TESTIMONIES |
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They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Revelation 12:11
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 A month ago I attended a "queer Christmas" celebration with two of my friends in a chapel of a seminary school in Jakarta. This school has been spreading the false gospel that accepts and celebrates sin instead of transforming sinners into saints. We stayed all the way 'til the end of the event because we wanted to talk with some people there. By God's grace all the attendants were given the opportunity to introduce themselves which gave us the chance to speak what the Holy Spirit put in our heart.
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 I've been given the honor to participate in Dare to Change, an international Ex-LGBT conference in Taipei, Taiwan from 8-11 November 2018. More than 15 Ex-LGBT's from 15 different nations came to celebrate love and transformation through Jesus Christ. Not only we were given the chance to share publicly what God has done in our life but we were able to make new connections and encourage each other in this journey. I was extremely blessed by this initiative
 The Beginning
My name is Michael Edward Ukus. I am writing the story of my life to prove that God exists dan that He is always there in my life. I'm the second child of three siblings. We lived with our parents in Manado. After enrolling to a Christian university in Manado to study theology, we found that that our parents were in the process of getting a divorce. Unexpectedly we received a letter from the court asking us to attend the divorce trial. Honestly as their children we were very heartbroken by this news. My dad left us and my mom had to work really hard to provide for us. It broke our heart to see how hard she had to work to the point of getting sick and even fainting because of fatigue. This really destroyed me personally and I couldn't continue my study because of it. I thought there was no point studying theology if my parents were getting a divorce. In the end I no longer had any desire to study and stopped doing Christian activities at my campus. That's when the Enemy took an advantage.  I’m a pastor of Seoul Calvary Chapel and the leader of Holy Life, an ex-gay movement. I became attracted to men since I was in adolescence for no reason and I started living as a homosexual. I thought that I was born gay. I was ashamed of myself and felt guilty so I didn’t tell this to anyone. I drifted into the gay lifestyle.
I did some work in the theater in my 20s and I was also the owner of a dress shop and the designer. After failing in my business, I decided to be a Buddhist monk,. When I was 27 years old, my mom who knew my identity, left a desperate message and committed suicide because she was not able to persuade me to come back. I lived as a loser after she died. When I was 30 years old, a woman introduced me to Christ and I met Jesus. I became a Christian but still lived as a homosexual. Nobody taught me what the word of God said about homosexuality.  Many transgender persons regret what they did to their bodies and souls, and some are pleading that others not repeat their mistake.
Robert Wenman was four years into being a “full-time” transgender woman in Ontario, Canada, when a police officer asked him: “You got all your legal rights by now. Why don’t you just enjoy life as a woman?” The question left the then-LGBT activist stuttering: Here he was, training a group of law enforcers on transgender rights, yet he couldn’t answer a basic question: Why? Why was he still campaigning, still fighting?  I sold my soul to “the god of this world”. He had the face of an angel. He said I could have it all. I traded the truth for lies. I followed my deceitful heart. I was crowned prince, dressed in Burberry and flown to New York, Los Angeles and Miami. The house music was spellbinding. I chatted up celebrities. I was ushered to the front of long lines and through the doors of exclusive clubs.
On September 11, 2001, I woke up out of a drunken stupor and turned on the TV. Immediately I started crying. It reminded me that the Lord is coming back in judgment (Matthew 24:37-39). Having no peace, I was terrified. For work, I moved from Pittsburgh to Boston to Washington, DC and then back to Pittsburgh. My gay life peaked in the bigger cities and then slowed down in Pittsburgh where gay life was less distracting. I was alone with my thoughts. Cursing and screaming at my family, I had pushed away those who would not actively endorse my lifestyle. One day on Facebook, Christians tried to tell me that I needed to repent. I viciously attacked them. I hated the church.  The word Jesus stuck in my throat like an elephant tusk; no matter how hard I choked, I couldn't hack it out. Those who professed the name commanded my pity and wrath. As a university professor, I tired of students who seemed to believe that "knowing Jesus" meant knowing little else. Christians in particular were bad readers, always seizing opportunities to insert a Bible verse into a conversation with the same point as a punctuation mark: to end it rather than deepen it.
Stupid. Pointless. Menacing. That's what I thought of Christians and their god Jesus, who in paintings looked as powerful as a Breck Shampoo commercial model. As a professor of English and women's studies, on the track to becoming a tenured radical, I cared about morality, justice, and compassion. Fervent for the worldviews of Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, I strove to stand with the disempowered. I valued morality. And I probably could have stomached Jesus and his band of warriors if it weren't for how other cultural forces buttressed the Christian Right. The surround sound of Christian dogma comingling with Republican politics demanded my attention. |
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