrayal I felt at that time.  I had made peace with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was still attending meetings when I found the time to.  I described the pain and the anguish I felt in a Facebook post.  This is what I wrote:

    "The past few days have definitely been incredibly difficult and heartbreaking. I'm grateful for everyone that I have seen who have stood up in defense of the children of LGBT parents and their families during this difficult time. Even though many of you will not be personally effected by this change within the LDS church. Just the fact that you have been willing to listen with an open mind and heart and advocate for others is an incredible blessing. The fact that you have been open to the plight of your brothers and sisters has made a tremendous difference. Your love and kindness has been noticed.
    To those people who see nothing wrong with this policy and the potential damage this will have to so many children I beg you to open your hearts to their stories. Realize how much pain, anguish, and exclusion they are going to feel when they see their friends getting baptized and then being told that they can't because of their parents, who if they are that age probably go to church with them and approve of their involvement. Realize that this policy will make them feel singled out and ostracized. Understand how their parents will feel whether they be from failed mixed orientation marriages or love the church and want their kids raised in the church. Many of them have faced so many hardships and had finally found a balance within their marriage and relationship with the church. Now they're being told that their kids are now considered the other and not worthy because of who their parents are. Imagine how this policy will open old wounds and how it feels that the church is trying to punish them further for their sexual orientation that they had no choice in. Whether it is their intention or not that is what is happening, that is reality.

    Some people may say that these kids can choose when they're 18 and that it will lessen conflict. The problem is the damage will have already been done. Treating a young child like this is harmful to their identity and relationship with their heavenly Father. No matter what the intentions and the belief that this is what is best for the child. The fact still remains that this policy will lead to broken families, heartbroken children, and a culture of exclusion for these kids. Many of these children have been adopted and have experienced abandonment from their previous families are now being told after they have finally found a family that loves them and cares for them that that love is counterfeit that they have to renounce that love, peace, and security they have found. How traumatizing that can be and will be for these children.

    I feel raw and heartbroken, a church that I grew up in and that has helped me develop my relationship with my Savior has essentially shut the door on my family and my future kids. This is how I and thousands of other people in my situation feel right now. People may seek to minimize it but it is there, we are here, we exist, our pain is real. You can either choose to ignore it and brush it off because it doesn't affect you or you can mourn with us and comfort us because many people are in need of comfort right now."  

     (As preface to what I am going to talk about, I have a deep respect for the decisions made by individuals. My thoughts are my own and are neither an endorsement or criticism.  They are merely the thoughts and the pain which I have personally felt.  Everyone's road is different and I can not emphasize enough that people must make their own decisions and should if they feel they are able to make their own decisions with God in regards to belief or non-belief.  That is something I would never deny to anyone, I just seek to share my own personal perspective.)

    My heart was broken and the pain I felt was beyond what I have previously felt before.  I didn't understand why this could happen.  I had felt that progress was being made and that my future children could be welcomed in the faith that I have held dear for many years even if I could not fully participate.  With this policy, the door had been shut and and my heart was broken.  For days I felt the pain and betrayal continue to twist and turn inside of me seemingly without relief.  I felt abandoned and I felt lost.  

    As I struggled through this pain and anguish trying to search for relief, I felt the spirit move me in a surprising direction.  My twin brother had been attending the Community of Christ (previously the RLDS church) for a couple of months.  We had had a couple of conversations about it.   Even with these conversations I had no interest in the Community of Christ because I never felt particularly drawn to them intellectually or spiritually. With the introduction of the new church policy I was seeking to find comfort and solace in my pain.   I found a talk given by the Prophet President of the Community of Christ church, Steven Veazy.  Here it is below 

     
     As I watched this video I felt a profound peace enter into my heart especially near the end when he talked about Oneness and Equality in Christ.  This peace drove away the pain and the anguish from my soul.  This peace also carried with it a prompting to learn more about Community of Christ.

I watched many other videos which I will post in later blog posts.  

