Are you married?

I’m used to answering without thinking. Now I can’t.

Every answer requires a calculation: who’s asking, what room I’m in, what they actually want to know. Do I give a simple answer or a more accurate one?

Who exactly is Elloa to me? Wife doesn’t entirely fit. Best friend undersells it by about twenty years and everything that is important to me. Ex-wife is not legally true nor emotionally. I find myself often having to go back eventually and tell the story. There is a moment in a casual meeting where you go a little further, and then I have to back up.

Say I meet a guy at a bar. Probably just a quick chat. It’s a gay bar, so being gay is already basically covered. I might say I have a partner. They are assumed to be a man. I’m cool with this because this is a casual meeting—who cares about details if I’m probably not seeing them again. But, if we talk for long enough, we eventually land at something akin to those scroll-stopping posts on instagram. Our conversation is picture after picture that makes sense and paints a life, then you see one that makes you stop. Look. Judge. Hopefully “like.”

That’s this moment. It’s almost always my kids. They come up. And were they adopted or biological. Who was the surrogate. And then it’s storytime.

I’ve started noticing how much I take for granted that English already has a word for whatever I’m going to need. It doesn’t. Swedish has a word — sambo — for someone you live with and build a life with and aren’t married to. It’s not a slang term; it’s on tax forms. If this is your situation, your neighbor will understand it immediately.

Japanese has the emotion “amae” — the comfort of being able to depend on someone without asking. To lean into love and assume you will not be rejected. That gets closer.

Life-partner. Other-half. Companion. Co-parent. My Person. Soul Mate. Anchor. Domestic partner. Cohabitant. Former spouse. Nesting Partner. Platonic life partner. Chosen family. — “We’re close. It’s complicated. She’s family. My kids’ mom. Someone I love.”

All a version of true. But just a version. Not actually true.

That’s not an accident of vocabulary, it’s just what vocabulary is. A language builds words for the things its culture expects to happen. It doesn’t build words for the things it didn’t plan for. And then people whose lives don’t match the plan find a linguistic hole exactly where they put the most important things about their little unique life.

I wrote a week ago about how labels can replace curiosity. This may seem like a contradiction, but here is what I think is the difference: the over-categorizing closes curiosity. Under-categorizing—having no word at all—makes a person invisible.

This is what I think is actually going on with the “all the letters”—the L-G-B-T-Q-I-A-plus.

The hostile version is familiar: ever-expanding proof of confusion, the woke mind virus, identity politics without a floor.

But there’s a more serious argument, made not by conservatives but by gay writers like Andrew Sullivan or Matthew Vines, that the original LGB movement was coherent precisely because it was about one thing: same-sex attraction. Who you love. Adding gender identity, then nonbinary identity, then a plus sign that could mean almost anything, didn’t clarify—it complicated. It handed critics a target they could actually hit. That argument isn’t coming from people who hate gay people. Some of it is coming from gay people who think the movement lost the thread. I don’t agree with the conclusion.

The list isn’t growing because reality is getting more complicated. It’s growing because language is finally doing the work of catching up to a complexity that was always there — just unnamed, unaccommodated, and quietly absent. Nobody invented these people. They fought enough for visibility that others finally started building words for them.

Speaking from my own life, not having a word costs something. Every time.

There’s a line from Donald Miller. He’s talking about marketing and says that people’s brains burn calories trying to process anything that doesn’t fit a category they already have. If your message takes too many calories to understand, people check out. They’re not trying to be cruel. They’re just conserving energy, the way brains are built to.

Being hard to explain has a price, and the price gets paid in relationship. Every person I meet has to decide whether they’re willing to burn the calories to understand what Elloa and I are, or whether they’d rather I just say “it’s complicated” and let them file me under Doesn’t Fully Make Sense, Move On. It stings, watching someone pull back a little after you explain your life to them.

And then every so often, someone doesn’t glaze over. Someone sits with the complicated answer and asks a follow-up question instead of changing the subject. 90% of the time, this person has a thing they struggle to explain too. Which is why queer spaces are so wonderful for queer people. I’ve never had a queer person pull back from my explanation. At least not yet.

That willingness—to spend calories on someone whose life doesn’t come pre-labeled—is one of the most healing things I’ve ever received. You reading this counts.

Elloa and I have built our own shorthand.

We give each other grace for which imperfect word gets used in which room. Sometimes I’ll use a word in front of new neighbors that neither of us would choose in private, because it buys us thirty seconds instead of ten minutes, and ten minutes is not always available. She knows. I know she knows.

My kids don’t need any of this. That’s the part that gets me emotional. They know I’m their dad. They know Elloa is their mom. They know we love each other and always have and always will, and they know we’re connected by something that doesn’t have a tidy name, and none of that costs them a single calorie.

It’s just their family.

I’ve watched them explain us to a new friend with more ease than I’ve ever managed with an adult, because they’ve never once needed the dictionary to catch up before they could love us right.

I don’t have a word for what we are. I’ve made an uneasy peace with not having one. What I notice now, more than the absence, is who’s willing to sit inside it with me. Knowing a person shouldn’t cost something, but it does. And the people willing to pay it are the ones worth keeping close.

When Rush Limbaugh died, a friend posted a series of his quotes as a tribute. “The good stuff,” they implied. Each quote described what liberals believe. And its what my friend believed liberals believed.

I am a liberal. Have been for a long time. And as I read, I could not find myself in a single quote. Not one. I didn’t recognize my liberal friends. Or the liberal elected officials I follow. Or the liberal writers I read.

I have never met the people of these quotes—and I’m a bit of a politics junkie—I know a lot of “people.” They may exist somewhere. But they are not “the left” as far as I can tell.

They are a tribe that was built to be argued against.

