I was shocked and heartbroken to realize that these were only a few of the lives lost that year, and that violence against LGBTQ+ people, and particularly against transgender people, was far more common than I had considered. This is the reality that makes a day like Transgender Day of Remembrance tragically necessary. Today, we honor the memory of transgender people whose lives are lost each year due to acts of hatred and violence. As a cisgender man, I write today to lament alongside my Trans and gender minority siblings, and to offer our community some spiritual reflections alongside our communal lament.

Dear Friends,

Revoice was created with a beautiful dream: to be a space where every person could experience the life-giving truths that they are fearfully and wonderfully made and that they have a place of unshakable belonging in God’s family. Yet we must also confess that we have not always exemplified these convictions for our gender minority siblings. 

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.