My faith was always important as I was growing up, and during high school I became excited about following Jesus.  I made profession of faith in church when I was 16, I was active in prayer meetings and Bible studies, I was elected president of our church’s high school youth group, and I started thinking about becoming a pastor.  So it seemed natural that soon after starting Calvin College in 1972 I joined the pre-seminary program.

It was early in my time at Calvin College, however, that I started becoming honest with myself about the fact that I felt romantically attracted to other guys.  I experienced this realization as deeply troubling.  I literally thought it was the worst thing that could be true of me because that was the perspective I had learned from the entire culture around me.

What was I going to do?  For years I didn’t dare tell anyone about what I was experiencing for fear of being scorned and rejected.  I felt ashamed and isolated.  All I could do was pray—pray continually that God would heal me of this terrible affliction.  The more I prayed, however, the more I noticed the good looking guys on campus!  This realization sent me into a downward spiral of anxiety and depression.

By my third year at Calvin I was growing concerned about my suicidal thoughts, and so I started taking some steps to reach out to others for support.  I joined a new faith-based community which had a big emphasis on people being open and honest with each other, and it was there that I began to tell people about what I was feeling.  This community eventually formed a church, called Christ’s Community Christian Reformed Church.  Well, the people of Christ’s Community responded to me with love and acceptance, for which I am still deeply grateful.  As far as I could tell, however, they all held the traditional view that gay people are sick, and so I continued to hold this view as well.  The thought never even occurred to me that there might be another way to look at being gay.

Until the fall of 1978.  I had attended Calvin for three years, then took three years off, mostly because I was an emotional wreck and couldn’t make sense out of how I could be gay and be a pastor.  By the end of those three years away from college, I once again became convinced that God was calling me to the ministry, and I believed that God would somehow make it all work out.  So I returned to Calvin for my senior year.

In my Thursday post I will tell the story of hearing a shockingly new approach to being gay for the first time.