 I still consider myself Mormon in the sense that my own personal beliefs have been cultivated within the LDS church.  My plan is to always leave my heart open to the possibility of me returning if prompted by the spirit to do so.  The culture and the influence the LDS church has had on my life has been profound and will never leave me.  I personally can profess that I have felt the spirit many times in the LDS church.  The spirit has borne me up in hours of need and trial and has offered me comfort countless times.  As I have continued to learn over the past couple of weeks I have developed a deep respect for both the LDS church and the Community of Christ as part of the Restoration Tradition of Christianity that has Joseph Smith as its first prophet.  I have also felt and recognized truth in the Community of Christ faith.  I have found it to be an honest and genuine expression of the Restoration one that I regret not knowing more about until now. 

    I still don't know exactly where God will lead me on this road.  There is still much I need to learn and hopefully many more years ahead.  I have found at this time a place of safety where my husband and I are fully welcome.  At the very least what I do know is that at this moment in my life. I am where I need to be.  

If anyone is interested in finding out more about the Community of Christ 
from a LDS perspective here is a link.

http://www.latter-dayseekers.org/

    

I Found God in the LGBTQ Community.

I have been thinking about writing this post for a while. Since my coming out I have truly experienced an outpouring of love and support of which I am tremendously grateful.  My journey of coming out started in November of 2012 and has led me to places and people that I never would have imagined knowing and experiencing that night I came out to my parents.  God truly is wonderful and patient and has touched my heart in ways I could have scarcely comprehended just a little over a year ago.

After coming out to my parents, I attended my Spring Semester at school and I endeavored to start coming out to very close friends of mine.  This was harder than I had anticipated.  Keeping something secret for eleven years and hoping it would go away is hard to talk about.  It was a difficult but also transformative process in many ways.   I started feeling like I was becoming a more genuine person as I shared this part of myself with others.  Not only that but I felt closer to God.  I felt God was pleased with me being honest with this part of myself.  I began walking through my day to day life with a renewed vigor and hope.  I felt like a burden was beginning to be lifted off of me and that the Atonement of Christ was working in my life to lift that self-inflicted burden.This brought a spiritual healing that I most desperately needed. I felt God prompt me in my day to day life, I felt like I was becoming a better person and closer to God.

One day last year, on a normal day I felt God prompt me in a direction that I had not anticipated.  I was prompted to go to a meeting of my school's LGBTQ organization on campus.  This was something that left me confused and nervous.  At this time I had only known a handful of gay people and then not extremely well.  I had never been taught any overtly anti-gay things.  What I had learned was that marriage was between Man and Woman. I also heard the youth  make gay jokes making it seem like it was  something to be mocked, scandalous, or dirty.  This compounded with homosexuality being a taboo discussion in LDS congregations and that no older gay people that I could tell were in my ward.  So I automatically assumed, just like I feel many other people do, that LGBT people were sinners that have shunned God and that they were devoid of  natural love and were lost in the lusts of the flesh,  which created in me an internalized homophobia toward myself.  I hated myself because I was one of those awful sinners.  Coming out allowed me the opportunity to push off this burden of self-hatred, but I would soon find out that God had so much more for me to learn about others as well as learning about myself.

Going to the meeting left in me a certain anxiety because of what I had heard about gay people.  I felt scared that I would be tempted and be led down a path that would be destructive to my soul.  All these things jumbled in my mind and put a fear in my heart. Even with all this opposition I followed the prompting.  I went to a meeting and luckily saw a friend there who I was able to sit with. So we sat together and the meeting began.

I was at this point incredibly nervous.  Here I was sitting in a meeting with gay people as if it was a disease that I could catch.  The thing that I took most from the meeting surprised me.  This surprise came from how normal everybody seemed.  They laughed and joked like everyone else and we actually talked a little about The Hunger Games afterward.   It was an experience that surprised me more than I think I anticipated.  These people treated me well and we talked and socialized.  I also found out that there were other LGBTQ Mormons like me.

I eventually was led to find another gay Mormon.  This experience became the most touching and powerful spiritual experiences of my life.  This experience is very private.  The fact that I had this experience is one of the reasons I know that God brought me down the path that he did and it truly reinforced my faith and devotion to him.

