Continued from part 2 of A letter to a church.

I felt a wave of peace flow through my entire being. I felt like
Harry Ashfield, the small boy in one of my favorite short stories,
The River by Flannery O’Connor. In this allegory, Harry is a boy
searching and struggling for meaning and purpose when his sitter
takes him to the river for a baptismal service. The preacher
baptizes Harry and then tells him, “You count now.” Afterwards, the
sitter takes him back to his loveless home where everything is a
joke, and upon awakening the next morning, Harry dreams of the
river. So he returns and finds the riverside healing place now
deserted. He bounds into the water, takes a gulp and stands there
trying to decide what to do next. One thing for sure he isn’t going
to fool with preachers this time. He’ll baptize himself and find this
Kingdom of Christ where he thinks life will be so much better than it
is back home. He ducks under the water and tries to stay there but
the river pushes him back. He tries again,

“…and the same thing happened. The river wouldn’t have him.”

He decides it’s just another joke. He gets angry, kicks out at the
river and the next thing loses his footing,

“…and the waiting current caught him like a long gentle hand and
pulled him swiftly forward and down. For an instant he was overcome
with surprise; then since he was moving quickly and knew that he was
getting somewhere, all his fury and his fear left him.”

In my life, I tried desperately to be heterosexual only to be “pushed
back” like Harry in the water. As I continued my struggling against
what God had intended for me, God, in the midst of my brokenness,
pulled me with his gentle hand into the life that Christ had intended
for me. Like Harry who stopped struggling once the hand of God
gently pulled him under, so too my struggle ended and my fury and
fear left me.

Tears streamed down my face.

With my newly gained acceptance of whom God had intended for me to
be, my struggle was now intellectual as I sought to reconcile my
sexuality with my understanding of the Scriptures. So I prayerfully
studied the Scripture in the hopes of gaining clarity on this complex
and emotionally charged issue.

…continued tomorrow…