Part 1: Foundations of Faith & Fear
Chapter 1: A Boy on Fire for God
When was the first time you truly felt God’s presence in your life? Describe that moment in vivid detail.
For as long as I can remember, I have always had a deeply personal relationship with God where we actually talk to one another. I don’t pray in the traditional sense, I just literally chat with him. Growing up it was instilled in me by my mom to turn to the Lord always and to read his word. In the Old Testament I read stories about God talking directly to Abraham telling him that he needed to sacrifice his only son. I read the struggle and torment that he went through, but faithfully followed the Lord’s command and let his faith be greater than his fear. I read about God calling to Moses and telling him that he was calling him to a great work and to lead his people out of Egypt. I read the struggles that Moses endured about not being capable of leading, and not being a good speaker, and the Lord told him to trust Him. He put his faith above his fear and crossed the Red Sea and led his people to freedom. Account after account we read of the Lord speaking in the scriptures through a “thundering voice” as in 2 Samuel 22:14, a “still small voice” as in 1 Kings 19:12, a “mighty voice” as in Psalm 68:33, and so on. We read of his communication with Adam and Eve in the garden, telling Noah to build an arc, to Jonah to go and preach his gospel, etc. There are so many accounts of the Lord speaking to folks in the scriptures that are just like him pulling up a chair and chatting with his people. Having read these accounts I just expected the same and communed with him in that same manner. I always felt that a prayer that started with, “Dear Lord,” just wasn’t authentic or sincere. Mine typically start with, “Okay, so here’s what’s up,” or something like that anyway. It wasn’t until later in life that I was told that was considered “irreverent” and/or “disrespectful” to speak to the Lord in that manner. That blew my mind because, like I said, I was just talking to God the way I had read about him talking to others – me included. I never meant to be offensive, I was just talking to my maker who understands me better than anyone else ever could – myself included. He made me this way, he knows me inside and out, and he wouldn’t expect anything else from me. He meets me where I am and talks to me in a way that I can understand. If you find this shocking, get a load of this… God swears too! Yep, he is blunt with me and speaks to me the exact way I need to be spoken to. He’s told me to “get [my] shit together,” on many occasions!
I think the first time I truly felt God’s presence in my life was when I was very young. My mom took us to Calvary Temple Christian Center in Lake Villa, Illinois and under the direction of Pastor Hendrickson. I was also on a competitive bible team at Calvary Christian School (yes, a school run by the same church I attended) where we competed against other schools to see who knew more facts about the bible, it’s stories, characters, and verses in order to win points and ultimate bragging rights. I attended Bible Class every day in school, and each summer a bunch of church kids would all meet up at a camp down in Carlinville, Illinois for a week long adventure where we would eat, sleep, and live in God’s word. We’d all load into this rickety ass bus that would ALWAYS break down - without fail! I know, you’re never supposed to use “never” or “always,” but this is NOT an exaggeration. As sure as I was that I was heading down to spend a week in the “Moo-tel,” I was sure that this four hour ride would be a miserably sweaty six or more hours due to the state of our ride.
Every night at camp was a revival type church service where we would all be called to repentance and to invite the light of Christ into our lives. We were encouraged to be born again in Him, to accept Jesus into our lives as our personal Lord and Savior. I saw the spirit of God work in the lives of kids all around me every summer. I saw kids get slain in the spirit, speak in tongues, and I saw miracles of healing take place. This was both terrifying and intriguing. I knew God, and I saw God all around me each night for a week. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it at first, but I knew that these kids were different – in a good way and I heard how they spoke of God in their lives. I wanted that too. So, one of these summers I asked the Lord into my life and I became born again. I have to admit, I already had a relationship with the Lord so I didn’t feel any different, but it sure made my mom happy that, “[I] had accepted Jesus.”
I continued to talk to the Lord as if he were my friend, my confidant, and my redeemer. How I spoke with him was determined by what I needed at the time. If I just wanted to talk, he was my friend. If I needed to confide in him and needed advice, he was my confidant. When I needed forgiveness and wanted to be made whole, he was my redeemer. He’s a God who wears many hats for me in my life. This relationship with Jesus as my homeboy has continued all throughout my life and he is truly my best friend. Jesus is my jam and God is awesome!
What did faith feel like to you as a child? Was it comforting, terrifying, both?