But God wasn't done with me yet.  I felt very welcome by everyone, much more than I had ever felt while in college.  I was invited to parties that actually turned out to be the most moral parties that I had ever seen in college.  We ate ghost peppers, played games like catchphrase, and watched movies.  The company was wonderful and the food was great.  Really for one of the first times in my life I felt like I truly fit in and was accepted.  This made a truly stark contrast to what I was led to believe and what I thought was truth in how gay people were.  They were normal people who were just as bad or as good as heterosexuals there was nothing sinister or evil about them.   However there seemed to be something that was different, something that I knew God wanted me to learn from them.

As the weeks and months went on I was invited to be a volunteer at the Equality Virginia Commonwealth Dinner.  I accepted and was interested to see how the dinner would go.  It was going to be the largest gathering of LGBTQ people and allies that I would ever have been too.  The purpose of the dinner itself was both a place to commemorate exceptional LGBTQ people in Virginia and also a place for political fundraising toward various causes.  It wasn't the politics or anything so worldly that caught my attention.  I still was trying to figure out more of what it was God wanted me to learn.  Something else much deeper and richer touched my soul at this meeting.

I felt a powerful love that filled the whole room.  It was a unique kind of love that I had never experienced not even in a church congregation.  The spirit filled my soul and testified of it too me.  Thinking through it later I realized that I felt no judgement from the people in the room.  As I thought on this I realized that many of the people sitting at the tables in that room had experienced pain and abandonment from their families.  The majority had been forced from their congregations and places of worship for the soul reason of being born the wrong way.  These people understood the sharp knife of judgement and hate toward them.  They felt the pain of being abandoned left for nothing and treated as less than human.  

This treatment from others in my view taught them what love really is.  Love is something that is unconditional it is something that doesn't see sexual orientation, race, or creed.  It is something that looks beyond earthly prejudices.  It isn't love the sinner hate the sin.  It is pure and simply love that sees no judgement.  As I looked out on that group of people.  I saw people that are as Christ taught "the least of these."   In God's great mercies whether they realized it or not.  He had taught them through their trials what true love really means.

I had found Christ among them.

Never in any congregation had I felt the same love and lack of judgement as I felt there.  It was something that was very moving.  The only time I had felt that same type of love was from God himself when I was on my knees crying to him to take this away from me.  When I was seeking to accept myself and when God spoke in my heart his acceptance for me.

This was when I knew what I saw that was different in the people I had met and got to know.  In a way the people of the LGBTQ community understood better in their journeys on this earth, what love is.  Every person I met were in different stages of life and all had there imperfections and challenges, but this one thing seemed to resonate in them in a more profound way than most other people I have known.

A certain scripture comes to mind that connects with this experience it comes from 1 John 4: 18-21 it reads:

"There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear:
If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?
And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also."

"45 And charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

 46 Wherefore, my beloved brethren, if ye have not charity, ye are nothing, for charity never faileth. Wherefore, cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail—

 47 But charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him. If ye have not charity, ye are nothing, for charity never faileth. Wherefore, cleave unto charity,"

Moroni 7: 45-47

I think the part of Charity that most, if not all there understood was that true love, Christ like love, endures forever.  Many had felt the sting of family members taking away their love for them on the basis of their romantic orientation.  Many saw religious leaders preach the love of Christ from the pulpit and then tell them they did not deserve his love in private.  But God's love is never ending and never changing and the atonement reaches toward all.  They truly have endured all things, and have hoped through adversity.

Judge not, that ye be not Judged.  Matthew 7:1

Only God can judge, to us we are only commanded to love and accept our brothers and sisters where they are, who they are, and who they love and want to spend the rest of their life with, they are all Sons and Daughters of God.  This is a wonderful video of how one woman learned from God that all she needed to do was to love unconditionally her gay brother and son.






 Other good resources,
LDSwalkwithyou.org
mormonsandgays.org
http://affirmation.org/
http://northstarlds.org/
voicesoflove.org

"As a church, nobody should be more loving and compassionate. Let us be at the forefront in terms of expressing love, compassion and outreach. Let’s not have families exclude or be disrespectful of those who choose a different lifestyle as a result of their feelings about their own gender."  Quentin L. Cook