Constructed at a distance. Made of fear and the deep human need to know exactly where the enemy is standing.

Paul Knitter puts it this way: we make necessary distinctions, and then take them too seriously. Eventually the distinction becomes a dividing line. Before long we’ve built a border where none actually existed. We build tribes out of thin air and then go to war with them.

Labels are containers we reach for when we run out of curiosity.

Those are not us. We are not them. This is not that.

Its like tab-closing on a disorganized internet browser. It’s biologically essential, our brains can’t keep every possibility open forever. So we close tabs. We file people away. We stop asking questions because categories are cognitively cheap.

That moment when someone says something and you think—oh, I know what this is—and you file it under a label you already had waiting. You don’t have to follow them anymore because you already know where they’re going.

Liberal.
Conservative.
Moderate.
Evangelical.
Ex-vangelical.
Progressive.

The category does the work.

I’ve done it. I’ve watched people I love do it to people I love. It is efficient and it is human. And every time, even if in just a small way, it robs someone of being truly known by you .

The one whose mind doesn’t fit the file. The one who, if you stayed curious long enough, would surprise you.

This is what almost kept me from writing any of this.

I fear as much. Though that was there when it really came time to hit “post.”

But the overriding urge preventing me from posting was more like, “what’s the point?”

It wasn’t because I was afraid people would disagree.

I expected that.

What discouraged me was the feeling that many people would decide what I believed before they ever finished reading.

I know the tabs that will get closed. I know the categories already being prepared for whatever I’m about to say. I’ve watched this happen to enough people to know how it goes, and for a long time the knowing made the whole thing feel pointless before I even started.

Even on the most sensitive topics, like faith and doubt, I'd watch people become categories before they remained people. "Church trauma." "Theological misunderstanding." "Deconstruction." "The slippery slope." Once the category was assigned, the conversation often seemed to follow a script rather than the person standing in front of them.

But I kept thinking about the people who wouldn’t do that. Who are still here. Still curious. Still willing to let a person be more complicated than they expected.

I want to be known before I’m categorized. I want my personhood to exist in your mind before the label arrives. Because once the label lands, the person has a harder time getting through.

And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

I think most of us want the same thing.

To be understood before we’re explained away.

To be known before we’re categorized.

And once curiosity leaves, the truth of a person has a much harder time getting through.

Grief and gratitude don’t cancel each other out.

I love my life. I wouldn’t want my life to be any other way. It is a blessing to be able to live it.

And yet I grieve a life I didn’t live.

A home I never knew. Friends I never had.

I’ve found this dissonance a surprising and strangely comfortable thing to hold together.

There is an ache for the freedom I could have experienced earlier. I've felt something similar about my depression. If I'd found healing sooner—or never needed it at all—I might have become secure in myself years earlier. But then I wouldn't be quite the person I am today. I’m who I am, in part, because of those struggles.

I have the life I have. And it’s great.

My children exist.

My closest relationship exists.

I am alive. And I mean that literally—that was not an obvious option during the darkest days of my adolescent depression.

I have thrived. I’ve grown, changed, and improved greatly. I’ve had purpose and contributed meaningfully to the world.

And yet. There is regret. Profound regret for a version of me that never lived.

People who loved me wounded me. They didn’t mean to. They were sure the life that lay before me as a gay man would create suffering. That it was outside of God’s design, and while God would always love me, it would create circumstances that would result in great harm.

I have not been failed by bad people. Just misinformed ones.

Well-intentioned. Wrong. Misguided, but not malicious.

And while this is complicated and the topic of therapy: I’m not angry. Not at them at least. I’m angry at something larger, I think. Or maybe I’d call it more concerned and grieved by it.

The world failed us.

The Church failed us.

These specific, beautiful, wonderful people in my life? They saw a boy who was broken, sad, and lonely—and they told him that he mattered. That he was a leader. That he was valuable. And as soon as he started believing it, he felt like his life truly began.

But can you imagine if they went further. If they’d finished what they started and fully allowed me to find the me I am just now beginning to discover.

The church gave me something real. It gave me legitimate ways to sit with real pain, to find meaning inside it, to fill what was hollow with something that had weight.

That weight—the calling and training stays with you.

No matter how much I doubt my faith, or my church, I’m still a pastor. It still shows up.

It showed up at 2 a.m. in a club with someone I’d just met who needed to talk to someone he could trust.

It showed up at a gathering when a man went quiet and emotional as I talked about real connection beyond the transactional—the mutuality, the intimacy of being fully known. Something cracked open in him.

It showed up over drinks with a widower who told me about holding his husband in his arms as he died. I knew how to sit beside him. To let him feel those emotions and not have to worry about how I received them. To let him talk about the size of his loss and the measure of what they had.

Something in me just knew how to hold all of those moments. How to be steady without making it smaller.

How the church ministered to me did change me for the better. I want to be honest about that because it would be easier and cleaner to say it didn’t. But it did. I genuinely healed. I got happier, more secure, more capable of love. Every sign of growth confirmed the framework. And so I never questioned the framework.

These pastors helped me see so much about myself.

So when I meet gay men now—young and old—I’m aware of something complicated.

I have something to give: a practiced tenderness, a kind of spiritual triage, the ability to sit beside pain and not turn it into a lesson. The ability to help someone feel seen beyond the mask they are used to wearing. That didn’t come from nowhere. The church formed it in me.

I know how to hold fear without making it smaller. I know how to name what hurts. I know how to stay steady when someone is unraveling.

And yet, many of the men I meet have something to give me, too: a sense of ease inside themselves, an earlier integration, a life that didn’t require so much unlearning just to breathe.

