It’s a moving letter, explaining how a lot of people in the LGBT community feel about the church, loving it and just wanting to be loved and embraced in return.
// // //
dear church,
there are millions of us. millions who just want you to understand.
millions who want to belong. millions who have been turned away where faith, hope, and love are said to abound.
we are LGBT+. we have many different struggles, pasts, and paths. but yet we are still human. we want to be a part of the things you are doing. we simultaneously feel the love of a savior and the condemnation of the saved— the latter is why many of us won’t be in your building on Sunday.
as we have grown and matured, we found our way through life, broken, alone, and silent. we didn’t talk to others about our struggles. we bottled them up so we could still be a part of the joy that comes from being around others who believe the same as us… but eventually, it’s not enough. we all come to a point where we cannot hide who we are any longer. we open up and tell the masses, while at the same time, your doors close.
your eyes no longer see the person you once saw, and without saying it, we know you see someone who is unworthy of your love, time, and affection. when we come out, there is such a relief and joy that overcomes us.
but you feel it is your responsibility to quench that. you stomp on our joy until it is no longer breathing. our newfound hope and happiness is quite literally put to death inside us.
so… many of us choose to follow Jesus on our own, without the community of believers we once had and still need. it’s lonely here, but we have a savior who still listens and wants us to live and gently teaches us how to breathe when we forget, shows us the love and compassion we need to spread, and gives us everything we don’t deserve to have.
but church… we still want to belong with you. we still want to be a part of what you’re doing. we want to be in your building on Sunday, worshiping our Creator, hand-in-hand with you.
open your doors, open your eyes, love with your hearts, and please, don’t let us stay in the cold any longer. we’re freezing.
too many of us are falling apart without you. our silent cries for help are slowly but surely tearing us apart until there’s nothing left.
so i have one question for you, church: will you love us?
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Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 4, 2017.
I know it’s been a long time since I’ve really blogged, but I’m doing so, so much better than I was.
I’ve been back in therapy for six months now.
I’ve been moved out for almost five years. I saw three different counselors in Colorado — a Christian psychologist and two counselors at my college off and on between 2011 and 2015.
My parents wanted me to see the Christian one because they thought he would convince me that moving out was a bad idea. He didn’t. He told me to be responsible and don’t go unless I could survive on my own, but he actually encouraged me to leave.
When I told my new counselor this, while reciting my entire History of Therapy (TM) to him, he laughed and said, “backfire!”
My first counselor taught me that I wasn’t responsible for other people’s emotions, like my dad’s outbursts.
He told me that leaving would involve a risk that I wasn’t ready to take yet. I asked him what that was and he said I needed to ask myself that question.
And he showed me that I wasn’t obligated to believe religious dogma that hurt me.
One day he told me that he wanted me to “stop thinking in terms of shoulds and musts and start thinking about wants and your reasonable heart’s desires.”
I asked him if that was wrong.
I recited that Bible verse that says, “But the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?”
But my counselor said, “The former is living under the law and the latter is where freedom is and where Christ wants you to be.”
I didn’t have the faith to believe him yet, but I wanted to. I was still so scared.
My second counselor was secular. I saw him through my college’s mental health services program. He didn’t really understand the pain of trying so hard not to stop believing when everything you were raised with seems like a lie, but he definitely tried.
But he told me to try new things and he asked me what would happen if I carried less in my backpack going to campus every day.
He asked me to put my backpack beside my chair, instead of between me and him. I’d barricaded myself off without realizing it. Not having something between me and him while talking about deep emotions was unexpectedly vulnerable.
My third counselor was through my college again. She happened to be Christian and had been to seminary, so she could feel my faith wounds.
She told me that my flashbacks and nightmares were part of c-PTSD. We started a type of therapy to help my brain process old memories and not freeze up.
I found her after my first breakup, in the lurch of unexpected heartbreak. When I wanted to stop breathing and not exist.
Last summer, I knew I needed to go back.
I knew I wasn’t done yet. But I didn’t know how to begin again, to recount my whole life story all over again for a stranger who I would come to know but who knew nothing about me.
But then unexpectedly — and aren’t the best things so often like this — one of my pastors was starting graduate school for counseling last fall.
