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Finding Meaning in God’s Calling

Teaching Philosophy of Religion and Philosophy of the Human Person sometimes leads to interesting class discussions, where students’ engagement with some important philosophical text intermingles with concerns about the ultimate meaning of their own lives. In these conversations, two important themes often emerge: “what will I do with my life?” And: “who will I love?” Elisabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity is one of the most profound and honest Christian reflections I have ever read on these questions. In the years just after World War II, while they were both undergraduates at Wheaton, Elisabeth Howard met Jim Elliot. They both desired to serve in the mission field. Both of them were inspired by the example of Amy Carmichael, a single woman who spent decades as a missionary to India, and so they both took seriously the possibility that the demands of missionary work might be incompatible with the demands of marriage and family life. Therefore, the possibility of being called by God to be a “eunuch for the sake of the kingdom” was real for both of them. After nearly five years of uncertainty about God’s call—and sometimes heart-wrenching struggle to submit their desires to God’s will—they finally married. But just over two years into their marriage, Jim was martyred by members of the Waodoni tribe. Elisabeth Elliot’s book is a deeply human meditation on the challenges of discerning and obeying God’s call on our life and submitting to that call in our loves. She does not present an unrealistic or sentimentalized picture of what that obedience looks like: she acknowledges that it is often difficult, but at the same time she never loses sight of the ways that their brief life together flourished deeply because it was grounded in their shared love of God. There’s an important distinction here. My students asked: “what will I do with my life?” And: “who will I love?” Like most people in contemporary American culture, they tend to think of these questions in terms of identity formation. But “identity” is often part and parcel with our culture’s individualism and consumerism. In the minds of most Americans, my “identity” is something that fits my preferences, something that I choose for myself. But this is not the most helpful way of thinking about Christian discipleship. Instead, we need to move beyond the language of identity to the more fundamental language of vocation, the language of God’s call. The real questions should be: “What is God calling me to do?” And: “Who is God calling me to love?” As Christians, we believe that God gives each person gifts. Along with our gifts, He also calls us to build up the Body of Christ in some particular way. Both in the New Testament, and in subsequent Christian thinking, the question of calling is closely connected with both what we will do and who we will love. Consider the following dialogue: in Matthew 19, the Pharisees approach Jesus to test Him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” The Pharisees are asking a question about law; but Jesus immediately shifts the conversation to the creation, and to the nature of marriage itself. The primary question for Christ was not, “What can we do with our wives?” It was “What did God create marriage to be?” He answers this question by referring to the creation of man and woman in both creation accounts in Genesis, and then concludes, “So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” The Pharisees immediately remind Him that the Law of Moses allowed divorce. Now, Jesus replies: “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery.” Marriage and family life present many challenges, and when Jesus says this, His own disciples immediately object that, if this is what marriage demands, then it is better not to marry. To this, Jesus responds: “Not all men can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given.” The reality of marriage is often more difficult than the sentimental picture of Hallmark cards or some “family values” rhetoric. It is not easy for a fallen man and a fallen woman to nurture love for a lifetime, to deal with the burdens of child bearing and rearing, to watch children grow and get sick and to discover the many burdens of living in our fallen world. Every spouse and every parent can attest to the times when love is so difficult that it seems impossible. They know the heart-wrenching anxiety that comes from trying to nurture children in a world full of many threats, both natural and man-made. The Gospel recognizes all this. It recognizes that the task of lifelong love is difficult; but not all are called to marriage: this word calling to lifelong fidelity is not given to all. But, Jesus says, those who have been given it can receive it. At this point, Jesus emphasizes the diversity of callings, for, in addition to marriage, “there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.” Most Catholic and Orthodox thinking on vocation has focused on only the last category of eunuch, those who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. From this, and some corresponding discussion in I Corinthians 7, a whole theology of callings to religious life has developed. But it’s worth noting that both Jesus here—and Paul in I Corinthians—write about those who are involuntarily single, as well. This is a worthwhile subject for more reflection, though I will wait develop it more deeply in a later post. Everyone wants a meaningful life. The good news that we have to share with the world is that each person can find this life in using the gifts that God has given us to fulfill our vocation in life and to love the people whom God calls us to love. When Christians discuss “sexual ethics” today, they often focus, like the Pharisees, on rules: what is permitted? What is forbidden? Eve Tushnet has pointed out the problem with this: “you can’t have a vocation of not-gay-marrying and not-having-sex. You can’t have a vocation of No.” But Jesus shifts the focus from rules to vocation. The more seriously we take marriage, single life, and vowed celibacy as callings, as the way of life within which God Himself asks me to share my gifts and respond to His call, the more seriously we will take the requirements of that way of life: fidelity in marriage, abstinence in singleness. So to shift from talking about sexual ethics to talking about vocation and communion does not mean downplaying or ignoring sexual ethics. Instead, it places those questions in their true context. However, if we think in this way, then the first questions we ask about any person are: what gifts has God given this person? How does He call them? And this, of course, applies to ourselves, as well: what gifts has God given me? What does God call me to do? In what way of life does He call me to share my gifts? God gives every person (gay and lesbian persons included) various gifts to build up the Church in different ways. While homosexuality creates some unique vocational questions, it does not negate these gifts. As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith observed: The human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation. Every one living on the face of the earth has personal problems and difficulties, but challenges to growth, strengths, talents and gifts as well. Today, the Church provides a badly needed context for the care of the human person when she refuses to consider the person as a “heterosexual” or a “homosexual” and insists that every person has a fundamental Identity: the creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life.

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#Finding Meaning in God’s Calling

What Does Selfishness Has To Do with Loneliness?

There are more than 6.7 billion people living on this planet right now. The planet has never been this populated. Yet this world have never experience so much loneliness like we do today. The more the people there are the less we are supposed to be alone. But many of us are alone. And worse is many of us are lonely. So what happened with the saying “The more the merrier?” I believe that the cause of this plague of loneliness is our very own selfishness. We have solely focused everything towards ourselves and forgotten others. We have chosen to disconnect ourselves to the rest of humanity when we placed ourselves as the center of the universe, the place of God. Each one of us was made for love. We long to love and be loved. To be denied of love, is to be denied of one of our most basic need. The state or feeling of being unloved is what we often call loneliness. Loneliness is one of the worst poverty one can experience. Because of our selfishness we have forgotten what real love is. We have focused are actions on taking than on sharing. We have a world full of Go-Getters and hoarders. Because of our mentality of getting we forgot to give. Now everyone feels deprived and empty because no one is giving. Unconditional love is scarce these days. It is funny because our own greed has made us poor. We fill ourselves with worldly stuffs but feel empty in the inside. We jump from one party to the next only to go home feeling so more lonely the before. We pursued to get everything we want, only to realize that it does not cure our emptiness. I believe to solution to loneliness is love. We must learn give ourselves to be filled. St. Francis of Assisi said, “It is in giving that we receive.” If one is possessed of any ONE good quality in a marked measure – sincerity, loyalty, honesty, honor, integrity, purity, goodness, comprehension, love, joy, sweetness, etc. -- it is impossible for one to be lonely. The right, rational, spiritual remedy for loneliness is to become selfless or self-giving. Selfishness organised as individuality is loneliness. Loneliness is the psychological by-product of mistaking individuality for narrow self-centered nature. The world needs the Go-Givers to make this lonely planet less lonely. “Where there is no love, put love and you will draw out love.” – St John of the Cross

#What Does Selfishness Has To Do with Loneliness?