Faith is believing in that which is not seen. Growing up attending a Christian school we were taught creation as opposed to the Big Bang Theory. However, we were also taught that evolution occurs all around us – as God has designed it. Things evolve and progress – even us humans, but we didn’t start out as sludge that somehow turned into monkeys first. I was taught at home, at school, and in church that faith was hope in something bigger and better than what I currently had. My upbringing was pretty rough and full of struggle, but I was taught to have faith for better circumstances, and so forth. Faith was relying on God to provide when the electricity had been shut off in the winter. Again. Or when there was only cold cereal without milk to eat. Faith wasn’t something I fully understood as a child. At the time, I think I was a victim of my circumstances and was just angry for being cold and hungry. I had a lot of rage as a kid and spent a lot of time being mad at God because I was going through a lot of shitty experiences of bullying at school, being physically abused at home, sexually abused by a neighborhood kid, struggling with my sexuality and being convinced I was going to hell for being such a horrible sinner and disgusting in the eyes of God, and so much more. I acted out in anger and was a real shit stick as a kid and having faith that things would or could get better was often confusing because I was so deep in the thick of so much pain that I couldn’t find the strength or the courage or belief to have faith that things would ever get better.
If your childhood self could have a conversation with you now, what would he say? Would he be proud? Confused? Scared?
I absolutely think my childhood self would be proud as hell! He thinks I’m a total badass warrior who has overcome just about every obstacle life threw in his path! I hope he would thank me for never giving up on him and for fighting like hell for him and his happiness. If I could give my younger self any advice, it would be “Don’t give up! It does, indeed, get better and it’s all worth it in the end!”
Did you ever doubt your faith growing up? What did those moments look like, and how did you handle them?
I definitely doubted my faith growing up, and I certainly got very angry at God and turned away from him when I wasn’t getting answers I had hoped to get when I wanted them and so forth. When I was getting harassed at school my mom would tell me to, “be like Jesus and turn the other cheek.” Then, as the bullying continued, got worse, and became more physical, she would get mad at me and tell me to “hit ‘em back!” The mixed messages were overwhelming. She would also be very heavy handed in her discipline with me telling me that, “the Bible says ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’” and there were many times I couldn’t sit after she spanked me within an inch of my life leaving welts and bruises and then turn around and tell me she loved me so much. She would often say, “this hurts me more than it hurts you,” yet I was the one who couldn’t sit down. This constant physical and emotional abuse I was suffering at the hand of my mom was so confusing and I would cry out to God to intervene and help me. When my situations got even more dark and twisted and my prayers would go unanswered I doubted my faith for sure!
I was sexually abused by a neighborhood kid and my mom’s abuse was used against me in order to manipulate me in performing sex acts on him. He would say things like, “If you don’t X, Y, or Z, I’m going to tell your mom and you’ll get in so much trouble.” He would use the fear that I had of my mom against me. This happened multiple times when I was very young and brings up the question of whether or not my childhood sexual abuse played a part in my being gay.
All throughout junior high and high school I was bullied, harassed, and terribly tormented as well and during these times I would cry out to God for help but nothing seemed to help. I was being abused at home, at school, and never seemed able to catch a real break which was frustrating and heartbreaking, but at the time I didn’t have the wherewithal to know that so I just acted out in anger and hurt. I was what my mom called me every day, “a hateful, awful, horrible, rotten child,” and I lived up to those expectations. I was a real pain in the ass and my faith fell by the wayside while I was just trying to survive one awful day at a time.
Can you recall a time when you were so sure God was speaking to you? What did He say?
Absolutely yes! When I was 21 I was praying to know if there was a prophet on the earth today. This is when I was investigating the Mormon church during another dark time in my life of severe depression, and I was trying anything and everything to escape the pain of my everyday life. I turned to drugs and alcohol and sex to numb my feelings and avoid my problems.