He started meeting with me. He knew parts of my story already, so vulnerability was both harder and easier. But there was really no one else I’d rather tell these things to.
It means so much when someone listens with their heart. They are more than just a counselor, then, they become an anchor.
In December, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to hurt myself anymore.
I have wanted to hurt myself for as long as I can remember. Even as a tiny human, I believed that I deserved punishment and would invent penalties for myself when “getting in trouble” didn’t seem like enough.
I am learning to trust other people. I am trying not to withdraw so sharply when I am anxious.
I am healing.
And I want to start sharing some of what I’ve learned.
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Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 5, 2016 as part of a series.
Another anonymous post from a creative soul friend.
Dear ****,
I’m not writing this for you, cause I know you’ll never read it.
I’m not writing this for you either, or you or you or you. I’m writing this for You, and I’m writing this for me.
Did you know I was at a point in high school, yellow light and kneeled prayers on my bed, please help me to be well I can’t handle this the rest of my life I’ve only been living this for four months!, and how did I still get the kind of grades I got that semester?
My freshman roommate from the start was a foreign creature but do you know the kind of embarrassment I felt when she asked me why it is I wash my hands so often!, she doesn’t know how it feels to hate yourself in the black and green of the mirror and wash your hands at midnight because of all the things you did wrong that day, hate your face in the morning fluorescent because of the way the lighting picks out the red on your cheeks when everyone else’s face is clear, stare quaking at your feet pointed toes in the library and unable to raise your head to the sky lit and clouded sky because your mind is turning turning please please help me can I know this is right which choice do I take cause something like a class schedule can obviously completely make or ruin your entire life!
Do you know about the times that I sat huddled in the corner of my room by the closet door at night all alone, knowing I was worthless and horrifically flawed because he talked to the blond one and not to me, cause from the moment I first heard his voice and saw his eyebrows he has held sway on a piece of my heart and you know that he holds it still.
(and yeah you know I still love him but there’s something different about you, something different, don’t worry).
I told my sixth roommate that my thoughts are a pressure cooker, that they spin and spin and spin the pressure clamps down harder, I can’t get out because I don’t know how I got in and she asked me how it doesn’t drive me crazy. This one was a nice boy but I couldn’t get out because all of a sudden he couldn’t compare to A— L—! Too many times I’ve loved a broken human being cause this wasn’t the first time but not the last either.
(and answer—it does.)
I don’t want to tell you about the times that I laid in my bed and I laid on the couch and there was sun behind the window but my ceiling was blue shadow, hearing a daybird sing in the first-summer twilight and listening to A Comet Appears and Pink Floyd’s The Wall way too many times until I couldn’t be anything but a tortured artist, cause the myth of the tortured artist is a persuasive one, you know.
I don’t wanna talk about that last dark semester, too many lonely nights with the light of my iPod at 2am in that strange dusty back room, my roommate was a perfect child with a secret and I never knew her in the six months that she slept five feet from me, ducking her head in the hallway and cripplingly polite as she was, she went to bed at 10pm and stood up at the first chime of her alarm in the morning and I sat and wrote in the dark and listened to her sleep. There was a quiet storm raging in the rest of my apartment and I knew from the first day and especially at the last that I could see the lights on the mountains and that everyone else couldn’t.
That was a semester of black and gold, under fire from heaven, on my knees by my bed but unable to think about anything but my next assignments. I was doing everything right but the formula for me wasn’t working, I was losing everything that’s so important to me and I tried to read thy words but instead I would bite my knuckles and my hands and wish I could cut myself open like a fish—!
My brother let me cry on his chest for three awful hours in between the trees and the streetlights. I could see the yellow light from the doors opening and shutting like matchbooks in the parking lot and I wished someone would hear me out there because my entire being was crying out and I just couldn’t believe that nobody could see it!
I was trapped by two boys that were like anchors on my feet. But when I went with you to the salt flats like I had dreamed every day for half a year, looked to the sky and asked what a terrible world what a beautiful world, walked in the pink and spun poetry from the air, and then when I came back those kind of anchors ceased to have any kind of relevance to my being—!
I’ve been writing like a fiend since the eleventh day of last December. I’m sounding the river of my being, in time and place like a rapid bioassessment and searchable by a magnifying glass. I’ve said a thousand times that my existence is not sustainable, that I am burning inside like a swamp gas, and I only write stories that are true.
