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 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.  It's funny that they still use our picture to represent same sex and "love". To be clear, Ana (Anacleta Paredes) and I broke up because we found something greater than this and that is Jesus Christ.
Just a little background - Ana and I dated for 6 years. Yes, we were in love but after a while, we started to feel empty. The relationship couldn't satisfy me anymore and I was always mad at her, blaming her for all the things I was feeling. Thinking we needed a spark, we tried to spice up our relationship by trying different drugs. Sure, we were happy when we were high, but after the high was gone, the emptiness was still left there. We both got depressed, and Ana even had EXTREME anxiety attacks because of the drugs. It reached the point when I wanted to kill myself. I knew I needed help and I didn't know who else to talk to--and that's when I reached out to Jesus. I didn't know what I was saying and "praying for" but the words just came out. I surrendered to Him fully and repented for all my sin.  I was deeply ingrained in the belief that I had been ‘born that way and couldn’t change’ and because of this, I was ready to suicide. At the age of twenty eight I had reached a stalemate. If I couldn’t reconnect in a real way with my God, then I could only see one alternative. The future alone and aging as a lesbian and an alcoholic looked bleak to me.
When I was twenty, I had given in to my orientation and tossed in my faith.For the first few years I was very comfortable with my identity as a lesbian and was very openly lesbian. However, I was also aware that I had lost connection with a God who had at one stage been very close to me. Now it was as if I prayed inside a concrete tomb.  The summer of 2013 is when everything changed for me. I heard a voice tell me to look at a tree while I was washing dishes. I knew it wasn't anyone of my family because no one was around. The voice began to tell me that trees have been here since the beginning of time but we all know that a seed has to be planted for a tree to grow. If you ask a little kid how long a tree has been there, they would say forever when we know that isn't true. Homosexuality is the same way, a seed is planted in the child whether it's a generational curse, rape, molestation, teasing, abuse, fatherless home, etc. My "seed" was teasing. I knew I was never born gay, I just knew the feelings came sometime during elementary school. I got teased all the time at school for being small and not wearing nice clothes. It seemed like the only people who showed love were the women in my church. Because of that I began to have feelings for them and then started to have feelings for my friends and classmates. I started dressing like a guy my eighth grade year and got my first girl friend my tenth grade year. That's when I began to explore everything and embraced the lifestyle.
 “I didn’t know how to handle attention from men and boys,” recalls Charlene Cothran. “I was tall for my age and fully developed at nine-years-old.”
Her parents divorced when she was three and the absence of a father left her hungry for affirmation from the opposite sex. “I wanted a guy to really like me.” But when she discovered that most of the boys she met wanted one thing: user her, it turned her off. “I decided no more of this,” Charlene recounts. She then closed her heart to boys at 14 and fell into a trap in which lesbianism felt like a “safe alternative.” In doing so, she drifted from her Christian faith which was part of her upbringing. “I learned the Scripture; I learned about Christ and the cross and His redemptive power. I believed it.” She had once been a youth leader in her church. |
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