At the time I had a very good friend who invited me over to her house and her mom and the two of us were gathered in her kitchen making cookies one night and chatting about faith, and God, and Jesus, and I had made it very clear that I was NOT interested in joining the Mormon church. I kept saying that I am happy with my faith and that I had no desire to change religions. At some point in our conversation someone turned to the topic of revelation and prophets and Kathy (my friend Kessa’s mom) asked me if I thought there was a prophet on the earth today and I told her no – that the Old Testament prophesied of Christ’s coming, and that the New Testament was the story of Christ’s coming, his ministry, and the fulfillment of the prophecies and that was it. She asked me if I thought that after Christ’s ascension into Heaven that Jesus had left his disciples in charge to continue his work and ministry in his name. She asked by Jesus remaining in contact with those guys and encouraging them to continue to preach his gospel, if that would classify them as prophets in the sense that they had direct contact with God/Jesus and were leading his church/followers at the time. I agreed that yes, in that sense, they would be considered prophets. We kept chatting and she then said, “Okay, so Peter, James, and John were left in charge as prophets and continued the work. Now, when they came to the end of their lives, they passed the torch and burden of responsibility onto someone else to continue the work, yes?” That made sense to me and so I agreed with her. In essence, these guys who were left in charge continued to commune with God/Jesus and lead his followers/church and therefore I agreed that they could be considered prophets. We continued chatting and we talked all about my faith and my relationship with God and she then asked me that IF there was a prophet on the earth today, would I want to know that information? I said, yes, that would be cool. Then she challenged my faith and my relationship with God and said, “Well, I believe from what you have told me thus far about your relationship with God and the experiences you’ve had with him that IF you were to ask him if there was a prophet on the earth today that he would answer you. Do you agree?” I said, “Absolutely, he would. Yes!” She then said, “Well there you go. If you want to know if there’s a prophet on the earth today, you can just ask him yourself. You don’t have to take my word for it,” and that was the end of it. We kept making cookies and the subject wasn’t brought up again.
That simple question began to eat away at me and at first I just played it off and tried to ignore it, but it would just gnaw at me until I finally asked. And, when I asked I didn’t really want to know because I didn’t really care. I knew what I believed and I knew there wasn’t a prophet on the earth, but because I couldn’t shake this idea I had to just ask to say that I did and didn’t receive an answer. However, I began to obsess over this idea that there was someone on the earth today that has been called as a prophet of God himself and the fact that I didn’t know this information was incredibly upsetting. So one day I went out to my mom and said, “I’m going to lock myself in my room for a while because I gotta figure some things out with God so please don’t interrupt me, or ask me if I’m hungry, hold my calls, etc. I’m okay, I just gotta pray about some stuff.” She said, “Okay, good luck. Hope it all works out,” and off I went to seek his guidance and get an answer once and for all if there was a prophet on the earth today. This went on for hours and hours and hours. Finally, I heard as clearly as I had heard any other voice, “yes.” That’s it. Just “yes.” I jumped up and spun around trying to figure out where that voice had come from as it was an audible voice - not a voice in my head. It went something like this:
Me: There’s a prophet on the earth today?
God: Yes.
Me: I’m sorry, did you say something? Did you just say there was a prophet on the earth?
God: Yes.
My mind went into overdrive. How could this be possible? How did I not know this? And then I started to spin out and I said:
Me: Okay, it’s got to be the Pope. Everyone knows the Catholic church has been around
since the dawn of time. If there’s a prophet on the earth it’s got to be the Pope. Right?
God: *silence*
Me: There’s a prophet on earth today, and you know about this?
God: Yes.
Me: And it’s the Pope.
God: *silence*
Me: It’s the Pope, right? That’s who you have chosen as your prophet on the earth today?
God: *silence*
Then I started to freak out because the ONLY other option I could think of, was what Kathy and Kessa (and all my Mormon friends) believed, that the head of the Mormon church was the prophet on the earth. I could NOT wrap my brain around this because I had been raised to believe that Mormonism was a Satanic cult. Truly! I was taught that Mormons were all brainwashed robots who sacrificed virgins in their temples, baptized dead people and drank the blood of animals. We had ex-Mormons come to our church and tell us all the terrifyingly creepy things they did in their temples, how secretive they are and exclusive they are to non-members. So, knowing this and having had this message beat into my head my whole life, certainly it COULDN’T be “the Mormon guy,” but I thought I should ask just in case.
Me: Okay, to clarify, there is a prophet on the earth…
God: Yes.
Me: And it’s not the Pope.
God: Yes.
Me: Okay, so it’s the Mormon guy?
God: Yes.
This is when my brain literally fell out of my head. This could NOT be possible! There is no way after all I had been taught my entire life that this was possible. There must be a mistake.
Me: The Mormon guy is the prophet?
God: Yes.
Me: And you know about this?
God: Yes.
Me: There is a prophet on the earth today…
God: Yes.
Me: And it’s the head of the Mormon church?!?!
God: Yes.
Me: Fuck me! Are you kidding?
God: *silence*
Me: You’re shitting me, right?
God: *silence*
Me: There’s a prophet on the earth, right now, today…
God: Yes.
Me: And it’s the head of the Mormon church.
God: Yes.
