Trigger warning: this post mentions emotional, spiritual, and sexual trauma.

Note: God is referred to largely with non-binary pronouns throughout this post, except when expressing a personal past view of God to show my experience at that time.

Preface

It’s really hard for me to share stories about myself.

It’s not because I don’t want to or don’t think they can be meaningful in some way. It’s that I’ve had a lot of tragic things happen in my life that deeply impacted me and I feel very shaped and defined by them. I worry that sharing my story just seems like “misery loves company” to people, or that there are too many sad parts to my life, or people will feel uncomfortable listening because it might bring up their own pain. It seems unbelievable to me sometimes, and I’m sure (because I enjoy writing and crafting the words in stories with great detail) I seem like I embellish when I share. My feelings just run deep and I try to relay my experience of life as precisely as I can.

I also come from a religious tradition where sharing “testimonies” (stories about what God was doing in your life) was one of the highest-held traditions. And in that culture, boring doesn’t cut it for a strong and mighty God. If intensity isn’t present in either the form of suffering, temptation and redemption, or prospering, you may just not be quite spiritual enough. The darker the darkness, the brighter the light. Or something like that.

While I don’t believe that the power or love or faithfulness of a deity hangs in the balance based on how I share a story anymore, I still feel a very deep responsibility in how I share my stories. But that responsibility seems like a fight between not wanting to burden others and wanting to authentically share about my life. So, I’m trying to just practice sharing my story again and be okay with it.

I love hearing about how others experience life. And even though all of our stories are different, I think we can often find glimpses of our own lives when we see the lives of others.

This mini-series is all about identity and how we define ourselves. So, I want to share how some of those defining aspects of identity have changed for me. If you didn’t see my previous post, you can find it here.

For the purpose of this post, my big three are not my sun sign, moon sign, and rising sign*. In this moment, my big three are the aspects of myself that I’ve identified with so heavily in my life that I’ve been completely lost when they have faltered. My big three are Midas Touch, The Zealot, and Daughter.

*Taurus sun/moon and Gemini rising for you exceptionally curious people.

Midas Touch

My mom got a call from the school counselor one day when I was in second grade. She and Dad were asked to come to discuss something concerning me. I could be pretty domineering and rambunctious—for the Harry Potter folks, imagine a mashup of the know-it-all of Hermione and mischief of Fred and George Weasley—so her thoughts were along the lines of, “Oh god, what has Elizabeth done?”

It turned out, I had actually gotten the highest scores of any student in the history of the school on our standardized testing and they wanted to evaluate my intelligence. I guess being able to whistle at 12 months old and Dad teaching me how to say “Czechoslovakia” and “Lithuania” as some of my first words had the effect he had hoped for. And that is where the Midas Touch began.

Not only was I highly intelligent, but also excelled in all things creative. Music, art, writing—you name it.

And I was also a pretty good athlete and played multiple sports.

I was either the best or one of the best at nearly everything I did. And I learned at a very young age that my worth as a person hinged on how impressive I was.

I had to go to a different school in 5^th grade. I was used to having friends and being liked by everyone. Now, I was bullied for being smart and being a tomboy. Classmates called me gay (which I didn’t even know about at the time) and ridiculed me relentlessly. No matter what I did, I couldn’t fit it. What was so wrong with me that they didn’t want anything to do with me?

I swore to myself I’d never be gay (since that had to be why they hated me), and I pressed hard into my abilities. Then I found where I belonged: church.

The Zealot

I can hear the soft orchestral rise and fall of trumpets and chimes as Disney’s Hercules pines: “I have often dreamed of a far-off place where a great warm welcome will be waiting for me, where the crowds will cheer when they see my face, and a voice keeps saying this is where I’m meant to be.”

Finally, this egotistical bullied kid who got torn to pieces found a refuge. I was able to use my gifts here. I was able to help lead. Being the best was expected, not frowned upon. It was here that I got to develop my music skills so I could lead worship. It was here I got to be excited about being smart because I could easily memorize scripture and was a boss at Bible trivia (as long as I didn’t also ask too many deep, probing questions). It was here that I found siblings I never had and a support group that was there for me, no matter what.

Instead of going home and feeling I’d be better off dead, I had a purpose. While I endured hatred from people at school that made me doubt the truth of even my family’s deep love for me, here I was loved. Maybe I could believe my family after all.

Here I also learned I was broken, fallen, full of sin. That God couldn’t even look at me because they are so holy and I was a monster.