Love Is Not a Feeling

For many of us, feelings dictate how we live our lives. We use them to motivate us. We use them to decide what we love, who we are, and what we should do. If they are strong, we will do anything to keep them going, and if they are weak, nothing can make us do anything. This can seem like a very reasonable way to live. Since we are what we love, we might say, our feelings show us who we are. Some have even reasoned that since they want to do something they know is wrong that they must love it, and since they love it they might as well do it. After all, there's no point in pretending to be any better than we really are; that's adding hypocrisy to our list of sins. The reality is that our feelings do not always tell us what we love, and therefore they should not be a factor in choosing what we should do with our spiritual lives. What we feel is not what we love. Loves do produce feelings, and feelings do help us know what we love, but they can also be misleading. A feeling can be good, yet come from love or selfishness. Take romantic passion for example. It always feels good. If it comes from a chaste love, and is expressed only within the bonds of marriage, that good feeling shows a good love. On the other hand, that same feeling could come from a horrible selfish desire. It's easy to see how far apart our loves and feelings often are when we are angry. Think about a time when you were angry with someone you love very dearly. In that time of anger, you may have felt like hurting that person, that you hated him, maybe even that you wished he was dead. But did that feeling of anger and hatred mean you didn't love him anymore? Of course not! In an hour, or even fifteen minutes, the feeling was probably totally gone, and you were ready to appreciate and even feel love for the person again. The love was there all along, but you were blind and deaf to it. While it is true that the presence of anger shows that you do not totally love that person, that's no big deal. It just means we aren't perfect, but we knew that already. What is important is for us to recognize that feelings don't necessarily show us what our overall love is. There is a better way to find out what we really love. We need to look at what we do. What things do we make time for? What things form consistent patterns in our activities? What do we always do no matter how we feel? Love is not so much a feeling as a commitment. We can see an even more powerful example of this principle in the Lord's prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. This was probably the lowpoint of the Lord's life on earth. He had been deserted by the whole Human race; He was about to be deserted by His disciples, and He knew it; even the angels had despaired and were telling Him to give up on humanity. He was totally alone. He felt so bad that He even prayed to His Father, to the soul within Himself, to ask if He had to go through with the trials of the next day. Yet think of the words He said in this lowpoint of His life: "O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will but as You will." Think about that. Even during the most overpowering feelings of loss and loneliness, ones we cannot begin to imagine, the very question He asked to get out of His appointed task is qualified with the commitment to do what is right: nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will. That total commitment to the salvation of each one of us is staggering. No one has ever felt more like giving up, and then no one has ever gone on to give more in spite of His feelings The closest we can get to doing what the Lord did is to be willing to lay down our life, either physically or spiritually, for someone else. The Lord said that this is the greatest act of love a person can do. Yet to do it we have to overcome the strongest feeling we have, which is our desire to preserve our own lives. No one feels like doing this. No one gets up in the morning and decides, "I think I'll lay down my life for my friend today." Rather, when a person or cause is threatened, he sees the need for sacrifice, and acts. True love acts on what it knows to be good, rather than what it simply feels to be good. So where does this leave our feelings since they should have nothing to do with how we act? Are they just useless adornments the Lord has given us, something we can't enjoy because we can't trust? The answer is that feelings are not made to show us our loves or to show us what to do. Our feelings serve two important uses. The first is to stimulate us to think about an issue. If a feeling comes up, we know that some love must be active. That mean we need to evaluate what that love is, and see if runs contrary to our commitments. If we feel a rush of anger coming on, it is a warning either that the hells are attacking us, or that we are feeling a strong desire to protect ourselves or someone we love. That feeling can stimulate us to decide what our commitments are. Similarly, if we feel the strong desire to hug someone, that feeling should prompt us to decide whether the setting is appropriate, and if that would be the most useful thing to do for that person. But feelings serve one far more important purpose. We can see it from the word used to name feelings in the Word for the New Church: they are called "delights." That word, delights, tells us how we are supposed to use our feelings: we are supposed to enjoy them, delight in them, accept them as a wonderful gift from our God to make our life enjoyable. Once we know that a feeling is from a good love, the Lord wants us to enjoy it. Until we get to the point where we instinctively know whether feelings are good or bad, in other words, until we become among the very best of the angels, there is another way of judging them. While it is true that the hells are particularly good at manipulating our feelings, they have a much harder time manipulating our thoughts. Therefore we can use our thoughts to judge our feelings. A simple way of doing this is to ask ourselves, "If I follow this feeling out, does it lead me to do good or evil things." If it leads us away from what we know is right, we should shun it, but if it does not, we can enjoy it, even abandon ourselves to it. Using our feelings in this way frees them up to simply delight us. All feelings do come from loves, but we often can't tell if it is a true or fake love. If we identify ourselves and our loves with what we feel, we give a great victory to the hells because at times they can make us feel just about whatever they want. Although we cannot control the feelings that flow into us, we can control the loves we develop. We will still feel terrible at times, just as the Lord did while He was on earth. We will learn that love in the form of commitment is more enduring and more powerful than any feeling we may have. And what is wonderful, we will discover the joy of allowing the good feelings the Lord has given us to delight us with their full power. .