I believe the Church keeps doing this: it creates fractures and then points to those fractures as evidence that the diagnosis was right all along. The loneliness, the shame, the divided self become proof that something is wrong with the person, rather than evidence of what the teaching itself has done.

And I know the theology many of us were handed requires non-affirming conclusions. I’m not pretending that’s a small shift. I’m just saying: when something you were taught by an authority becomes clearly untrue in lived reality, it doesn’t stay contained. You start to doubt the rest of what that authority told you.

I know you have scriptural reasons for not affirming. Peter had scriptural reasons for not welcoming Gentiles, too—and yet they saw God doing something different among them.1 I believe it's time the Church really looked at this beautiful community and the different thing that God is doing among them.

I’m grateful for the real gifts I received. I can honor what the church gave me without calling the wound holy. I’m grateful for what held me, and I’m grieving what it cost. I’m grateful for so many things, and yet I’m grieving the life I didn’t live.

Language can hide what someone truly thinks. It can obscure the fact that we don’t actually agree, even when we sound like we do. You say love and I say love, and we have never compared definitions. You say Kingdom of God and I say Kingdom of God, and we build churches, write songs, raise children, and dedicate our lives to it—only to discover years later that we may have been imagining very different kingdoms all along.

Today is the Fourth of July. Two hundred and fifty years of this country. This year it feels heavier.

For many people I know, November 2024 joined a short list of dates that live physically in their minds—what psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik called a flashbulb memory. The kind where someone asks you years later where you were, and you remember the smell of the coffee, the light in the room, the feeling in your chest. For people like me, November 2016 and November 2024 carry disorientation. Moments where life divided into a before and an after. And yet many of the people I love experienced those same days as little more than a normal Wednesday—perhaps with relief that the election ads had finally ended.

I wasn’t prepared the day after this most recent presidential election. I was prepared to lose but I wasn’t prepared for what that day brought. I walked into work (a church) and into conversations with people I loved, and realized that something enormous had happened inside me while almost nothing seemed to have happened inside them.

That’s why I’m writing this post.

Not to rail. Not to condemn. If this were a conversation, I’d want to hear your story too—what led you to vote the way you did, what hopes or fears shaped that decision. Substack doesn’t really allow for that. So all I can do is tell you what it felt like from inside mine.

I’ve been shaped by the people closest to me, by the books I’ve read, the podcasts I’ve listened to, and yes, by algorithms that know exactly how to keep my attention. I’m not writing from neutral ground. I know that. But I also can’t honestly tell my story by pretending everything I’ve experienced feels symmetrical. From where I’ve stood—from the churches I’ve loved, the communities I’ve belonged to, and the people I’ve trusted—I watched something change. Maybe you experienced the same years very differently. I’m only trying to explain why I can’t tell the story that way.

Rev. Raphael Warnock has said, “a vote is a kind of prayer for the world you wish to see.” Whether or not that framing captures everything, it captures how voting feels to me. My vote wasn’t simply about policy. It was an expression of the kind of world I wanted to help build.

I know many faithful Christians prayed just as sincerely before casting a different vote. I’m not questioning whether they prayed. I’m trying to explain why discovering that we were praying for such different visions of the future left me feeling like we had begun speaking different languages entirely.

Political choices are rarely clean. None of us gets everything we want. Our two-party system forces compromises that frustrate nearly everyone. A vote doesn’t mean you endorse every word a candidate has ever spoken or every decision they will ever make. I know that. But it does say something about what we were willing to accept in pursuit of the future we hoped to create.

What I will say is this. Something has been creeping in—not just out there, but in places I know well. Something like secondhand smoke. Not loud. Not always obvious. Just present. A residue. You don’t always notice it until you realize the air has changed.

I have watched people I genuinely love begin describing those on “the other side” as enemies of America, enemies of the Church, or enemies of God’s purposes. Some of those people taught me. Some prayed over me. Some shaped my faith. I don’t doubt their sincerity. But I also can’t ignore what it feels like to realize that, without either of us changing rooms, I slowly became one of the people they were warning others about. That realization has changed me and changed many of the people who agree with my vision of the future.

I no longer know how to comfortably worship in a church where I believe most people hold conservative political convictions. That sentence grieves me to write.1 The reason isn’t that I think those churches are filled with bad people—I don’t. Many are filled with people I deeply love. This is not a condemnation. It’s a confession of loss. Because I know that I couldn’t invite my closest friends to my church. I don’t know that they would feel comfortable enough to exhale. And if I’m honest, I know that I wouldn’t feel comfortable either.

Suppose I ran for Congress. Suppose everyone already knew exactly what I believed before I ever walked into a church—my politics, my views on LGBTQ+ inclusion, everything I’ve written. Would I be welcomed? I don’t mean greeted. Churches are usually very good at greeting people. I mean welcomed. Would people hope I came back next Sunday? Would they celebrate my family becoming part of theirs? I’m sure you would welcome me. But what about the person sitting to our left during the sermon? Would that family be okay with mine? Would I quietly become someone’s concern—someone to pray about, someone whose presence made the room just a little more uncomfortable.

Let me flip that question around: What would you do if you knew you were the one making the room uncomfortable?

That is the experience of being my authentic self in most churches. And it’s even more true for my friends who don’t carry what I do—years of knowing, really knowing, that people in those rooms have loved me. They don’t have that cushion. They already know how the room feels before they sit down.

I grew up believing the Church was the safest place to tell the truth about who you are. Somewhere along the way, I stopped experiencing that. Not because everyone changed overnight. But because, over time, the political culture, the media culture, the online culture—somehow that became the driving culture of the church. A secondhand smoke of a different world has settled into so many hearts inside the church that it is slowly dividing who either of us can fully be inside these communities.