“It was as if the mere thought of me would be so unbearable and enraging to a holy God that my only salvation would be if someone held up a photo of me and God somehow saw a picture of Jesus instead. Despite God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and omni-everything else, was the very sight of me so bad?”

Rachel Held Evans, Wholehearted Faith

As long as I believed in Jesus, was truly sorry for my sin, worked as hard as I could to make sure I never messed up again, and asked for forgiveness and to be changed IF I had a small misstep, I could have access to agape. Agape, this unconditional, deep, overflowing love of God for their creation. This love that was always present, but I separated myself from it with sin.

One year, I made a friend at church camp who was really into charismatic Christian thinking. What I mean by that is he told me about this experience called the baptism of the Holy Spirit where you would be filled with God’s spirit and be given spiritual gifts. Possibly speaking in tongues, or healing, or gifts of prophecy. It’s this deeply intimate connection with God and you get superpowers. Who wouldn’t want that?

Shortly after I experienced this experience, my Dad died. My whole identity wrapped into being a daughter of God, who was my heavenly father that could never die.

And then I hit a bump in the road. Maybe those kids that had bullied me were actually right about me being gay. But they couldn’t be, right? And the worst part was that I fell for a girl who also really loved God. No matter how much we prayed and begged for God to change us and help us stop, we kept going right back.

I went to a ministry that had a powerful drama about a very old Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac even though he was his only son and God had promised Abraham he would have many descendants. They asked us what God was showing us to put on the altar. If I truly loved God, and if I truly loved her (in a pure way that wasn’t “perverted”) it had to be that relationship. I sobbed and sobbed and felt like I got cut in half. But it was the best choice I thought I could make for the sake of doing what was truly loving. So, I told her I could never speak to her again because I loved her too much to risk damning her soul. And once more vowed that if that was why God couldn’t love me, it was something I’d never be.

The deeper I got into charismatic Christian culture, the more intense I got. Speaking in tongues. Laying hands on people to pray for healing (I prayed some headaches away for people a few times and was part of a group who prayed over someone who had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and then it was miraculously gone). Prayer retreats. Long liquids-only fasts (I once fasted for 40 days on smoothies, so sorry juicer folks, weird Christian culture beat you to that one). I even started a ministry with my friend where we traveled around to church youth groups to lead worship and perform dance ministry dramas like the one I had seen about Abraham.

I quit school and moved to Florida to start a ministry there. While there, I met some people who had really intense miracle stories. There was one guy, who I’ll call Jim, who had so many. Jesus had visited him in visions trying to get him to follow him, he had prayed over people and healed them, was led by the Holy Spirit to people in distress, and he had started up lots of ministries with different churches in the community.

Jim said he didn’t typically mentor young women, but after I begged him to mentor me, said he would pray about it and ended up making an exception.

Over the three years I was there, Jim challenged everything I thought I knew about the Bible. And basically, showed me how everything I thought was wrong. He would give me a scenario and ask what Jesus would do, and then when I would answer, would tell me why it wasn’t right and what the correct answer was.

I remember us riding in his truck one day when he posed a very detailed hypothetical story to me about moving to Ethiopia to do missions and being violently gang-raped and contracting AIDS and if it would be worth it to see Jesus’s face after I died and hear him say, “Well done, my good and faithful servant”. I knew what answer he was looking for, but every part of me cringed at it. Saying it out loud killed something inside me.

When asking him about my friend’s parent who had an affair with a pastor, he gave me a hypothetical scenario about if he were to leave his wife and run away with me to Colorado. He asked if we started a ministry and repented if I thought God would bless that. He started talking about King David’s affair with Bathsheeba and how God’s spirit never departed from David because his heart sought after God even though he was such a knucklehead.

Later, when a coworker of mine who worked closely with us on some projects was getting a divorce, he condemned her for revenge cheating on her husband after he had cheated on her and said God’s spirit had left her. And I think that was the moment that saved me. She may never know it, but I feel like I owe her so much because her life exposed who he truly was to me after years of mental, emotional, and spiritual abuse.

Every ounce of self-confidence I ever had or ever got back was stripped away from me. Not to overdo the Disney theme, but I like to think of Jim as Ursula because he stole my voice. During therapy a few years later, my therapist had a long discussion with me about what grooming is, and how he had displayed quite an extensive bit of grooming behavior through giving me gifts, trying to isolate me by destroying relationships with close family members who were suspicious of him, manipulating me, and brainwashing me.