#True Love is Not Based on Feelings #Love Is Not a Feeling

Gay Chastity is a calling

Gayness is not reduceable to homosexual sex, or the desire to have homosexual sex. It is a way of relating to other people, a way of appreciating human beauty, and a way of relating to one's own gender. Most people who identify as chaste, gay Christians, are referring to involuntary currents of homoeroticism and gender-queerness that run through the personality. Many believe that these currents are so fundamentally disordered that the only proper response to them is one of outright warfare, that the personality must have surgery performed on it in order to eliminate every vestige of queerness in order that it might be rendered fit for salvation. I think that there are two serious problems with this approach. First, people who engage in this kind of argument seem to think that the question of to be, or not to be same-sex attracted is an open question in the lives of gay people. This point is obvious to those of us with SSA, but apparently not to everyone else: for a homosexual person, same-sex attraction is a given. We can have a heated debate about whether or not people ought to have these attractions, just as we can have a lively argument about whether or not men ought to have spontaneous erections (a subject that has produced considerable discursive excitement over the centuries, mostly amongst ivory tower academics), but the fact is that for all practical purposes the question is settled – no amount of theological speculation has ever proved capable of preventing “concupiscent movements of the flesh,” nor can any amount of moralistic diatribe prevent homosexual persons from having homoerotic desires. Secondly, hard-line traditionalists tend to assume that same-sex attraction is fundamentally objectively disordered in all of its aspects. The Canadian Council of Catholic Bishops, in their recent document on Youth with Same-Sex Attractions, were very careful to explicitly spell out the fact that homosexual inclinations are objectively disordered in so far as they concern the desire to have same-sex genital relations. That is, in so far as same-sex attractions are concupiscent, they are objectively disordered: a nice little tautology which only stands in need of clarification because it is counterintuitive to contemporary secular culture. What this means is that same-sex attractions, in so far as they are not concupiscent, are not disordered: another tautology, but one that is equally counterintuitive to many moral conservatives. To understand the difference between concupiscent desire, and ordered desire, let's follow John Paul II's lead and return to the Beginning. I'd like to analyze, specifically, Genesis 3:6: “The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was enticing for the wisdom that it could give.” Surely this is a case of disordered desire, right? Eve wants what she's not supposed to have, and as a result of that desire, she sins. Sed contra, Eve at this moment is still in a state of Original Innocence. She does not have concupiscence clouding her judgement. What she sees at the moment is objectively true: the fruit really is good to eat, it really is pleasing to the eye, and it really is desirable for the wisdom that it could give. What is false is her conclusion, that because of these properties, it is justifiable for her to take and eat what has been denied to her by God. I'd like to apply the same hermeneutic to same-sex attraction. When I look at a woman, and see that she is beautiful, that she is desirable, that she is enticing, I'm seeing something that is objectively true: she is objectively a manifestation of the imago dei, she is objectively attractive, and it is objectively legitimate for me to desire to be united with her in the vast communio personarum which is constituted by the Church and by the whole human race. My desire is not disordered in and of itself: it becomes disordered when I direct it, or allow it direct itself, towards something which is forbidden. If it leads me to fantasize about homosexual acts, or to think of the woman as a sex object, then it becomes disordered, that is ordered towards an end which is not in conformity with Truth and with the dignity of the person. But what if I make the act of will to redirect that desire, to use it as an opportunity to give glory to God for the beauty which He has made manifest in that particular woman? Or to meditate on my desire for the one-flesh union of the entire humanum in the Eucharist where there is neither Gentile nor Jew, slave nor free, woman nor man? Or as an opportunity to contemplate the relationship between the doctrines of the Communion of Saints and of the resurrection of the Body? What if, by an act of will, I take that desire and order it towards its proper end: towards the Good, the Beautiful and the True? This is what I mean when I speak of sublimation, and it relates to what we mean when we speak of being both gay and chaste. It means that the word “gay” is being used to refer to the fact that some of us are more easily able to experience the goodness and beauty of the body in the bodies our own sex than we are in the bodies of the opposite sex. Obviously that leaves us open to homosexual temptation, just as the ability of most men and women to more easily appreciate bodily beauty in the opposite sex leaves them open to heterosexual temptations (to pre-marital sex, to adultery, to pornography, to sexual fantasy, etc.) Obviously in so far as it leads to homosexual temptation, it is disordered. But the word “gay” can refer to the orientation of that initial erotic impulse, irregardless of whether it develops towards disordered lust, or towards an appreciation of Christ playing “lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not His.” Which is why, in my submission, gay chastity is a calling, not a myth. .

#Gay Chastity is a calling.gay and chaste

Celibate Gay Christian

At a conference where I spoke this week, the question came up again: “Why would you call yourself a ‘gay Christian’?” Others have posted about this so here’s my brief take on the question.

First, what’s behind the question? One of my interlocutors this week suggested that a parallel case would be if someone were to label himself an “adulterous Christian” or a “stealing Christian.” Those terms are self-evidently problematic in that they make sinful behaviors part of an identity description for believers, and therefore gay Christians should find their chosen label equally problematic. My response to this is that those are not, in fact, parallel cases. “Gay” in current parlance doesn’t necessarily refer to sexual behavior; it can just as easily refer to one’s sexual orientation and say nothing, one way or the other, about how one is choosing to express that orientation. So, whereas “stealing Christian” certainly denotes the behavior of stealing, “gay Christian” may simply refer to the erotic inclinations of the Christian who claims that identity and leave open the question of whether he or she is sexually active with members of his or her own sex.

This is why, by the way, I rarely use the phrase “gay Christian” without adding another adjective: “celibate.” To call myself a “celibate gay Christian” specifies both my sexual orientation and the way I’m choosing to live it out. (More on that in a moment.)

But I take it there’s a second, deeper question lurking under the “Why do you call yourself a ‘gay Christian’?” question, and it’s this: “By using the label ‘gay’ for yourself, aren’t you simply accepting that same-sex attraction is an unalterable part of your personality and thereby giving up on the possibility of healing and change?”

At least two things strike me as important to say in response to this. First, the best scientific study we have of sexual orientation change efforts urges caution in holding out the possibility of “change” to any and all gay Christians ). Reflecting on the results of this study, Joshua Gonnerman concludes:

We need not absolutely reject orientation change. But it is frequently presented as a strong hope, an ideal to be striven towards, with good chances of success. For a person who is deeply struggling with her sexuality, who desperately wants, as many people do, and as I once did, not to be gay, the ready offer of orientation change can become an object of fixation, even an idol in which all of one’s hope is placed…

Too often, I have seen people who placed their hope in orientation change in this way come crashing down when they realized it wasn’t working. On a psychological level, it can lead to depression, to self-loathing, to suicidal tendencies. The message that the absence of successful change makes one a lesser Christian or some kind of failure is always present, either explicitly or implicitly.

This brings me to a second response to the question, “Have you given up hope?” On the contrary, calling oneself a “celibate gay Christian” may be a way of expressing, not giving up, hope—but expressing it in a way that doesn’t link that hope to orientation change. Claiming the label “celibate gay Christian” means, for me, recognizing my homosexual orientation as a kind of “thorn in the flesh.” When the apostle Paul used that phrase in his correspondence with the Corinthian church, he made clear that his “thorn” was indeed an unwelcome source of pain (2 Corinthians 12:7). But he also made clear that it had become the very occasion for his experience of the power of the risen Christ and, therefore, a paradoxical site of grace (2 Corinthians 12:8). Paul, I think, would have had no qualms about labeling himself a “thorn-pricked Christian”—not because he recognized his thorn as a good thing, in and of itself, but because it had become for him the means by which he encountered the power of Christ. Likewise, living with an unchanged homosexual orientation may be for many of us the means by which we discover new depths of grace, as well as new vocations of service to others.

