How shall a work please God, if it proceeds from a reluctant and resisting heart? To fulfill the law, however, is to do its works with pleasure and love, and to live a godly and good life of one’s own accord, without the compulsion of the law. This pleasure and love for the law is put into the heart by the Holy Ghost.
Martin Luther

Breaking The Cycle

Breaking The Cycle

Breaking The Cycle

An Active Homosexual Experiences Healing

At 38, I was leading a classic double life. To our friends, my wife and I seemed an ideal couple. But I was an active homosexual.

As far back as I can remember, I knew that men attracted me more than women, but I was naive about homosexuality. That was in a time when a homosexual lifestyle was so unacceptable that we didn’t even talk about such things. The standard thing to do was to grow up, get a job and get married. And I did.

I did the best I could to meet my wife’s expectations, and for the first few years our marriage was fairly happy. We had two daughters and by the time they entered their teenage years we had a lovely big house in the suburbs, a lot of friends, and we were both active in church.

It never occurred to me, when we married, to think of what I might do to the woman who joined me. But pretty soon my homosexual desires began to grow to the point that they totally dominated me. I was cautious at first about how I acted them out. I sneaked down to Washington after meetings to visit gay bars and movie theatres, or I planned business trips out of town. But pretty soon the desires so dominated me that I started hitting the gay bars in my home town. I started going to the parks looking for other gay men.

I knew what I was risking. I loved my wife and children and I knew I might lose them along with my job and my reputation, but it didn’t matter. Fortifying myself with a drink, I could go out and do the things I knew I had no business doing.

All this time I was active in the church. I taught Sunday school, and even though I might come in Sunday morning with a hangover, I fulfilled my responsibility. The God I believed in had created the world, had set up the physical and moral rules by which we were to live, and was sitting back watching us to see whether we made the grade or not.

I believed that everyone had his advantages and shortcoming through no fault of his own. Some people were born too poor, some were physically handicapped, some were alcoholic, some homosexual. I happened to be homosexual and felt no responsibility for it. The causes went too far back in my life, I was either born that way or something had happened early in my childhood to make me this way. I believed God was just and that in the end all these factors would balance out. I certainly didn’t believe in a God who could come into my life and change me.

That was the way I thought part of the time. At other times, I was deeply remorseful about what I was doing. I never kidded myself into thinking homosexual activity was all right. I believed it to be a sin. And in my case, it was also adultery, so there was no way to excuse myself. I confessed it to God periodically, and I determined not to do it again. I asked God for strength and at communion I claimed power to overcome, but it never worked.

Fifteen minutes after I had renounced my homosexuality, I could be right back into it. After a while, I couldn’t even confess any more because I knew I would go back to it. I had no power to control my desires. I was miserable. My wife had discovered what I was and went through a terrible struggle. We fought a lot and I took to drinking heavily. I came to dislike my job and more and more gave myself to degrading kinds of things.

Then two things happened. First, my wife joined a prayer group. Life had gotten so difficult for her that she knew she needed some kind of support and when a woman in our church talked about forming a group she jumped at the idea. Well, those women really had the gift of prayer. They prayed for me and for our family. My wife never told them the nature of our problem, but they prayed for us faithfully.

The second thing that happened was that a friend of mine, who did not know I was homosexual, got converted. He and I met for lunch once a week and began talking about religious matters. I began reading C. S. Lewis’ books and got him to. He was reading Thomas Merton and got me going on that. Together, we began a search to understand God and life.

Then something happened to him. He heard of a large charismatic prayer meeting and started going to it. There he found people with joy and a love for God most people don’t have.

My friend was quiet by nature, but he was suddenly transformed. He just “lit up”; he didn’t know how to express what had happened to him but I could see the change written all over him. I remember him saying things like, “The flowers are brighter” and “The food tastes better.” He was a new person, and because we were close friends, I came to believe that what had happened to him could happen to me.

There began for me the worst struggle of my life. I hated the life I was living and wanted to change. I hated the deceit and guilt. I hated what I was doing to my family, but I was obsessed with my homosexual desires. They were the first thing I thought of in the morning and the last thing at night. I never chose a route to where I was driving without arranging it in a way that would stimulate my sexual fantasies. The thought of giving up all that was terrifying.

On the other hand, the thought of confronting God personally and asking Him to heal me and having nothing happen was almost worse. And mixed with it was the fear that I would have to confess what I was to everybody I knew before God would hear me.

But I decided, at last, to go with my friend to his prayer meeting. It was on a Tuesday night. The attendance was large and the praying was noisy. But in the midst of it all, I just quietly said to the Lord, “I’m fed up. I have tried for 30 years to make it my way — now I’m ready to ask for help. I’ve tried to become stronger and it hasn’t worked. Now I just put myself in your hands, Lord, and ask you to do whatever you want with me, with no restrictions, no limitations.”

I left the meeting with a good feeling. The roof hadn’t come off the building, no heavenly choir had sung. But in two or three days I knew I had been healed. I was no longer a homosexual and I could hardly believe it. My friend had said to me, “The Lord is going to work in your life in a way that is beyond anything you can expect,” and I certainly hadn’t expected this.

In five years since then I haven’t had a homosexual desire. My wife and I have a renewed and deepened relationship that is a wonderful gift I never deserved. And all this came to me without a lot of faith on my part.

The one thing I had the night I gave myself to God was some hope. That hope had come through my close friend who, as far as I know, had never struggled with a “life dominating problem.” But I watched him change and just threw myself on the Lord’s mercy. So I guess hope is a part of faith and I would like my story, like the change that came to my friend and inspired hope in me, to bring hope to others who are caught, as I was, in a defeating whirlpool.

When we need the love of Jesus most, we are so caught in our inner turmoil that we can’t even think of anything else. Yet it is the love of Jesus that can heal us. What can break the cycle but a friend coming close and showing us the love of Jesus in action in his life.

  • Alan

For further information about homosexuality or about other areas of sexual brokenness, please contact:

LOVE IN ACTION
G.P.O. Box 1115
ADELAIDE SA 5001
Phone (08) 371 0446

This article is reprinted by permission from

Regeneration
P. O. Box 10574
Baltimore, Maryland, 21204
U.S.A.