buying back each day

"See then that you walk ... not as fools, but as wise. Redeeming the time, because the days are evil." Ephesians 5:15-15, NKJV

To make a very long, very complicated story overly short:

- I grew up a Bible-thumping, evangelical Christian. More conservative than my parents in every way, despite being homeschooled. Trying, in every area of my life, to achieve perfection.

- Yet what is the one way, in a small Southern town, to be absolutely irredeemable? By being a total homo, a gay boy, a musical theater-loving-anti-sports-academic-stereotypical fag.

- What does a perfectionist try to do? Someone who hates conflict? Change, of course! I surreptitiously read books, articles on the internet, participated in message boards, and prayed, prayed, prayed.

- How well did that work? Of course, I simultaneously struggled with gay porn and kissing random boys at musical theater church camp.

- Mostly, I just tried to ignore it. Being a perfect student in high school and college left me no time for relationships.

- I moved across the country after college for a job, simultaneously experiencing a newfound vigor for fighting my gayness while meeting a beautiful girl that I clicked with very much.

- We fell in love. I genuinely fell in love with a girl, despite having had no business doing so. But I was trying so hard to be straight. And I really loved the girl. Plus, Jesus really wanted to make me straight, right? And I'd have to try a lot harder if I was married, right? And who knows, maybe I'd really like straight sex. I just didn't know what I was missing. So, we got married. Big church wedding. The whole shebang. This was God's way of making me straight.

- Except that... it wasn't. I cried on my honeymoon because I could barely "get it up."

- Some random family deaths, a few shitty years and another cross-country move later, and the resolve waned. I did that which I simultaneously wanted desperately yet shouldn't have done. And then plunged even more seriously into the world of ex-gay therapy.

- Then I gave up. I just gave up.

- I don't want to be straight anymore. Well, I do, but I realize it's not going to happen. Either Jesus doesn't care, He doesn't care enough to make me straight, or He's just going to have to deal.

- This blog is about exploring how a floundering faith mixes with being gay, recovering from ex-gay theology, philosophy, and pseudo-psychology, and trying to be whole after feeling so empty for so long. Trying to buy back those days, one at a time. We'll see how it all shakes out.