Commenting on 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 and the homosexual partnerships that some of Paul’s readers had been involved in prior to their baptism, J. I. Packer writes about Paul’s gospel:

With some of the Corinthian Christians, Paul was celebrating the moral empowering of the Holy Spirit in heterosexual terms; with others of the Corinthians, today’s homosexuals are called to prove, live out, and celebrate the moral empowering of the Holy Spirit in homosexual terms.

Finding the moral empowering—and the grace and consolation—of the Holy Spirit “in homosexual terms” is, it seems to me, what leads many of us to label ourselves “celibate gay Christians.” .

#Why would you call yourself a gay Christian #gay Christian #Celibate Gay Christian

Not Good to be Alone

In reality, the traditional view of Genesis 2, believed by many Christians, distorts scripture by assuming facts not in evidence. Genesis is an explanation of origins. It is not a dissertation on marriage relationships. God asserts the importance of human relationships by observing: “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.” Genesis 2:18 Adam was a one of a kind original. The animals had compatible companions but Adam was all alone. Here was Adam, a perfect man, alone and lonely because no other human beings existed and Eve had not yet been created. Adam, the original, perfect man in a perfect world, had God as his intimate companion yet God knew His companionship was not enough for Adam. In the midst of fellowship with God, Adam still needed someone like himself - an orientation compatible partner - for emotional, physical and spiritual companionship. Just as God is the original community as Trinity, so we are humans are made in His image. Alvin Plantinga has written, “At the center of the universe, self-giving love is the dynamic currency of the Trinitarian life of God. The persons within God exalt each other, commune with each other, defer to one another. Each person, so to speak, makes room for the other.” Jesus began his public ministry hearing these words of affirmation from the Father, “You are my son, marked and chosen by my love, the pride of my life.” That same family love that the Father has for Jesus, includes us. It is into this love between the Father and the Son that Jesus invites us. The circle of the Trinity is opened and the warmth of the love between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit draws us in. We reflect God made in His image in that we were created to be fulfilled and completed through relationships. “It is not good to be alone…” goes straight to the greatest fear of human life. Loneliness or being cut off from others leaves the deepest wound. We were made to be completed and fulfilled in our relationships with each other. Not even God is enough for Adam. Adam is created prior to Eve, has the entire garden to himself, with God as His companion, and yet “it is not good for man to be alone.” This should undermine the Jesus and me theology, that says I can live this Christian life by myself. No, as we shall see we were made for community and Jesus came to create a new humanity that is a restoration of our tarnished image. The New Testament covenantal community birthed through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Not all of us married or have found that kind of intimacy. For all of us who have failed to keep our promises or have been victims of other broken promises there is a community of grace. We are all promise breakers in one form or another. None of us has ever fully kept our promises; we have violated God’s law and standards. So God looked beyond His original role as Creator to when He would pursue us as Redeemer all the way to sending His Son into this world to buy our sinful lives back through the cross. The image of God in us that was tarnished through our promise breaking, would be restored by the One who bore the very image of God, Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul says of Jesus in Colossians 1:15, “He is the image of the invisible God...” The true image bearer, the God-man, came among us to restore the image of God in us and restore a community that bears His image. The church in God’s scheme is the restored community; the place where our isolation in sin that separates us from God and each other is overcome, because the ticket into this community is to admit our brokenness, receive forgiveness, and be reconciled to God and each other. It is here that our loneliness is filled through the community in whom Jesus dwells, a new humanity infused by the life of the image bearer. This is to be true family that reflects that original family we know as the Triune God. At Christ Church what we long to be is that place where people can say, “I belong here and find my deepest longings fulfilled in the intimacy of relationship is the new humanity that Jesus is creating.” .

#Not good to be alone #It is not good that the man should be alone #Genesis 2:18

Same Sex Attractions are not considered Sinful

Introduction: Sexual orientation describes an enduring pattern of attraction—emotional, romantic, or some combination of these—to persons of the opposite sex, the same sex, or to both sexes, as well as the genders that accompany them. These attractions are generally subsumed under heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality, while asexuality (the lack of romantic or sexual attraction to others) is sometimes identified as the fourth category. The term sexual preference largely overlaps with sexual orientation, but is generally distinguished in psychological research. A person who identifies as bisexual, for example, may sexually prefer one sex over the other. "Sexual preference" may also suggest a degree of voluntary choice, whereas the scientific consensus is that sexual orientation is not a choice. There is no simple, single cause for sexual orientation that has been conclusively demonstrated, but research suggests that it is by a combination of genetic, hormonal, and environmental influences, with biological factors involving a complex interplay of genetic factors and the early uterine environment. That's why we conclude that sexual attraction/feeling (sexual orientation) in itself is not sinful because It's not a voluntary choice. When does Sexual Attraction become sinful ?? Any sexual attraction (whether it's to person of the opposite sex, the same sex, or to both sexes) becomes sinful when we act on it in a wrong way .In every case of attraction there is the possibility to go down the right or wrong road with it. The Church condemns homosexual acts, but does not condemn same-sex attraction unless it leads to homosexual sex (which includes, of course, lustful thoughts deliberately indulged in and directed at a member of the same sex). Just as some men have a greater tendency towards lustful thoughts about women, but commit no sin if they do not deliberately dwell on or encourage these lustful thoughts, and stay out of situations where they may be excessively tempted toward them (such as avoiding pornography), so does a person having same-sex attraction who neither have homosexual sex nor encourage lustful thoughts. How can Same Sex attractions be useful ? Instead of using attraction as an occasion for lust or passivity, maybe we can use each case of attraction to do something positive to benefit not only ourselves but the person we find attractive. How so?. Well, We can use the attraction as a trigger to pray for that person's needs. We can 'unwrap the gift' of our sexuality by accepting it, understanding it, and perhaps even hearing what God is saying to us through it. If we can see the value of the gift to us, personally, then it must be valuable to others, also. It can lead us to know more of God's love and forgiveness. It can help us to know and understand others. We should not deny the power of desire, when touched by the holy, to lift the desire to a more holy state . Godly relationships are a gift from God that brings an element of richness to our lives that make even the most mundane days enjoyable. When you look back over your life, it isn't the accomplishments that have the most significance, but the people we impact and who impact us along our journey. That's why Friendship is considered a powerful tool for using same sex attractions in a positive way. Friendship is a blessing !. When two people share a strong bond of mutual understanding, respect and love it lays the foundation stone for an everlasting friendship. This bond just gets stronger with time; the trust between the two people grows and so does the attachment. This is the beauty of the relationship and is the essential meaning of friendship. Ideally the meaning of friendship is sharing unconditional love for each other. Having and being a friend means wanting only the best for each other. "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." - John 15:13 .