I don’t wanna say this but there is something about you that fills me up with gold.
I don’t need all that anger and those blessed twenty-one pilots expressing my broken relationship with my God. You’re such a help to me above and below, you’re so kind and special and so quiet but your soul is so so good, you showed me that you don’t have to be boring to be good, you let me soften my heart and fill my being back up with light. I’ve laughed to the sky a hundred times since the start of September, I tell myself that no one who gets this little sleep should be allowed to be this happy.
Some days I have the bones of a bird but I can’t tell you about all the mornings that I wake up with a sandbag in my chest. I can’t explain why but I’m doing better than I have been in years and years and years, I would never take away anything that has ever happened to me because everything in the world is beautiful.
And you know I had a moment in the green and the blue while I was walking under that bridge in Iceland, an insane trust in God that has been more solid and enduring than any trust I’ve had in Him before, despite the sunlight on the walls in that window-filled room and despite naps in the park and a firestorm in my brain just last weekend, there have been hands on my head and a peace in my heart as I’m kneeling on my deep blue sheets every single night, but now I think I get that You love me as I am, because for the longest time it’s been I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, but you know that right now it’s just thank you thank you thank you.
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Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 2, 2016 as part of a series.
My friend Mary Nikkel, who I once knew by the online nickname Elraen, was the first blogger I started regularly reading while I was still trapped in the cult my family was in, the Independent Fundamental Baptist movement. She blogs at Threads of Stars. Here is what she wrote about recovering from spiritual abuse.
I grew up believing that I could break other people, break myself, break the world, with the smallest of missteps.
There was a list of movies I couldn’t watch and music I couldn’t hear because they would break my mind.
There was a list of things I couldn’t wear because they would break the minds of others.
There was a list of words and opinions I couldn’t say because they would break someone else’s perception of the Christian faith.
There was a corresponding list of words and opinions I had to say because I would be sending someone to hell if I were to omit them.
The lists of the way I could break things seemed endless, and I lived by the letter of their law with an awful holy terror. But there are terrible consequences to believing you live in a world so breakable, with a soul so fragile. I began to feel like I was, at best, a weak excuse of a human for being so unable to meet the list of requirements, and at worst, a weapon designed only to damage the world. Better if I be removed for the sake of safety, my mind whispered on the dark nights. Better if I erase myself before I break anything or anyone else.
When grace opened the door to a wider world and I learned to walk in it (certainly with my fair share of bruises and skinned knees along the way), I would quickly be startled by a few truths. First was that the world was more elastic than I had imagined, that sometimes when I fell, rather than shattering beneath me like brittle glass, this wild life embraced me and bent around me and became a new kind of beautiful. Second was that sometimes even when something did break—my heart, a friendship, some corner of my innocence—my spirit had the ability to mend, like grace had planted this resilient life in me that outlasted even the death of dreams, the death of my strength, the death of all the porcelain pictures I once thought defined “good enough.” And really, perhaps these truths are no surprise in the end, for I believe in the truth of a Christ whose Spirit overcame death—who gifts that same Spirit to me.
On the other side of laws and fear-based protective prisons, I have certainly loved the freedom to enjoy things. I have the freedom to immerse myself in rock and roll, the freedom to dye my hair blue, the freedom to wear shorts and tank tops in the summer, the freedom to watch (and even laugh with) movies that currently matter in pop culture. But perhaps the freedom I have loved even more is the freedom to make mistakes along the way, knowing each small choice will not save or condemn me.
I have certainly found consequences and heartache out here. But I have outlasted them. And the steady hands of friends who have stayed with me, even when I say the wrong thing or say nothing at all, even when I’m feeling too small and dim inside to spark any kind of response to their lavish light, has taught me that maybe I can’t break others as easily as I once believed either. Maybe there is a staying power in our souls beyond anything we could possibly imagine. There is more grace out here than I ever knew.
I believed I was an ember, struggling to stay alive from my place embedded in the ash and dirt. Imagine my surprise to find a spirit like a star burning in me, relentless, impossibly bright, alive though it wander through the coldest walks of the night.
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Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 1, 2016 as part of a series.
Nostalgia is defined as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. The memories of childhood often evoke feelings of longing for a time when happiness abounded.