With this new information I had A LOT to work though and sort out about my life as I was literally moving in with my boyfriend. There was an age difference between us and I was younger than he was and I was in and out of work so I was a financial risk, but he had just moved to a new place and was willing to try to make our relationship work and I was literally moving boxes into his new apartment when this happened. I thought, “Holy shit! If God had a prophet on the earth and it was the head of the Mormon church then by default I needed to better understand the teachings of the church and figure my life out, and moving in with my boyfriend was probably not the best move for me just then. So I drove over to his apartment, and through tears told him that I could never see him again because I think I was going to try and be a Mormon. I apologized profusely and begged him to forgive me and I gathered my belongings and left.
That was, by far, the clearest time when I was so sure God was speaking to me and what he said. There have been many more times, but that was the only time I heard the audible voice of God. Needless to say, that was a game changer for me. My whole life changed that day – for the better.
Who was your role model for faith? What lessons did they teach you?
My role model for faith was by far my mom. She taught me to always, always, always talk to God. She taught me to pray continually and never stop. Her parents and my dad were all killed by a drunk driver when I was just 7 months old. When that happened my mom tells the story of how as she was receiving the news that night from the officer on duty she just kept saying, “God help me. I don’t know what I’m going to do. God help me,” over and over. Looking back, many years later she says that’s what brought her to the Lord and when she found Jesus in a pentecostal/born again Christian way. Up to that point we were members of the Episcopal church. It was shortly after the accident that my mom found the Lord and left the Episcopal church and started attending Calvary. I grew up listening to Sandi Patty and The Gaithers and going to church every Sunday and attending the same Christian school that was at the church I attended. I was immersed in prayer, faith, and God all day, every day and it’s because of my mom that all of this happened. I am so grateful for her steadfastness in Christ and her unwavering faith. She loved God with her whole soul and would talk about Jesus as her Savior to literally anyone who would listen. She loved Jesus so much that she pushed a lot of her family away because she just wanted to save them and share with them the love and joy that she had found for herself. Looking back, she did the best she could just trying to survive – and I honestly do not think she could have without the help of her Heavenly Father. Those lessons were ingrained in me from a very young age and have served me well my whole life.
Even after I became a dad myself, and was raising my kids in the Mormon church, she would never stop trying to “save” my kids from the cult my wife and I decided to raise them in. She would pray with them, and one night at a sleepover at her house they accepted Christ into their lives. She was so proud when she called to tell me the next morning. I let her have her moment, but I knew that my kids already knew Jesus and had accepted him as their Lord and Savior, but it made her so happy that she finally got through to them – she believed they (and we) were brainwashed and she needed to save us. Ah well, let her have her moment, right?
How did your faith shape your idea of who you were supposed to be?
I was raised in a bible bangin’ church where people spoke in tongues, we praised Jesus, danced in the aisles, got slain in the spirit, had revivals, and were constantly reminded that, “the wages of sin is death,” and that all sinners go to hell. This is going to surprise you I’m sure, but in church, we were told that being gay was one of the most egregious sins that would send me to spend eternity weeping, wailing, and gnashing my teeth in eternal damnation. So to ever say it out loud was NEVER an option. If God hated gays, and I am gay, that meant God hated me.
So if God hates me, then that’s why everyone else hates me. They were just doing what we were told, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” It was my own fault I was treated the way I was – because God and all good Christians hated what was at my core. This is what I spent so long rolling around in my brain. This is what I fought within myself. This is what caused such depression, self loathing, anxiety, and a suicide attempt. I loved God. I thought he was awesome! Jesus was my jam! But I was so ashamed of being gay, disappointing God, and being an embarrassment to everyone around me. I wasn’t worthy of God’s love because I was gay, and if I wasn’t worthy of God’s love, I was unworthy of anyone’s love – including my own. I hated myself for being gay. I prayed that God would fix me, take away these unrighteous desires, and heal me.
He never did.
He never did, because there’s nothing to fix. Now I can say that with a surety being a grown man, having perspective, and a deeper understanding of myself and my relationship with God. As a kid though? No way!
Did you ever question whether you were worthy of God's love?
I think the obvious answer is a resounding yes! However, today, as a 48 year old man with more understanding, and having done a lot of work on myself I’d say no – but being young and trying to figure it all out for myself and going through hell, I definitely questioned my worthiness of God’s love. And that? That breaks my heart!
What was your first understanding of sin and how that shaped your self-image?
“Love the sinner, hate the sin.” Heard that all the time in church. Assumed that I was treated so poorly because everyone was just trying to “tough love” me into righteousness and repentance. If I could somehow get past this sin, overcome these feelings, pray hard enough, be good enough, try hard enough, something would give and I’d be healed.
As mentioned above, that never happened. However, it took many years before I came to the understanding that I was loved exactly as I am – a child of God, made in His image, and perfectly imperfect just the way He made me.