#Same sex Feelings not considered sins #homosexual orientation is not a sin #homosexual acts are sinful

Too Close for Comfort

EVER since the Census Bureau released figures last month showing that married-couple households are now a minority, my phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from people asking: “How can we save marriage? How can we make Americans understand that marriage is the most significant emotional connection they will ever make, the one place to find social support and personal fulfillment?”

I think these are the wrong questions — indeed, such questions would have been almost unimaginable through most of history. It has only been in the last century that Americans have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love. Because of this change, many of us have found joys in marriage our great-great-grandparents never did. But we have also neglected our other relationships, placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process.

A study released this year showed just how dependent we’ve become on marriage. Three sociologists at the University of Arizona and Duke University found that from 1985 to 2004 Americans reported a marked decline in the number of people with whom they discussed meaningful matters. People reported fewer close relationships with co-workers, extended family members, neighbors and friends. The only close relationship where more people said they discussed important matters in 2004 than in 1985 was marriage.

In fact, the number of people who depended totally on a spouse for important conversations, with no other person to turn to, almost doubled, to 9.4 percent from 5 percent. Not surprisingly, the number of people saying they didn’t have anyone in whom they confided nearly tripled.

The solution to this isolation is not to ramp up our emotional dependence on marriage. Until 100 years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion.

St. Paul complained that married men were more concerned with pleasing their wives than pleasing God. In John Adams’s view, a “passion for the public good” was “superior to all private passions.” In both England and America, moralists bewailed “excessive” married love, which encouraged “men and women to be always taken up with each other.”

From medieval days until the early 19th century, diaries and letters more often used the word love to refer to neighbors, cousins and fellow church members than to spouses. When honeymoons first gained favor in the 19th century, couples often took along relatives or friends for company. Victorian novels and diaries were as passionate about brother-sister relationships and same-sex friendships as about marital ties.

The Victorian refusal to acknowledge strong sexual desires among respectable men and women gave people a wider outlet for intense emotions, including physical touch, than we see today. Men wrote matter-of-factly about retiring to bed with a male roommate, “and in each other’s arms did friendship sink peacefully to sleep.” Upright Victorian matrons thought nothing of kicking their husbands out of bed when a female friend came to visit. They spent the night kissing, hugging and pouring out their innermost thoughts.

By the early 20th century, though, the sea change in the culture wrought by the industrial economy had loosened social obligations to neighbors and kin, giving rise to the idea that individuals could meet their deepest needs only through romantic love, culminating in marriage. Under the influence of Freudianism, society began to view intense same-sex ties with suspicion and people were urged to reject the emotional claims of friends and relatives who might compete with a spouse for time and affection.

The insistence that marriage and parenthood could satisfy all an individual’s needs reached a peak in the cult of “togetherness” among middle-class suburban Americans in the 1950s. Women were told that marriage and motherhood offered them complete fulfillment. Men were encouraged to let their wives take care of their social lives.

But many men and women found these prescriptions stifling. Women who entered the work force in the 1960s joyfully rediscovered social contacts and friendships outside the home.

“It was so stimulating to have real conversations with other people,” a woman who lived through this period told me, “to go out after work with friends from the office or to have people over other than my husband’s boss or our parents.”

And women’s lead in overturning the cult of 1950s marriage inspired many men to rediscover what earlier generations of men had taken for granted — that men need deep emotional connections with other men, not just their wives. Researchers soon found that men and women with confidants beyond the nuclear family were mentally and physically healthier than people who relied on just one other individual for emotional intimacy and support.

So why do we seem to be slipping back in this regard? It is not because most people have voluntarily embraced nuclear-family isolation. Indeed, the spread of “virtual” communities on the Internet speaks to a deep hunger to reach out to others.

Instead, it’s the expansion of the post-industrial economy that seems to be driving us back to a new dependence on marriage. According to the researchers Kathleen Gerson and Jerry Jacobs, 60 percent of American married couples have both partners in the work force, up from 36 percent in 1970, and the average two-earner couple now works 82 hours a week.

This is probably why the time Americans spend socializing with others off the job has declined by almost 25 percent since 1965. Their free hours are spent with spouses, and as a study by Suzanne Bianchi of the University of Maryland released last month showed, with their children — mothers and fathers today spend even more time with their youngsters than parents did 40 years ago.

As Americans lose the wider face-to-face ties that build social trust, they become more dependent on romantic relationships for intimacy and deep communication, and more vulnerable to isolation if a relationship breaks down. In some cases we even cause the breakdown by loading the relationship with too many expectations. Marriage is generally based on more equality and deeper friendship than in the past, but even so, it is hard for it to compensate for the way that work has devoured time once spent cultivating friendships.

The solution is not to revive the failed marital experiment of the 1950s, as so many commentators noting the decline in married-couple households seem to want. Nor is it to lower our expectations that we’ll find fulfillment and friendship in marriage.

Instead, we should raise our expectations for, and commitment to, other relationships, especially since so many people now live so much of their lives outside marriage. Paradoxically, we can strengthen our marriages the most by not expecting them to be our sole refuge from the pressures of the modern work force. Instead we need to restructure both work and social life so we can reach out and build ties with others, including people who are single or divorced. That indeed would be a return to marital tradition — not the 1950s model, but the pre-20th-century model that has a much more enduring pedi- gree.

#Too Close for Comfort #The fragile institution of marriage

Anal Sex - a Christian's perspective

God created sex for three basic reasons: reproduction, pleasure, and intimacycome to mind immediately. However, there is no limit to the creativity a married couple can exercise in fulfilling the pleasure and intimacy reasons for why God created sex.

There are some rules, however:

1) All sexual desire must be directed to the spouse and not to a third person, real or imaginary.

2) All activity must be free of physical pain or discomfort for both parties.

3) All activity must be relatively free of psychological discomfort and embarrassment.

4) All activity must be subject to frank and open discussion, both before and after the activity. [Was that as good for you as it was for me?] Some of the activities listed below may be counterproductive and cause emotional discomfort or even revulsion. However, none of these activities should be considered perverted or unnatural as long as rules 1-4 are followed. None are forbidden by Scripture.

Anal sex can increase the participants' chances of contracting a sexually transmitted disease (STD), infection or AIDS. (see health risks PDF document) As the primary exit for bodily waste, the anus is highly contaminated with harmful bacteria. Because of the potential tissue damage arising from anal penetration, both partners have a high risk of contracting infection.