It’s not that we voted differently. Its not even that we disagree. It’s that I know the communities that once felt like home to me, would no longer recognize me as family.

There are people reading this who know me—friends, former colleagues, people I grew up with. They’re going to wonder what’s going on as they see things change about my life. This is partly for them.

Also, I hope this reaches some people who disagree with my theology. Several posts coming up speak more to that. As you can imagine, I think the church needs to change. This is partly for those who disagree with me, too.

But there’s another group I’m really thinking about most. People like me. People who might need to leave.

There is an amazing song by Flamy Grant, “If you ever leave, I hope you leave a light on. Just enough to see, the open door you left from.”

Listen to "If You Ever Leave"

I've struggled to put this next part into words.

I just left a church that was the most sincere I have ever known in trying to help kids like me, and adults like me now. I adore these pastors. These pastors saved my life. These churches raised me. This part of my story is the hardest to write, because I wouldn’t be the person I am today without them.

Being critical of them can feel, I guess, like “betrayal.” And I'm going to do it anyway. I wrote a first draft with harsh language. Then softened it. But now I’m going to go more first draft because I think they can handle it, and because I want them to hear it from me.

The pastors I worked alongside are wonderful people. I have watched them—with the best intentions—cause profound harm to people like me. (And not just people like me…but me.) Not because they are cruel. But because the theological framework they’re working inside of doesn’t leave room for us—for the real us. I felt for many years that we were making progress, finding a better way to minister.

I was wrong. We were not, are not, and are getting worse.

My theology has shifted. But it didn't shift in a vacuum. I've been given access to other lives, other stories of men and women with and without the church trauma I carry. And what I've seen in the younger generation especially, LGBTQ+ people who grew up with better theology, who never had to unlearn what I've spent years unlearning…they're thriving.

So I say to people like me: nothing is wrong with you.

God will not save you from it, because you are not lost. God does not place a universal call on you to be celibate. God will not take away what God meant to bring you profound joy. God will not heal what God meant to make his Church complete. Your design is not the flaw. It is the point. God doesn’t need you to change this part of you to be whole; God needs this part of you to make his Church whole.

So I say to the Church, you need these people.

Not as a project. Not as a theological problem to solve. You need their perspective, their creativity, their stories, the way they’ve learned to love at a cost, the way they’ve had to think harder about God than most people ever have to. LGBTQ+ people have been sitting in your pews for centuries, quietly carrying what you told them to carry. And the gifts they could have brought you, the truth they could have held with you, the beauty they were made to display—you let that walk out the door. You’re still letting it walk out the door.

People like me: God meant for you to display the beauty and diversity of his creation. God intends to use you to bring truth, justice, and love to his Church.

God is proud of you.

He wants to save you from shame.

I’m 44. I know what it costs to live a life that almost fits—to be in every room you’re supposed to be in, doing everything you’re supposed to do, and still feel one layer removed from your own life. I know the weight of carrying something alone so long you start to believe the carrying is just who you are now.

It isn’t.

I’m not trying to tell you what to do. You’ve had enough of that.

But you are not wrong about yourself. I prayed those prayers. I meant them. I woke up the next morning exactly the same. Not because I failed. Because there was nothing to fix.

And I want to be clear about something. I loved every day of my life. I was thriving. And yet, the life I have now is more full and more real than anything I lived before it. Even in the confusion and difficulty of profound change, I am whole. My life is integrated. (Several friends and family members have noticed. I’m lighter. My voice is different. My cadence. My posture and stride. Even my heart rate is down. I am physiologically healthier.) And it started the moment I stopped trying to live a life that I wasn’t meant to.

The other side of saying it out loud is more real, not less. More complicated, yes. More costly, sometimes. I won’t minimize that. But more real. I am more myself on the horizon of my forty-fifth birthday than I have ever been before.

I don’t know what you’re risking. I don’t know what you stand to lose, or how long you’ve been waiting. So this isn’t advice. Just another story of someone who left.

I left because, to paraphrase Larenz Tate, I realized at some point you have to stop begging for a seat at the table and go build your own.

If you ever leave—whenever you’re ready, on your own terms—we’ll leave the light on for you.

I knew when I was six.

I knew when I was six that the way I felt about Carrie Fisher wasn’t quite “normal.” And it wasn’t something I should let others know about. In other words, I knew I was different. And I knew that wasn’t okay.

There’s a scene in Return of the Jedi, on a bridge in the Ewok village. Luke and Leia have an intense (or as intense as George Lucas’s limited dialogue talents will allow for) conversation about The Force, the current situation, and (shocker) that they are siblings! Leia is noticeably upset as Han approaches her on the bridge and asks her what’s going on. At some point she asks him, “hold me” and leans in as he embraces her. It’s as cringy as cringy can get.

But when I was a kid, I’d watch that scene over and over and over, imagining myself as Han Solo. I didn’t have words for it then, or even conscious thoughts, but I knew that the one I was supposed to want to be was Leia.

The mind can convince the body it’s something it’s not

As I grew up, I found myself attracted to women or female peers here and there. “Girl crushes” as we called them. I had a couple “boyfriends” occasionally…always initiated by the boy, not by me. I grew up in the Southern Baptist church. I was a “double PK (Preacher’s Kid),” as both of my parents were on staff in the Southern Baptist Convention.

A key experience of growing up in 90s evangelical youth culture was “True Love Waits.” The goal of the campaign was to convince teenagers to sign pledges of abstinence until marriage. Purity was glorified as the ultimate goal. The ultimate sign of maturity. The ultimate characteristic of a “desirable” future spouse.

“Flee sexual immorality! Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the person who is sexually immoral sins against his own body.”

