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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 Two years have passed so far and the Lord was helping me and disciplining me. Before that, I was just a human bound with evil and thrown in its deepest pit.
Ever since I was a child i suffered from evil for I was sexually molested. Moreover, I grew up during war times and my country Lebanon was collapsing.. and I was collapsing along. At home, i used to feel so lonely, usual and weird. At the age of 4, I lost my father and didn’t have the chance to know him well. Oh how often I threw myself over his bed, hoping he’d come and embrace me, wishing I’d be able to cry out and express the fear, terror and unease I felt toward my defiled body. How I needed to express how disturbed my mind was as I was so ignorant of my situation.
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 Becket Cook was sipping champagne at a Fashion Week after-party in Paris when the thought hit him: “Is this what I’m going to do for the rest of my life?” He looked around at the sea of beautiful, accomplished, air-kissing people surrounding him and suddenly felt so alone, terrified, and empty that he left the party early.
As a Hollywood production designer, Cook was living a lifestyle most people only read about in gossip tabloids. He received invites to movie premieres and fancy ceremonies such as the Oscars and the Golden Globes. He schmoozed at elite parties and luncheons at A-list celebrities’ homes. And yet, all the noise and glamour were losing their luster. As a gay atheist, Cook had enough of a Catholic upbringing in Texas to know homosexuality and God were incompatible, and giving up his gay identity felt impossible and unnatural.  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.  I realized I was attracted to same sex in my early 20's. To put it simply, I thought I was waiting for the right girl and one day I realized I was actually waiting for the right boy. I'm a Christian because firstly I found that following Jesus has transformed my life. It has made my life much more exciting and real. Secondly because I believe it's utterly credible that Jesus actually did rise from the dead and that is the most important thing ever happened in history.
We seem to have this strange idea in our culture that sexual orientation dictates what your sexual identity should be. When I began my journey, accepted my same sex attraction, I made the commitment to be single and I began to explore what it meant to be same sex attracted Christian and what my sexual identity was. I started reading the Bible and realized that the Bible doesn't talk about gay or straight people. It just talks about man and woman. So I realized I was constraining myself by calling myself gay. I was limiting what God could actually do. So I just dropped thinking of myself as gay or homosexual. I just started thinking of myself as a man and as a man when I read throughout the Bible, I was called to be either single or married. So I was going to stay single until God brought someone to my life.  I didn't understand why life was always leading me to roads that brought me suffering, pain and agony. Roads that I didn't choose to go down, that only made me cry. My life was so hard to bear, I lived on the stages of the discos waiting for people to give me applause. For so long I didn't even know what it meant to sleep.
I was slave of drugs, and had to flee to live and hide not to die. This was my life.  “My parents really wanted to hold onto our Chinese heritage. So even though we were here in America, we were still distinct.”
Christopher Yuan is the son of Chinese immigrants. Although he was born in the United States, he never felt like he fit in with his American classmates. “Kids are always cruel, and they pick on kids for being different.” He was small for his age. He played piano and worked hard in school. He wasn’t good at sports like the other boys. “I was shorter. I wore glasses, so I was ‘four eyes,’” Christopher recalls. “I was picked on, because I was maybe a little more effeminate [and] I was more artistic.” When he was nine years old, Christopher saw pornography at a friend’s house. That’s when he started thinking maybe he was different. “Those images just awoke something in me that I didn’t know was there,” he says. “But, I also noticed that I was attracted to the images of both the men and the women.” He decided to keep his feelings secret with hopes they would go away, but they didn’t. “All these feelings were kind of bubbling up in me, and I was keeping them held down. I felt like I just needed to get it out somehow.”  Sexually abused, pornography, promiscuity, depression, suicidal thoughts, unwanted same-sex attraction, all these subjects is all I'm going to talk about because all these mean my life.
My name is Carlos Catari and I'm from Venezuela, I'm 32 years old but now I'm living in Canada. From the age of 5 to 12 years old I went through sexual abuse. So at early age I developped hypersexuality. My only focus as I grew up was to look for sex. I was always looking for sex. In fact at the age of 15 I was already into prostitution. At some point I decided to speak with my sister to talk about what was going on in my life and also to come out to her, telling her that I was gay. She couldn't handle it. She couldn't even understand it. So she talked with my mom and my mom came up to me in tears asking me something that I had never thought about. She asked me, "Carlos what if you were never sexually abused? Would you still be gay?" And then I said, "What?" I have never thought about that. But in fact this question: "What if you were never sexually abused? Would you still be gay?" haunted me from that point on. It might be true. But at that point I was already gay. I told them, "Listen, I'm gay." Despite that, she decided to make an appointment with a psychologist. From the first meeting we had I could understand that all that happened to me wasn't my fault. Before, I believed it was my fault. So she told me something that I never thought about, "Carlos, whether you will be gay or straight, let this be your choice and not the decision of someone else in your past." I really liked this. I liked the fact that I could decide my life |
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