Anal intercourse is not recommended as an alternative for vaginal intercourse.

In conclusion, As a personal opinion, avoid it. Even so, some Christians may not agree with this conclusion, and may hold that marriage gives a husband and wife permission to do whatever they want with each other's bodies. If that's your rationale, I then urge you to consider Paul's "beneficial test" found in 1 Corinthians 6:12-13 NIV:

12"Everything is permissible for me"--but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible for me"--but I will not be mastered by anything.

We can ask ourselves, "Is anal sex going to benefit me, my spouse and our relationship with God, or will it harm or hinder us?" If it is going to harm or hinder in any way, then we would be wise not to practice it.

#is anal sex a sin?#Anal Sex in bible

Are homosexual inclinations disordered ?

Side B means they who are gays and believe that same gender sex is outside the boundaries God has set for sexual morality

I really think the issue is not whether homosexual inclinations are "disordered." I think it's safe to say that most inclinations of humanity are disordered and have been skewed by the Fall, and every single person on the face of the earth displays that "disorder" in one way or another or in many ways. I'm pretty sure we can all agree on that.

It's not like homosexuality is the only thing that is "disordered" in the world. The straight community definitely doesn't have a corner on the market when it comes to being "ordered." The problem comes for me when people want to paint me as more "disordered" or put me in a special category just because I am gay. When people automatically assume that somehow I am incapable of living a holy life unless I fall in line with their preconceived notions of what that means, i.e. living a straight, "normal" life, really gets to me. That makes no sense. I agree that the best we can do is to get out there and form relationships with people and allow those people to know us. If we show ourselves and allow ourselves to be seen and known, it will go a long way to change people's perceptions and understanding of what it means to be a Christian man or woman, who also happens to be gay. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that without this, the Church probably won't change at all. Because unless it becomes concrete for people, the whole gay thing will remain something theoretical, and people will continue to perpetuate their prejudices and preconceived ideas about gay people. In this way, Harvey Milk was right when he said that the more we "come out," the more people's hearts will soften and change. I also am becoming more convinced of our need to pray as a community for this intention. We should be seeking the Lord's guidance and help along the way. We need to first take this to the Lord in prayer. First, we should pray for our leaders and shepherds that they will have open hearts and minds regarding this issue. In the First World these days, many of them are walking a perceived tightrope trying to balance being open and welcoming of gay people while upholding the Church's traditional teachings on homosexuality, and that cannot be easy. We need to pray for them that they will have the wisdom and insight to make good decisions. Given the difficulty of walking that tightrope, we also should not be surprised when some of them fail. We need to also pray that God will have mercy on them and offer them forgiveness. As I heard a priest say once, people err on the side of justice or on the side of mercy by either being too harsh or being too lenient. I see that happening a lot with this issue, i.e. either churches tend to fall on the side of being too harsh on gay people or being too lenient. It's rare to find a church that is "just right" to quote a line from The Three Bears. I don't know about you, but I find it equally difficult to feel at home in a so-called "welcoming" church as I do in a church that wants to excommunicate me merely for saying I'm gay. I say this as a Side B gay Christian. The "welcoming" church usually finds me an oddity because I want to live a chaste life and tries to convince me that I'm living with an antiquated world view and that I need to modernize my understanding of Scripture, marriage, and myself. However, if they do accept my desire to be chaste, they want me to become a Side A gay man, who just happens to feel called to chastity. As a Side B gay man, I really don't feel very welcome in a church that is gay affirming. (Disclaimer: that is merely my own opinion and comes from my own experience. Others may feel differently and have had different experiences.) Second, we need to pray for ourselves and each other. Being Side B is not easy. We have a very hard time defining what Side B is while we do a very good job at saying what it is not, so it's not surprising we have a difficult time speaking to the Church as a whole. This is something that hit home to me again during our discussions about what it means to be a Side B gay Christian during our Brevard gathering. The more we pray about this, I really believe the easier it will be for us to define ourselves in a positive light. The Lord will answer our prayers. Third, just to echo what I said about our shepherds, we also need to show mercy to all our brothers and sisters in the Lord. Sometimes I think we expect too much of people and expect them to turn on a dime when it comes to their ideas and notions of gay people. I think it is helpful to look at our own prejudices and shortcomings and work to change those first while showing everyone a great deal of kindness. We have no idea what is really going on in people's hearts, and I think in the face of injustice and hurt, the best thing we can do is follow the Lord's example and teachings. It is difficult, but we need to show mercy while pointing out the injustice and hurt. As Tom said, what else can we do? Fourth, something else that comes to mind is our need to be involved in service. Now, I'm not a very good example of this, but I often wonder if we need to get out of ourselves and over ourselves and reach out to others more. I wonder how our perceptions of this issue in relationship to the Church would change if we engaged more in service of others rather than sitting around endlessly thinking and writing about these issues. In some ways, our discussions on here, while good to some extent, might have a tendency to promote an attitude that is reactive rather than proactive. I don't think it was a mistake when Christ spoke about how we need to be servants of each other. I wonder how much of this discussion would change if we consciously made an effort to combine our lives of prayer with lives of action in service to each other. Lastly, we all need to examine our own consciences, I think, regarding all this. Yes, it is one thing to sit around and talk about this and complain about how much the Church won't accept us or how the leaders of the Church are not speaking in ways with which we agree or with which we are comfortable. However, what are we doing to make a change? Are we striving to be known and to know others, or do we just expect things to magically change? Please don't think that I'm casting any stones with that last paragraph. I am not a very good example when it comes to that. I just think it's so easy for us to sit here and cast stones at our brothers and sisters in the Lord rather than to get out and start working and doing things that will help to change the situation. As I said earlier, it is not easy being Side B, but it is definitely not impossible. We can make a difference. Let's start with prayer and move to action as the Lord calls us. Things can and will change, but we need to be willing to step out and help make that happen.

#Are homosexual inclinations disordered ?

Life Without Sex

David Jay was in middle school when everyone around him grew suddenly obsessed with the same all-consuming impulse. It wasn't sex per se, but it was its nascent beginnings. While his classmates talked non-stop about which movie stars they thought were hot, eyed each other in the hallway, and made their first, awkward attempts at dating, Jay was left feeling distinctly out of the loop.

"I just didn't get it," he recalls. "I didn't have a reference point to understand what they were going through. And that's really terrifying, because everyone assumes that's what should be happening for you. Sexuality is a really big deal for almost everyone, from middle school on. It's a really central part of a lot of people's lives."

But sex was not a central part of David Jay's life: not in middle school, not in high school, and not now. That's because, like approximately one percent of the population, Jay identifies as asexual. Not only that, he is America's best known asexual person, serving as the emergent sexual orientation's attractive, articulate spokesperson on everything from The View, to MTV, to France 24.