I had this verse on lock. Committed to memory in heart, mind, and body. We pledged our commitments to purity (as defined by a committee of old white men), wore rings that looked like wedding bands (because we were married to Jesus until we were married to our earthly spouses), and did our best not to think about sex (during the phase of life when hormones are, ahem, doing their thing).

As part of this oddly obsessive focus on purity, there was this event that many youth groups did called “How Far is Too Far?” In the context of purity culture, I’m sure you can guess exactly what this was. But if you’ve never gotten to experience the specific horror that is a “how far is too far” youth group session, let me explain.

They separate the guys from the girls. The girls’ session was led by someone’s mom, the guys’ session by someone’s dad.

The gathered teenagers were asked to name every sex-related act they can think of. Literally anything goes. For the naïve preacher’s kids like me, this was my chance to learn a thing or two! For the kids who live for the attention of shock value (also me), this was a chance to throw out the most ridiculously taboo thing they could think of. Horribly, for the girls who had already done some of these things, it was an evening filled with shame.

Our leaders would then list all these actions in order of how close they were to “actual sex.” The goal being (I think?) to give us a line to draw so we could maintain our precious purity. Naturally, I hadn’t done any of the things on the list, so I’d find these sessions wildly entertaining and hilariously taboo, then I’d walk away patting myself on the back.

Because I had zero desire to have sex with a boy, I figured I was doing something right! Purity? Check. Sexual immorality? Not even a blip on my radar. Copious amounts of “girl crushes”? Look away! Pretend those don’t exist.

Safety is a catch 22 when the danger exists inside yourself.

I took all these inklings, quiet internal whispers, undeniable crushes, and shoved them deep into a nearly inaccessible part of my psyche. What I was keeping at bay was this lurking, chilling notion that if anyone were to find out how different I am, the bottom would drop out. The ground would crumble underneath me. My acceptance into the only culture and community I’d ever known hinged on:

• fitting in

• “guarding my heart”

• Purity

• Attraction to boys.

  • Which leads to marriage to a man.

  • Which leads to children to “raise in the faith.”

To be fully known was—I was sure—to be fully, entirely, wholly rejected.

A Lifeline

When I got to college, I met Mike and we started dating. We dated off and on for a couple years, with me breaking it off because of lingering doubts. Having no idea what was “supposed” to be happening in my heart or in my body, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was missing. But our friendship (and friend group) was so close, so tight-knit, that we kept some semblance of a relationship going. As the thoughts in my head got louder and impossible to ignore, it became almost necessary to tell someone.

So I told Mike that I was attracted to women. That I couldn’t ever remember a time when I didn’t have a crush on a girl.

And he told me he felt the same way about guys.

In that moment I felt an almost physical “whoosh” of weight being lifted off. I wasn’t alone! It wasn’t just me. I’m not the only one. And what a gift that my best friend shares my same “struggles!”

Convinced that we were meant to be together, and knowing I couldn’t imagine a life without him, we got married. We built a life together. Built a community of wonderful friends. Had two amazing, beautiful kids. From the outside, it all looked perfect. And in some ways, it was. But in some key ways, it very much wasn’t. We were contorting ourselves into something we weren’t. To belong. To fit in. To remain in the community we’d built our lives around.

Neither one of us lived the life we were supposed to live. We never got to be the people we were supposed to be.

And yet.

It’s never too late for authenticity. It’s never too late to become who you’re supposed to be.

What’s next?

That’s a story for another day and another post. But we want to tell this story to honor those brave souls who have gone before us, and to leave a light on for those who will come behind us. If you see your story reflected back to you in ours, know that you’re not alone. You have what it takes—when the time is right—to live your authentic story.

I’d noticed things before that felt different, but by twelve I was certain. I was just beginning middle school in a new school district and was two years into what would become a fifteen-year struggle with depression.

With sixth grade came sex ed, and at an evangelical church that meant “True Love Waits,” purity rings, and entire Sundays dedicated to teaching boys how not to think about girls. How to look away and do what they called “flee temptation.”

It became obvious very quickly that I didn’t have any of the same problems as everyone else.

The strict heteronormativity showed me who I wasn’t. Purity culture described “the norm” so specifically that I could easily see I wasn’t it. This of course deepened my depression, and left me clinging to the furthest edge of any room I was in.

By twelve I was sure.

I was gay.

And I didn’t tell anyone for a very long time.

The Consequence of Those Years

Depression was really the theme of those years. That was what I felt every day. When you hate yourself that much, friends are hard and girlfriends are out of the question. I did have some friendships, especially as I got into high school.

Depression had taken up a lot of brain space, but as it lifted some in late high school, my sexuality became a greater concern. The Southern Baptist Church I was in almost never mentioned it. The “gay agenda” hadn’t yet become the invented enemy the “church and state” would make it.

I genuinely assumed it would go away. It didn’t.

The voices in that world had a term for what I was experiencing: “same-sex attraction.” You weren’t gay. You just had this “struggle.” The distinction mattered to them theologically. If it was an identity, it was something you were. If it was an attraction, it was something you fought. Their faith required the second option. So that’s the language they built.

I understand it. I even appreciated it once. Many used it because they were honestly trying to create belonging. They wished to avoid the slurs and to leave a door open. But it had a cost.

John Ortberg, borrowing from Dallas Willard, described the soul as the thing that integrates everything—will, mind, body—into a single life. A well-ordered soul is one where those things are in harmony.

How you love, who you move toward, who you let in—that isn’t a secondary feature of who you are. It runs through the center. When you build language that separates who someone is from who they're allowed to be, that's what you're doing to them. You're not managing their struggle. You are breaking the integration they were designed for.

Finally Telling Others

At New Year’s toward the end of my senior year, I was at a youth camp. There was a pastor speaking—someone I’d heard of, who seemed caring. He was someone who had no history with me and no stake in my future. He seemed safe.

