It all started as a way to support my then girlfriend, now wife. In the same way I’d talk through her work struggles to support her career, or reluctantly shop with her and provide my valuable fashion advice, I agreed to go to church to support her desire to reignite her faith. I wasn’t a believer, but she grew up a Christian. After a hiatus from church in college, she wanted to return, so we began spending our Sunday mornings at a church in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco..
I reached a point where I did not know how to live as a Christian anymore. I became suicidal, thinking my only two options for my future were death or to come out as a lesbian atheist. The former option was birthed out of a summation of the church’s language around this conversation. Sinners were welcome, certainly, but only the heterosexual kind. I did not know how to become more Christian in order to be heterosexual. So, to appease the church crowd, I thought the Christ-following answer was to kill the gay out of me.
Suddenly, I felt him grip my arm and yank me off the path, crying out, “Attention: serpent!” Look out, a snake! As he pulled me back, he lunged himself forward, and in one swift stomp, Sidiki crushed the snake’s head under his heel. Snakes in this region are deadly poisonous, and the nearest hospital was many miles away. So, on my first night in his village, Sidiki saved me from certain death.
How do we move from becoming anxious about what we see and read to being able to have peace as we build a habit of turning to God with prayers and petitions based on what is going on? And how do we keep from letting our minds go down an endless spiral of negative information and instead choose to dwell on restorative things?
I have to see that I have a need for forgiveness because I am a sinner. Now, that’s sort of negative. That’s humility. That helps toward forgiving other people when you realize “I’m a sinner too”. But that’s the bad news. The good news is the cost of forgiveness. What God went through, what Jesus went through in order to get you that forgiveness and to forgive you freely. And that fills you with grateful joy, and there’s a need for both the humility and the joy.
How do we move from becoming anxious about what we see and read to being able to have peace as we build a habit of turning to God with prayers and petitions based on what is going on? And how do we keep from letting our minds go down an endless spiral of negative information and instead choose to dwell on restorative things?
Christians in every society must use their wisdom in how to apply the Bible carefully, allowing others to come to different conclusions and use different approaches—all of which are based on biblical inspiration, but none of which comes with absolute biblical warrant. How freeing is it for the church that we can agree on the moral imperatives, but have a healthy (and even heated!) debate over the application of those morals in culture?
An autoimmune disease that had been lying dormant surfaced early this year with life-changing force. Overnight my world completely shifted.
Even though I turned her down, she befriended me, and over the next few months, she and her friends became my friends. I was attracted to the way they loved one another and me, and was often amazed by their generosity and care. I eventually accepted one of their many invitations to come to church because I grew to trust them and love their community. About a year later, in large part thanks to their persistence, I became a follower of Jesus.
An autoimmune disease that had been lying dormant surfaced early this year with life-changing force. Overnight my world completely shifted.