Jay launched the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), an online community dedicated to raising awareness of asexuality and providing support to people who identify as asexual, in 2001, when he was 18 and a college freshman. "I had spent the past four years struggling to realize that I was okay, and I didn't want other asexual people to have the realize the same thing," he says. The website soon became a rallying cry: first for hundreds, then thousands, and later tens of thousands of people who felt alienated from the sexual stories and imagery that dominate our culture.

If we stop defining our significant relationships only as those that are romantic or sexual, being single will take on new meaning.

At its most basic, asexuality is defined by an absence of sexual attraction. Some asexual people are in romantic relationships, others aren't. Some are outgoing, others are shy. Some are sexually active for the sake of their partners or social pressure, some have never so much as kissed another person. Some think sex is disgusting, some are indifferent, and some think it's great for other people but have no wish to "go there" themselves.

But what all asexual people have in common -- and what defines asexuality as an orientation -- is that, while they may have a desire to connect with other people, asexuals have no desire to connect with them sexually. Asexual people are not the same as celibate people: it's not that they are purposefully or unintentionally abstaining from sex they would otherwise like to have, but rather that they have no interest in it.

There have always been people who didn't want or seek out sex, and there have long been people who have described themselves (even if only in the recesses of their own minds) as asexual. It's just that before Google came along, they couldn't find each other. David Jay didn't invent asexuality. But his website did arrive right at the critical moment at which a person typing that word into a search engine could stumble upon a relevant community -- rather than, say, an article about the reproductive systems of sea stars.

But although the Internet provided the technology for people to start talking about asexuality, it was not the only -- or even the most important -- condition necessary for that conversation, says Mark Carrigan, a researcher at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. "There had to be something about [asexual people's] experience that led them to want to have those conversations in the first place," he says.

That something is the sense of not just difference, but of defect, that Jay alludes to in his memories of middle and high school. "For a couple of years I just assumed that I was broken," he says.

And that feeling of being broken is more than just a matter of individual neurosis. It is illustrative of how deeply what Carrigan calls "the sexual assumption" is embedded in our society -- "the idea that everyone has sexual attraction, that it's this powerful force inside of you, and that it is experienced the same way by every person," Carrigan explains.

History shows that this was not always the case. Sex has long been considered a matter of great importance in Western culture, from the Ancient Greeks' fixation on moderation, to the asceticism of the early Christians.

But the particular ways in which sex was considered important changed significantly throughout the 20th century, as we stumbled awkwardly from a culture that prized sexual restraint to one that celebrated free expression -- or at least the outward appearance of it. At the same time, the rise of sexology, sexperts, and lifestyle journalism meant that we started talking about sex more than ever before: as a health issue, a relationship issue, and an identity issue. Increasingly, sex was expected to hold our relationships together, boost our self-esteem, and dissolve our discontent.

Says Carrigan: "These assumptions about sex are so ingrained, that if you're sexual you don't notice them. But asexual people do notice them, because their experiences don't fit." And over the past couple of decades especially, people who didn't fit those particular expectations stood out.

In other words, in order to become a point of identification, not being interested in sex had to first be considered a problem -- or at the very least something worth commenting on. Asexuality exists as we know it in part because of the assumption that, unless otherwise stated, everyone is either having regular, passionate sex or seeking it out. It also exists because of the assumption that, if you're not doing that, there is something medically or psychologically wrong with you.

For David Jay, taking that feeling of defect and turning it into a positive identity was a radical act. For others who identify as asexual, it brings a sense of relief. Like Jay, Alyssa, a 19-year-old college student from California, describes feeling "broken and unavailable" as a younger teenager. Identifying as asexual, she says, has "allowed me to feel like I have a place in the grand scheme of things." Jess, a graduate student in the Midwest, had been in romantic relationships before, but had never felt the "butterflies" or the urgent desire she had been told she was supposed to.

But asexual people aren't the only ones who are hurt by the cult of great sexpectations. Think of people for whom sex is painful or difficult, or long term singles who find themselves unintentionally celibate because they opt out of the casual hook-up scene. Nor are the challenges asexuality poses to our culture's unspoken assumptions about sex, relationships, and intimacy relevant only to people who desire neither sexual intercourse nor relationships.

In an interview with The Guardian, Jay suggested that the asexual movement might be moving into a "third phase": from awareness raising and mobilization to expanding mainstream beliefs about what a "normal" sex drive and life looks like. But the disbelieving and derogatory responses that flood in whenever the subject is raised in the media would suggest, they're not quite there yet.

"People, especially sick people, can rationalize away their problems," wrote one commenter on a recent Salon article about asexuality. It was a sentiment that was shared at sex columnist Dan Savage's blog, on which one reader remarked: "The idea of there being NOTHING inside, no juice, no drives at all ... well, to my mind that is the ULTIMATE FREAKINESS, the one eternally unfathomable kink."

In a culture in which sex is believed to be central to who we are, what we care about, and how we relate to other people, a person who doesn't care about sexuality can seem like a non-person. Jay doesn't believe that it is the lack of sex that confuses people, but the perceived absence of all the things we associate with it: intimacy, passion, connection with other people.

"Freud originally defined libido as lust for life, not lust for sex," Jay says. "He talked about libido manifesting in sexual desire, but not exclusively. For a lot of people, sexuality serves as an essential metaphor for that desire to live or desire to connect." As for those who believe that asexual people are lacking in some essential life force? "They clearly haven't hung out with me and my friends," Jay quips.

Perhaps it is that fact that asexuality is, for many, so unfathomable that makes it so potentially powerful. "Asexuality draws attention to the complete fixation we have on sex, and really brings it to the surface for all to see," says Ela Przybylo, a sexual cultures researcher at York University in Canada. "Sex has become so fused with our sense of self that we can't even imagine how it might be any different. This is why asexuality is compelling, because it does imagine how it could be different."

And imagining how it could be different is something that has the potential to benefit us all. If we stop defining our significant relationships only as those that are romantic or sexual, being single will take on a whole new meaning. If we broaden our emotional focus from the person we share bodily fluids with to the sum of our friendships, acquaintances, and colleagues, our communities will grow stronger. If we stop treating penetrative sex as the be all and end all of physical intimacy, we will experience greater heights of pleasure. And if we can accept that although sex can be ecstatic and affirming and fulfilling, it is not all those things to all people all of the time, we will relieve it of some of its cultural baggage.

Ideally, says Przybylo, we would stop thinking of our sexual histories and desires as fixed and absolute, but rather as something more fluid, which can be dialed up or down, redirected entirely depending on how we feel, who we're with, and our inbuilt biological inclinations.