I walked up to him completely terrified and told him.

I want to say more about that conversation later, because it deserves more than a paragraph. What I will say is this: I walked up to that man carrying something I had carried alone for six years, and he received it with a kindness I still haven’t forgotten. He gave me his cell phone number. Told me to reach out whenever I was ready for next steps, on my own time, in my own way. That conversation was the first step out of something I wasn’t sure I was going to survive. This man is and will always be a hero in my story.

That summer I came out to a youth intern, then my youth pastor. They encouraged me to tell my parents.

My parents handled it well, especially for the times we were in. I had kept so much from them—the depression, my sexuality, and most of my interior life. Now that I have kids, I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for them to learn what I’d been going through. They listened. The tears came when I got to the parts about my depression and what I had thought of myself. My parents got me into counseling.

Christian counseling at a Southern Baptist Church is usually the part of this story where conversion therapy comes in. Exodus International was everywhere. I encountered their literature. But this counselor—and everyone I interacted with, by what feels like sheer luck—didn’t go that direction. The counselor saw, correctly, that the depression was the thing that needed attention. Not the orientation. Someone finally started treating the thing that was actually killing me.

I started dating. Haltingly, awkwardly. But everyone dates awkwardly at first. And, the church taught us the “boundaries” of dating. So my lack of temptation felt a bit like what was supposed to happen. Looking back, I was dating them for friendship more than anything else. That was the part I was drawn to. I always found women easier to connect with and interact with. Everything was easier. I didn’t have to be anything in particular.

And then I met Elloa.

Every minute I ever spent with her was perfect. We were so opposite but it just worked. She loved what was different about me. I loved what was different about her.

We dated, broke up, got back together, broke up again. Later that next year we found ourselves back in the same orbit, knowing it would be awkward for our friends if we didn’t find a way to be civil. We agreed to meet. Coffee. Breakfast. Whatever.

She came out to me that morning. She was the brave one.

Then I came out to her.

What began in that moment was an impossible miracle of a relationship. She became family in the deepest sense of the word. The person who saw me exactly as I was and chose to stay. I still thought, then, that this was what I was supposed to do. I didn't know if it would work.

We got married. We built a life. We raised kids. We found community. We worked in ministry together and it was good—genuinely, surprisingly good.

(I’ll speak for myself here and not for Elloa.) Over time I became theologically affirming. It was slow, then all at once. But I was married. I didn’t need to come out, even to friends. It would just cause problems. And I was never really comfortable.

Hell, I’m not comfortable now. I’ll probably have a panic attack when I post this.

But it’s beyond time.

My life has been wonderful. Full of love, full of friendship. Elloa knows everything about me and is still my closest friend in the world. We are still raising our kids together. There is no word for what we are, and I've looked—married, partnered, nesting partners, best friends. None of it fits. I'll write another piece someday about the absence of that word.

What I know is that nothing I love in this world would exist without her.

And we both know that neither one of us lived the life we were supposed to live.

Those people never got to exist.

What’s next? Neither of us knows. But we’re excited to find out. We are excited to meet the people we were always supposed to be.

Not just in the way the conversation flowed. I mean something more specific. There was an absence of interference. There was a lack of what usually runs underneath things and keeps me slightly elsewhere.

I was just there. He was just there.

And as we talked I wasn’t monitoring the conversation from a slight distance. I was in it. And it kept going somewhere real. I was going somewhere real with someone who was basically a stranger.

It wasn’t even that deep. Not yet. But it could have gone there. There were moments of vulnerability. Of transparency I hadn’t even shared with close friends. And all of it was met with mutual understanding. There was nothing in the way.

“That, that is what that’s supposed to feel like.”

Being Known

Working in churches my entire life, there is an idea that is paramount — being known. Truly known. Not just liked, respected, welcomed. Known. Not known as in information, but known deeply and fully.

Here is the problem. I couldn’t be known. Not really. Not there. Not in the church.

In an interview, Denzel Washington was asked if he felt it was important that Black films (films with Black Cultural Stories) were only told by Black filmmakers. I love his response.

“It’s not color, it’s culture. Steven Spielberg did Schindler’s list. Martin Scorsese did Goodfellas, right? Steven Spielberg could direct Goodfellas. Martin Scorsese probably could have done a good job with Schindler’s List. But their cultural differences... we all know (speaking to the other black actors on stage with him) what it is when a hot comb hits your hair on a Sunday morning (referring to a black cultural experience and Spike Lee’s ability to more fully understand and represent that scene in Malcolm X).”

That is the kind of knowledge you either carry in your body or you don’t. You can be generous. You can be gifted. You can love someone across a cultural divide with everything you have. But you cannot know what you have not lived.

What if the things that defined you most deeply were only true of you?

What if certain questions ran through your head, but never appeared in conversation—not because people didn’t care, but because they simply hadn’t occurred to them?

Imagine being the only one you knew who couldn’t get pregnant. The only one who had lost a spouse. The only one who had ever wrestled with depression. You could be surrounded by people who loved you and still be, in the specific way that matters, alone in every room.

Lately, I have found myself more1 fully known by strangers than by people who have been in my life for decades. And I don’t mean only that I’ve allowed myself to only be known here—though that’s a bit true. I mean there was something we shared that made understanding possible in a way it simply hadn't been before. There was no gap to manage. No translation. No monitoring of how I was landing, no quiet cleanup of what I’d just said.

Richard Niebuhr wrote that we are ethically obligated not just to speak the truth, but to speak in a way the other person can receive it. I believe that. I’ve spent my whole life doing it. But I've realized something: when I am always tending to how I'm being perceived, always listening to my own words from the outside, I am never fully in the conversation I'm actually having.