I moved away and went back to school. I tried to find churches, but it was one let down after another. While I was back at school, Lee University of all places, I went to the counseling center. On the intake, it asked if I had ever had same-sex attraction. I couldn’t lie. I said yes. And when I did, I was shocked (and appalled at the time) to have a counselor suggest maybe I should explore that and look at different theological views around it. I ended up changing to another counselor. This counselor also challenged me to do that, but in a way that never pushed me toward it and just left the choice up to me.

For nearly two years I consumed nothing but books and articles and talks and sermons and therapy sessions over different views on homosexuality and the Bible. Like many people trying to figure this all out, I had a very close friend that I thought I could make things work with if I had to. But, I adored him and couldn’t imagine him having to live a life with a wife that might be gay. No matter how much I prayed, I was still attracted to women. One night I was reading 1 Corinthians 13, the passage often heard at weddings about the characteristics of love. I had been trying to live those out in my life the best I could. But that particular night when I read “love rejoices in the truth,” I was overwhelmed by how my dishonesty about who I was attracted was not holy either. I understood how it would impact others if I tried to do that with no guarantee of it ever changing. And I cried, and I whispered to God, and myself, without ever having whispered it to anyone before—that I was gay. I felt overwhelming love, and I also realized my larger spiritual community would certainly not understand. I hoped they would anyway, I but ended up losing nearly all of the close friends I had made in church life. I was crushed and lost. But I still tried to hang onto my spirituality.

The Zealot part of myself started dying in the process of learning to ask questions of Scripture and our internalized theological views. I learned that maybe the Jewish idea of wrestling with the texts and asking the hard questions about them and debating the meanings of passages and books is one of the best ways (in my opinion) to deeply honor the text. Anything that has to be interpreted is subject to us, people, who have all of these different experiences and cultures and views that we have to account for being projected onto it to some extent. My black and white world slowly turned into a gradient of grays and morphed into the full-color spectrum.

Daughter

At 17, I lost my dad unexpectedly. In my mid to late twenties, I heartbrokenly walked away from dearly held lifelong spiritual beliefs and spiritual parents I had made along the way (people who had been in those roles as well as God themself). And at 32 I unexpectedly lost Mom, who had become the rock of my entire life.

When you’ve been a daughter your entire life, what happens when you have no one to be a daughter to? I honestly don’t know.

I was recently going through a journal that asked me to take a look at the beliefs I’ve grown up with and asked what I was taught to believe a good daughter was. I realized that while my parents loved me very much, somewhere along the way hearing “You are the best thing I ever did in my life” got twisted up. They were so impressed by me and wanted everyone else to be too. It made them feel like they had really done something well. And I get that. But on the other side of that, much like my relationship with God had been (and maybe largely due to that), I have had overwhelming pressure in my life to be amazing because we are often seen as a reflection of how well or how bad our parents did.

If you do something stupid, someone asks if you were raised in a barn (at least here in the south). If you are an outstanding person, people often assume you had excellent parents (even if someone had horrible parents and learned how to be outstanding completely on their own). And don’t even get me started on how church culture has been permeated with the idea of God’s credibility being on the shoulders of anyone who claims to be a Christian (both inside the church and by critics of the church, myself included).

When I thought God had delivered me from homosexuality, I would find people who I thought needed to hear that story. And I remember when they asked if I was still attracted to women how I would lie because I thought they needed to believe that God was powerful enough to stop that too in order to be open to that happening in their lives. It was clear that God had changed me completely, but demons were putting those tempting thoughts there. It wasn’t me anymore. Right? I was a reflection of my heavenly Father, and my mess-ups seemed to tarnish that God’s good name somehow. (Those days and behaviors are now my biggest regrets. Oof!)

So, when those parents aren’t there anymore, there’s still the good name of the legacy they left behind. I’m the legacy. But is there any other way I remain a daughter? And if that legacy is actually just a very questionable and unhealthy social construct, when that idea falls and shatters, am I still a daughter at all? I don’t know that either, but this seems to be yet another shifting piece of my identity.

Wrap Up

Looking at just these few parts of my life, it’s crazy to me how the parts of ourselves we attach our identity to are just as fluid as the rest of life. Knowing who we are, what we enjoy, the things about us that make us tick? That’s amazing. But the more attached we become to these roles and parts we play, when they shift underneath of us and we lose our footing, it can be really hard to get it back.

Who are we underneath it all? Beyond the parts we play and the hobbies and aspects of ourselves we tie our identities to that fade away, what is at our core that, for the most part, stays the same? And what happens if we define ourselves with that?