Coming out—to myself, to my therapist, to my friend—was following God into the unknown, no longer living in denial about these patterns. Flash forward to the present: following Jesus is not so much about coming out to new people but is more about being honest with people I’m already out to, about the ways I’m experiencing my queerness.

The gospel invites us to something better: to make Christ, not our struggles, the center of our lives. When we turn our attention toward Him rather than toward managing or escaping from ourselves, we begin to experience the deep rest that comes from being defined by His love, not by our resistance or our desires.

Isn’t that often the case in our relationship with God?

We’ve seen and tasted His goodness, yet we often fail to recognize its source. And it’s not just Christians—the whole world experiences glimpses of God’s goodness without realizing where it comes from.

When I look at myself, I still see many moments of ungratefulness in my life. Now I understand why: for a long time, I believed I couldn’t bring my deepest desires to God because I assumed they were all sinful. Deep down, I began to doubt His goodness—not fearing rejection from people, but from God Himself.

It is comforting in the Song narrative that the Beloved quickly comes to her senses and gets up, then pursues the Lover at significant personal cost (5:7), reminding herself in the process of how beautiful and, yes, desirable, He is.  Happily, she is soon re-united with Him and bliss is resumed.

In Laodicea, we are left with a cliffhanger situation; will they let the Lord in or not? The major difference in this passage is that Jesus is disgusted with their complacent behavior and threatens discipline or even violent rejection if they don’t wake up (Rev. 3:16).  We are left to write the ending of that narrative in our own hearts, minds, and lives.  I’d rather identify with the Beloved than with the Laodiceans.

The years-long battle in my denomination regarding faith, leadership, and sexuality forced my body into a perpetual state of fight or flight.  A sense of distress, rather than rest, was the norm, and I could no longer accurately assess when I was genuinely at threat. In this state, I was easily pushed past my emotional and physical limits into panic attacks, racing thoughts, racing legs, apparently, and a general feeling of anxiety and dread.

My friend’s comment opened my eyes to something I had normalized and, and initiated a two-year process of returning my heart, mind, and body to a sense of safety.     

What follows is an assortment of practices that helped me build resilience not only for the hardships I’d already experienced, but for the ongoing stressors that queer Christians face as part of their everyday lives.  I share them as examples of things you might consider or practice to help you return yourself to a sense of safety, which is really what resilience is: the capacity to endure hardship and return yourself to a sense of safety, so that you might experience life to the full.    

Depression and suicidal ideation have a high prevalence in LGBTQ+ spaces. But correlation does not mean causation. Just because a person is LGBTQ+ does not mean that their same sex attraction, gender incongruence, or queerness is the root cause of their mental health struggles. Rather, a greater source of mental health issues is treatment by others. And it isn’t just treatment of LGBTQ+ people on an individual level, but on a community level too. 

LGBTQ+ people experience collective trauma, meaning that the traumas that happen to people who are LGBTQ+, even in other locations, leave a deep and personal impact. An example would be the Pulse Night Club shooting in 2016. LGBTQ+ people also experience generational trauma, not because our parents struggled with some kind of sexual sin that made us queer; no, the trauma experienced by LGBTQ+ people throughout history impacts us today. Examples of such traumas would be the AIDS/HIV epidemic and the treatment of LGBTQ+ people in Nazi concentration camps. Intersectionality matters as well. For LGBTQ+ people who have other marginalized identities, such as being a woman, BIPOC, AAPI, an immigrant, or neurodivergent, their mental health struggles are amplified.

Which takes me back to James (and similarly Romans 5:3-5, and hey, let’s not forget pretty much the entire book of Hebrews in light of 12:5-13). When we seek the face of God, perhaps we should wrestle with the reality that, given our fallen state and natural inclinations, trials become a necessary means of showing us our weaknesses and shaping us to be more like the One we seek. Perhaps these time are, through the power of the Holy Spirit, even a gift from God. 

Because the loneliness and rootlessness I experienced growing up as a military brat and have experienced for much of my adult life have given me a deep longing for home and because the instability and dissolution of my marriage has made me acutely aware of the inability of human relationships to satisfy that longing, I resonate deeply with Hebrews 11: 14 For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. 15 If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. 

This is why the ex-gay promise—that orientation change is the standard outcome for gay Christians pursuing holiness—was so devastating for sexual minorities. It wasn’t a promise God ever actually made. Despite what some who promoted the ex-gay narrative claimed, Scripture never gave us reason to believe that changing one’s orientation—or, pattern of enduring attractions—was something God guaranteed. At the same time, a Christian life without any hope isn’t the answer either.  Gay Christians need to let go of the unbiblical hope for orientation change and instead embrace different, gospel-centered kinds of transformation in our sexuality—changes we can genuinely hope for and expect to see by God’s grace. Though the gospel does not promise orientation change, we are not powerless to submit our sexual desires and temptations to the lordship of Christ. We can trust the Holy Spirit to strengthen us to do this, further nurturing holiness within us as this takes place.