And it distorts what I actually believe. Because I never really allowed myself to sit with my beliefs, thoughts, and understanding as they actually were. I never really let myself be with myself as I actually was. I only encountered those things after they had been translated for someone else.

When life requires constant translation, finally meeting people who already speak the language feels like coming home—and gives you something rare: the chance to simply be there.

Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same

There’s a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same.

And there’s doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

[…]

— Malvina Reynolds, “Little Boxes,” 1962

In 1962, Malvina Reynolds wrote “Little Boxes” while driving through a new post-war suburban development outside San Francisco—watching the homes repeat themselves on the hillside and thinking about what that repetition does to people. It’s a song of its era: pointed, a little protest-y, and a bit of an oversimplification. Those little boxes made life affordable. They gave people community, stability, a place to raise kids.

I grew up in one of those boxes.

I want to say this directly: I’m not writing to indict the people who raised me or the community that formed me. The love was real, and it was a great place to be raised. It shaped me into the person I am today, and I rather like that shape.

But what happens inside a person when belonging has a shape, and you learn to become that shape before you’ve realized that you were doing it?

My box was safe. It was full of people who loved me. It was good to me, and it often gave me opportunities to belong. A little box on a hillside next to other little boxes, all the same.

I went to school. Found a faith I believed in. Found people who shaped me and saved me. Worked in ministry. Got married. Had children. Built a life that made sense from the outside, and from the inside, mostly, too.

The love was real. The work was fulfilling. I laughed a lot. Cried with people. I felt known, useful, and connected. I built real things alongside people who mattered to me.

This isn’t about the suburbs. It’s about Reynolds’s underlying concern—conformity—and how it lives in every community, school, church, and organization.

I grew up becoming whoever the room needed me to be, and I didn’t know it. My temperament made it more acute. I’m wired to keep the peace, but my beliefs pretty consistently sat outside the norm of what was around me. So I learned to hold them quietly and stay in the room.

Some of that was strategy. I believed presence mattered more than scoring points. That if you wanted to influence something, you had to remain inside it. (And its influence back on you was usually a good thing). So I tempered reactions, let theology slide that I should have challenged, stayed quiet in conversations where I should have pushed back. I told myself it was grace. And I was in this for the long haul not a short win.

But somewhere the strategy became the person. I'd been doing it long enough that I stopped noticing I was doing it. The room's version of me stopped feeling like a choice I was making and started feeling like just—me.

I wasn’t wearing a mask or choosing to play a part. It wasn’t code-switching or hiding. None of those are quite the right word. I was habituated. It was the water I swam in, and I just swam.

I agreed with the advice I was given, “never settle for just making a point, make a difference,” but I forgot the other advice from the same person, that “your friends will determine the direction and quality of your life.”

Between the two of them, the second is the truer aphorism.

And then there was the theology. Most communities do what this one did — shape you quietly, without asking. The culture shaped me without my knowing it. The theology told me I shouldn't want to be any other shape. That's a different thing entirely.

This post isn’t a critique; it’s a testimony. It’s how it felt and what happens as an unintended consequence of what I experienced. At least for me.

I didn’t experience it as oppression. It just felt like how things were. Embedded theology. Embedded politics. Embedded worldviews, frameworks, and culture. Embedded windows for what’s acceptable, what’s worth saying, what’s better left alone. You breathe it in and it becomes you, or at least the version of you that fits the room.

The second I was somewhere with no set expectation of me, I felt it lift. Like something I’d been holding without knowing I was holding it.

I cannot express just how profound this was to me. In future posts I’ll discuss the specific event, but here I’ll simply say: I felt who I really was. I did not realize who I was analytically. In fact, I’m still unpacking that. But I felt it. I experienced it. People noticed it in the days that followed. Something about me was different.

The system I was in didn’t mean to do this. The people inside were trying to help. The love was real. I wouldn’t be alive without some of them—that’s not a metaphor. For several years of my life I was suicidal. Several of these people literally saved me from that, and built me up into a much more secure and settled person today.

And still, as I walked out of a system I’d been inside my whole life, I was looking back at it, and I thought: that place did real good and real harm. It didn’t mean to harm, but harm was still done.

The promise was simple: Jesus will make your life better, and make you better at life.

That’s not untrue. I want to say that before I say anything more complicated.

The church promised community. Belonging. People who show up. And they did—genuinely, repeatedly, at real cost to themselves. I watched people sacrifice time and comfort and sleep for me and others, and they did it because they believed it mattered, and it did matter, and I am not going to flatten that into something smaller than it was just because the story got complicated later.

And there was transformation. I was in church my whole life. In my early years marked by loneliness, not quite fitting at school or in the world, I found refuge there. Found mentors, purpose, and acceptance. And I eventually found real friendship. For a lonely kid, that was the world. And slowly, over years, I found a sense of my own worth. I’m a self-assured person now. I genuinely like who I am. That wouldn’t have happened for me without my church.

There’s a saying—I don’t know who said it first—that the church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.

That’s true, comforting, and welcoming. We’re all on the same playing field. Just trying our best.

But here’s the thing: people in a hospital get better.

What I kept watching was people getting stable and then just staying there. Not worse, mostly. But not better either. I wouldn’t call it transformation. The same struggles cycling through the same small groups year after year. Some of them sliding. Some of them doing outright terrible things—even some of the senior Christian leaders I know. I kept waiting for the fruit that was supposed to be obvious. The changed lives that were supposed to be unmistakable.

And then something changed. Looking outside the church, I started seeing the unmistakable fruit I’d been told should be easiest to find inside.

And at the same time, looking inside, I started noticing the inverse: not just “imperfect people,” but something thinning out—something withering—in places I expected to feel most alive.

