“I was rejecting myself in my same-sex attractions and in my feelings that I had, but whenever I was crying out to God and lying in my bed, I just kind of knew that his presence was there, and I was sometimes just very aware of his love for me.”
“I didn’t have to be transformed to be embraced by God the Father.”
“I had to wrestle with God. Why me? Why is this happening to me? Following you means I thought you would fix me or you would take this away…he didn’t give me an answer for a long time as to the reasons why, but I think he was asking me, can you trust me?”
“My expectation was that God would make me straight…and then in my twenties I was aware that he was not doing that.”
“In my sexual journey, I feel that God was preparing me to pour into other people.”
“Both marriage and singleness can represent Christ and his bride to the fullest.”
“Marriage is a trailer to the movie, and when the movie is out, you don’t watch the trailer anymore. But like any movie, there’s different trailers. And singleness is also a trailer to the same movie.”
“If you’re single, you have the gift of singleness. If you’re married, you have the gift of marriage. Sometimes people who are married don’t want to have that particular gift at that particular time—but they have the gift. And so you cannot excuse yourself in the sense of, I don’t have [the gift of singleness] because I don’t want it sometimes.”
“How do I give myself fully to my community that God has given me?…And how do I stay with my friends and the people that God has given me?”
“Especially for me, I feel like I needed male friendship, and I needed to learn how to do male friendship well. And I was always so afraid that I would fall in love or feel attracted—and it happened—but the friendship that I had, I needed to engage it.”
“I feel like sometimes in the purity culture that we had in the church, we say, ‘Let’s just avoid all that messiness.’ But it didn’t help us to become mature.”
“We need to learn how to [have healthy friendships] and see each other more as brothers and sisters first…instead of potential partners or a potential threat to your marriage.”
“The purity that God is asking from us is purity of heart. And it’s not always defined by behavior.”
“I think what we see right now and I even experience, especially in America, there’s such a loneliness…How do I even fit into a community that’s so based on only families and married people? It was so interesting to come to the U.S. and be part of a ministry where I came in as a single person. And my first year in the U.S., I worked in a department [where people have] lived abroad too, but I was not invited to someone’s home, a married home or a family’s home, for dinner.”
“Families and married people and single people—there’s kind of like this enormous wall that’s invisible, but very tangible.”
“There was much more of a mutuality [in the Netherlands], and here it’s so separated. And I found it really sad, honestly.”
“The challenge is, how can we be then a healthy body of Christ that has intimate relationships with each other, because that’s where we’re going anyways. Because marriage will be over. Everyone of us in heaven will have this deep, intimate relationship with each other, doesn’t matter our gender…So as we mature and let the Holy Spirit transform our lives, can we have part of that kingdom already here on earth? Because we so need it.”
“If you want to reach out to the LGBT community, you also need to think through, what is the community then that we want to invite them into?”
“Because I find something beautiful and I have a longing for it, that’s when I can also say no to other longings.”
“Think through what your narrative is. Do you have a biblical narrative on sexuality for your whole community? Doesn’t matter, straight or gay. Because if you all can acknowledge that we’re sexually broken and that we all need the Holy Spirit to transform our sexual brokenness…that’s what straight people and gay people need.”
