The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert

by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

A life outside of Christ is both hard and frightening; a life in Christ has hard edges and dark valleys, but it is purposeful even when painful.

Even though obviously these Christians and I were very different, they seemed to know that I wasn’t just a blank slate, that I had values and opinions too, and they talked with me in a way that didn’t make me feel erased.

Ken and Floy did something at the meal that has a long Christian history but has been functionally lost in too many Christian homes. Ken and Floy invited the stranger in—not to scapegoat me, but to listen and to learn and to dialogue. Ken and Floy have a vulnerable and transparent faith. We didn’t debate worldview; we talked about our personal truth and about what “made us tick.” Ken and Floy didn’t identify with me. They listened to me and identified with Christ. They were willing to walk the long journey to me in Christian compassion. During our meal, they did not share the gospel with me. After our meal, they did not invite me to church. Because of these glaring omissions to the Christian script as I had come to know it, when the evening ended and Pastor Ken said he wanted to stay in touch, I knew that it was truly safe to accept his open hand.

The Bible told me to repent, but I didn’t feel like repenting. Do you have to feel like repenting in order to repent? Was I a sinner, or was I, in my drag queen friend’s words, sick? How do you repent for a sin that doesn’t feel like a sin? How could the thing that I had studied and become be sinful? How could I be tenured in a field that is sin? How could I and everyone that I knew and loved be in sin? In this crucible of confusion, I learned something important. I learned the first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin.

Biblical orthodoxy can offer real compassion, because in our struggle against sin we cannot undermine God’s power to change lives.

How did the Lord heal me? The way that he always heals: the word of God got to be bigger inside me than I.

“As I live,” says the Lord God, “neither your sister Sodom nor her daughters have done as you and your daughters have done. Look, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters had pride, fullness of food, and abundance of idleness; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty and committed abomination before Me; therefore I took them away as I saw fit.” (Ezek. 16:48-50)

Pride combined with wealth leads to idleness because you falsely feel that God just wants you to have fun; if unchecked, this sin will grow into entertainment-driven lust; if unchecked, this sin will grow into hardness of heart that declares other people’s problems no responsibility or care of your own; if unchecked, we become bold in our sin and feel entitled to live selfish lives fueled by the twin values of our culture: acquiring and achieving.

Modesty and discretion are not old-fashioned values. They are God’s standards that help us to encourage one another in good works, not covetousness.

Importantly, we don’t see God making fun of homosexuality or regarding it as a different, unusual, or exotic sin. What we see instead is God’s warning: If you indulge the sins of pride, wealth, entertainment-lust, lack of mercy, and lack of discretion, you will find yourself deep in sin—and the type of sin may surprise you.

While sin is not contained by logical categories of progression, nonetheless, sin is progressive. That is, while sin does not stay contained by type or trope, if ignored, excused, or enjoyed, sin grows and spreads like poison ivy.

I share my sexual history with you not to flaunt my sin or offend my reader, but to reveal that my sexuality was sinful not because it was lesbian per se but because it wasn’t Christ-controlled.

The boundaries for obedience are clear, but trust must somehow manifest itself in the boundary-less world of “anything can happen.” The fact that God is sovereign over the good and the evil does not necessarily make the evil any less frightening.

But healing, to the sexual sinner, is death: nothing more and nothing less. I told my audience that I think too many young Christian fornicators plan that marriage will redeem their sin. Too many young Christian masturbators plan that marriage will redeem their patterns. Too many young Christian internet pornographers think that having legitimate sex will take away the desire to have illicit sex. They’re wrong. And the marriages that result from this line of thinking are dangerous places.

We in the church tend to be more fearful of the (perceived) sin in the world than of the sin in our own hearts. Why is that?

Yes! I have often found this to be true as well.

When fear rules your theology, God is nowhere to be found in your paradigm, no matter how many Bible verses you tack onto it.

These students were smart and devout in their faith. They also were sheltered. They imparted to me in a firsthand way the serious dangers of isolating our children from real life. Adult children can appear obedient when they are tuning out instead of acting out. College life tends to bring out all the fears and doubts and perceptions of contradictions and hypocrisies. Between this hyper-sensitivity to authority and rules, and a growing sexual awareness, we met students who were struggling with real moral issues. Their unsuspecting parents had no idea how their over-protection had dangerously ill-prepared their beloved, overly protected children from all of this. Sin—especially sexual sin—has a sneaky way of triumphing in an environment of secrecy and shame. Kent and I had our ministry cut out for us.

Betrayal and risk are at the heart of the gospel life.

Mercy ministry always comes down to this: You can help, but only Jesus can heal.

We wonder how we can experience church growth, but that is not the issue. The issue is, how can we minister the gospel to hurting people?

Dr. Clyde Narramore once said in my hearing, “It’s always good to let the Novocaine take effect before pulling the tooth.” So we prayed and waited.

Just have a happy family into which you invite others. They’ll come back.

Finally, let’s get over being stand-offish to people who are not like us. And here let me be open about the gay and lesbian community. In many ways they, as a movement, are indeed a threat to our society’s stability. But, on the other hand, these are the people who need Jesus. Let me point out that people, according to the Bible, come in only two “sizes”: saved sinners or lost sinners.

The influential southern theologian of the 19th century, R. L. Dabney, remarked that more teaching is done by the pastor outside the pulpit than in the pulpit. I have found that to be true time and time again.