For some, the wistful, longing feelings of youth give way to an all-consuming emptiness. The definition of a ‘lie’ is to tell something untruthful. The state of untruth, of chronic deceit, replaces any feelings of nostalgia from my past.
I had no uninhibited feelings of curiosity. I lived in constant fear of ‘rebellion.’ An older sibling was always on the verge of a ‘dangerous path’ for some indiscretion.
My youngest memories are of parents whose marriage was on the rocks. In an attempt to maintain the family unit, I was used as a human shield.
I have vivid flashbacks of my father trying to force himself on my mother. The innocence of youth was torn from me at an early age. Every sense was violated by the presence of inappropriate boundaries, or lack thereof, with my parents.
My mother would rarely sleep with my father and usually when she did, I was placed between them.
I was her safe haven. As far back as I can remember, I was her shield, both physically and emotionally. I was not allowed to interact with my other siblings, creating animosity between myself and my siblings.
I was rarely allowed out of my mother’s sight. I was 17 years old before I was allowed to stay at home even if she was only grocery shopping.
However, as with every child, I bonded with my mother. I remember the normal feelings of wanting to please her and gain her approval, which was always elusive. I never knew when she would praise me or attack my “rebelliousness.”
Throughout my childhood I was not allowed to have friends, but I was very close to my sister Faith. We were never separated, which was by my mother’s design. Faith was the other half of the human shield. Combined, we formed a human triangle. We were a unit, it was as though Faith and I were appendages of my mother.
As a child, I was unaware of the cage I was living in.
I was not aware that I was being used as a shield to save a failing marriage. In many ways, I was like any other child.
I loved life, I was curious, I loved my family. I loved my parents. I was sure they really cared for me more than anything. I ran wild on our five-acre plot. I loved the creek near our house and my stuffed animals. I loved my mother’s cooking. I loved to bake cookies and play silly games with Faith.
The young child in me loved life, happiness and wanted only a safe haven, a place to explore the world without fear. But cages are a result of fear.
Paranoia resided in my parents, causing them to isolate their children, allowing us little contact with the outside world. We lived in a cage of patriarchy, guided by an “umbrella” theory of God. The gist of this theory was that our father was the portal through which God gave his will to children, especially girls.
It was my father’s duty to make sure his daughters were “pure” before marriage. It was my father’s duty to give his daughter to a worthy man, meaning he felt entitled to be heavily involved in any dating relationships. Young girls were not allowed to have opinions, much to the dismay of my spunky nature. I wanted opinions, I wanted respect. But I was rarely allowed opinions, and I was often mocked.
Becoming an adult in such a cage was confusing and stressful. Conflict burned within me. I loved my parents, why did I have to choose between them and the world? Was God as rigid as they claimed? Did God think women had a voice? Were women only meant to have babies? Does God hate me if I sin? If I lose my virginity will I go to hell?
Growing up in a cage also makes the bars of the prison cell harder to see. When talking with people ‘outside,’ it was strange when their responses to my circumstances were not in agreement with my parents.
You mean it isn’t normal to sleep on the floor of my parents’ bedroom until I was 14-years-old? You mean God made men and women equal? It isn’t normal for children to be told they are half-aborted? There is such a thing as marital rape, that isn’t only possible if you are unmarried? How can a husband rape his wife, aren’t they supposed to have sex?
Coming out of the cage, realizing my childhood was merely a chess game, in which I was nothing more than a shield, was more than painful. Adequate words are not available to explain how I can no longer look back on my youth, frolicking in my backyard without thinking about the cage I was in.
I cannot think of my long talks with Faith at night, memories I formerly cherished, without remembering how we were really drowning out the screaming of my parents. We were the shields, my life was a lie.
I can no longer see the remnants of my former life without feeling the stabbing pain of the lie of childhood. I cannot look back at my young self without feeling pity.
Sometimes I long for the home I thought I had as a child. I long to be a child again because I realize I never really experienced childhood. I was never in a safe environment. Sometimes I feel starved of love, ill-equipped to handle adulthood because I was not nourished. Just as bones break when they lack protein, the heart breaks when it lacks love.
The phrase, “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then” rings true for those who look back and see a dark past where once they saw a blooming meadow.
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