It was unsettling: the diagnostic tool I trusted stopped matching reality.

It wasn’t just strangers or headlines. It was people close to me, too. People who took Christianity seriously—its practices, its formation, its teaching—becoming harder to recognize. Not cartoon villains. But compromised. Thinner. Less gentle. Less compassionate. Less curious. Less connected.

And yet my neighbor who has never set foot in a church, is the one who shows up every time someone on the block needs something. The friend who walked away from faith in college and somehow built a life of more genuine presence and care than most of the Christian leaders I’ve known. Communities forming around people loving each other with everything they have.

Here’s something I’ve come to believe: for most people a lot of the best people they know aren’t Christians. Some of the most visible Christians are often some of the worst people they know. And in their own lives, the most generous, most present, most genuinely good people they can point to—a lot of them have nothing to do with church at all.

Fruit is everywhere outside the Church—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness—the whole list.

I don’t know what to do with that. But I keep sitting with it.

I woke up and went for a walk.

No destination. Nothing I was supposed to be doing instead. Just feet on pavement and the neighborhood waking up around me. But the part I was not used to was the quiet.

Not the quiet of an early morning with no traffic. Not the quiet of no one being out yet. The quiet in my own mind. Not a peaceful quiet. Not the quiet of having figured something out.

A noise had stopped.

Most of the time the noise felt like static. Something I didn’t even know was there, just taking up a little bit of room in my brain, always. Like having red hair. Maybe it was a bit unique to me, but just part of me.

Lately it had taken on a more metallic quality. Loud and uncomfortable, like the sound a knife makes on a porcelain plate. The kind of sound that makes you automatically want to get away from it.

That metallic texture is what finally allowed me to notice it at all.

An Operating System

About a year ago the noise had shown up as anxiety, depression, and a persistent feeling of being misunderstood. Of being the crazy one. Of something being wrong with me that I couldn’t name.

But when I finally started unpacking it, I understood that the noise wasn’t situational. It was an operating system—a hum underneath everything.

Before now, it hadn’t felt like depression or anxiety. It was just “life.” I was walking through my days quietly negotiating, holding parts of myself back, not interacting with people the way I actually wanted to. Not liking what I actually liked. Not allowing myself to feel love the way I feel it now.

I didn’t even realize I wasn’t my whole self. I hadn’t allowed myself to know my own feelings.

My life was, by every measure I had been given, perfect. Nothing was wrong. It was the best possible version of the situation I had been told I needed to be in.

There was also this: a growing unease about the world I was living in. Questions I couldn’t stop asking. Is God real? Is any of this real? Have I spent my life on something true? Did I even really know myself, and had the people around me ever actually met me? Why was it getting so hard to be in spaces I had always called home?

For years, all of this swirled in the background. When it finally came to a head, the result was not the disorientation I thought I’d feel. It was instead, for the first time in much of my life—quiet.

I Have No Answers

And what replaced it wasn’t an answer. It was something closer to what Thich Nhat Hanh calls aimlessness—the idea that you are not a project. That you are not on your way to becoming someone. You already are all that you hope to achieve. You already are who you are supposed to be.

I already am.

That’s what the quiet was.

I am the most whole I have ever been.

I know how that sounds. It sounds like the end of a story—the part where someone wraps it up. It’s not that. I’m standing in the middle of a life that is stranger and messier than I expected, and I’m telling you I feel fine. Better than fine.

Some of you will read all that I am planning to write over the next several months as a cautionary tale. A before picture. I understand that. But I’m writing it down anyway. I want to understand it better myself, to have my mind changed where it needs changing, and to find the people whose story rhymes with mine.

Things have been stripped away. Faith, as I understood it. Family, as I imagined it. A version of myself I performed for so long I didn’t even realize I was performing. I have done things I was told would destroy me. I have lost people I loved. I have sat alone at a bar on a Tuesday night—me, an introvert who would have found that unbearable—and felt completely alive. I’ve talked with a group of strangers and felt more understood than I ever have before.

I have people in my life now who don’t need me to translate myself first. I didn’t know how much energy that cost until I wasn’t spending it anymore.

None of this was the plan. Almost none of it is what I was told would make me whole.

My Fear

I’ll be honest, writing this is hard. There is emotional content ahead. Vulnerability. Pain I’m still working through. And a persistent difficulty putting any of it into words, for two reasons.

The first is that some of what I’m experiencing is simply ineffable—too large for language. The second is that I often find myself in territory where two things that aren’t supposed to coexist both seem to be true, and I’m forced to reach for a word that doesn’t quite fit. The French have a phrase for that: faute de mieux. For lack of a better option.

My story is full of paradoxes. Grief and joy coexisting in equal measure. Regret for what could have been sitting right next to gratitude for what is. I wouldn’t trade a minute of my life to change my current reality—and I wish I’d had a different life. Both of those sentences are true. I’m not going to resolve that for you, because I can’t resolve it for myself.

What I can do is tell you what happened honestly, which mostly means not making it neater than it is.

That morning I walked until the neighborhood was fully awake. I wasn’t ready for it to end. Just a quiet moment, for me, to ponder and feel.

And then I thought—maybe it shouldn’t only be for me.

I’m writing because my therapist told me my story was unique enough to be useful. Because a song I love says if you ever leave, leave a light on—for the people who might come looking for the way out after you. Because somewhere out there is a person who needs to know that this quiet is possible.

But honestly—I’m also writing because I need people around me while I figure this out.

I usually wait until I know myself before I let people in. This is daunting for me. I go from excited to low-grade dread from the vulnerability, the judgment, the people who’ll dismiss it. It’s uncomfortable, but it feels like the right thing.

So. Here we go. I hope you follow along.