In other words, you might want to have sex five times this week, or you might not want to have sex at all. Your experience of desire might be intensely physical, or it might be indistinguishable from emotional attachment. You might experience next to no attraction for years, and then find yourself consumed with another person. At one point in your life, sex might be the ultimate thrill; at another, it might be boring and routine. And all of it is okay, and none of it marks the essence of who you really are.

"It's not that we talk about sex too much," Jay says. "It's that we celebrate sex in a way that is inauthentic. If we were to have a widespread, accurate discussion of sexuality -- all the things that it means and doesn't mean to people -- that would include a discussion of the fact that sex is not interesting to everyone at some points, and that's okay, and sex is not interesting to some people all the time, and that's okay. Instead, I think what we have is a dialogue that fetishizes and celebrates sexuality, and equates it with the sum of our value and relationships."

#Life Without Sex #asexuality

I have a SideB conviction

Having a "Side B" conviction means believing that the same gender sex (sexual act) is outside the boundaries God has set for sexual morality. And this is what the bible says. HOWEVER,

If by the term you refer to the supposition that all same sex attractions are problematic and must automatically be struggled against then I am not SideB. If by the term you understand physical affection between members of the same sex to be inherently sinful and assume that it is not meant to be pursued in any case then I am not SideB. If by the term you refer to a kind of bubble reality that separates one group of people wholly from another and which doesn't allow for stages of insight and growth and for a common encounter between them, then I am not SideB. If by the term you imply a necessary disavowal of attraction to other members of my sex and also a disconnection from social pursuits with said persons, then I am not SideB. If by the term you mean a denial of a sexual nature and a denial of sexual feelings and attractions then I am not SideB. If by the term you suggest a kind of bench-sitting on the sidelines of life then I am not SideB. If by the term you assume the need to adopt a public posture, then I am not SideB. If by the term you deny the power of desire, when touched by the holy, to lift the desirer to a more holy state then I am not SideB. If by the term you feel smug then I am not SideB. If by the term you feel safe then I am not SideB. If you believe that having a SideB view somehow makes your life easy then I, more than likely, am not SideB. If by the term you anticipate a kind of moral teetotaling society then I am not SideB. If by the term you emphasize an outward display of moral actions then I am not SideB. If by the term you deny real love when expressed amidst imperfections, holding to an ideal perfectionism that resists embodiment, then I am not SideB. You cannot have redemption in a world without the real possibility of failure. If by the term you alienate others who do not share your views and draw a line between you and those persons, then I am not SideB. Such a view is an offense against faith and charity and lacks goodwill. If by the term you long to build a little kingdom with flags and patrolling deputies then I am not SideB. If by the term you create a kind of badge of public identity then I am not SideB. If by the term you presuppose that life is loneliness than I am not SideB. If you believe what SideB states about human sexuality, then it would be correct to say that I too share that belief. I think it would be more apt to say that I have a SideB conviction than to say that I am SideB.

How to Overcome Depression & Regain a Positive Outlook

Be aware of the cause of your depression and try to be optimistic about the future.

Try to be aware of your negative thoughts and replace them with positive ideas.

Focus on your positive experiences.

Make a weekly list of your positive accomplishments.

Get socially active.

Make a weekly schedule of your daily activities and do not forget to include social activities.

Find a hobby or two.

Exercise daily.

Use self-relaxation techniques whenever you feel tense. For example, slowly breathe in and out for several minutes until your whole body feels relaxed.

Do some volunteer work to keep you active.

Set realistic goals.

Learn to accept that everyone has different abilities and focus on your unique characteristics and positive accomplishments.

Be assertive when you are expressing anger.

Try to know and develop your strengths.

Get professional help if symptoms of depression persist.

How to Help a Depressed Person

Do not tell a depressed person that you know what he/she is feeling. This may make the person become angry with you.

Be supportive and patient.

Let the person know that you are concerned and that you will be there for him/her.

Encourage the person to seek professional help if symptoms are persistent and seem to interfere with activities for daily living.

#How to Overcome Depression

Building a Healthy Relationship from the Start

The Beginning Stages

While the early months of a relationship can feel effortless and exciting, successful long-term relationships involve ongoing effort and compromise by both partners. Building healthy patterns early in your relationship can establish a solid foundation for the long run. When you are just starting a relationship, it is important to:

Build. Build a foundation of appreciation and respect. Focus on all the considerate things your partner says and does. Happy couples make a point of noticing even small opportunities to say "thank you" to their partner, rather than focusing on mistakes their partner has made.

Explore. Explore each other's interests so that you have a long list of things to enjoy together. Try new things together to expand mutual interests.

Establish. Establish a pattern of apologizing if you make a mistake or hurt your partner's feelings. Saying "I'm sorry" may be hard in the moment, but it goes a long way towards healing a rift in a relationship. Your partner will trust you more if he or she knows that you will take responsibility for your words and actions.

As the Months Go By: Important Things to Recognize as Your Relationship Grows

Relationships Change. Changes in life outside your relationship will impact what you want and need from the relationship. Since change is inevitable, welcoming it as an opportunity to enhance the relationship is more fruitful than trying to keep it from happening.

Check in Periodically. Occasionally set aside time to check in with each other on changing expectations and goals. If a couple ignores difficult topics for too long, their relationship is likely to drift into rocky waters without their noticing.

What to Do When Conflict Arises

Disagreements in a relationship are not only normal but, if constructively resolved, actually strengthen the relationship. It is inevitable that there will be times of sadness, tension, or outright anger between you and your partner. The source of these problems may lie in unrealistic/unreasonable demands, unexplored expectations, or unresolved issues/behaviors in one partner or in the relationship. Resolving conflicts requires honesty, a willingness to consider your partner's perspective even if you don't fully understand it, and lots of communication.

Healthy communication is critical, especially when there are important decisions regarding sex, career, marriage, and family to be made. The following are some guidelines for successful communication and conflict resolution.

Understand Each Others' Family Patterns. Find out how conflicts were managed (or not managed) in your partner's family, and talk about how conflict was approached (or avoided) in your own family. It is not unusual for couples to discover that their families had different ways of expressing anger and resolving differences. If your family wasn't good at communicating or resolving conflict constructively, give yourself permission to try out some new ways of handling conflict.

Timing Counts. Contrary to previous notions, the best time to resolve a conflict may not be immediately. It is not unusual for one or both partners to need some time to cool off. This "time-out' period can help you avoid saying or doing hurtful things in the heat of the moment, and can help partners more clearly identify what changes are most important. Remember - if you are angry with your partner but don't know what you want yet, it will be nearly impossible for your partner to figure it out!

Establish an Atmosphere of Emotional Support. Emotional support involves accepting your partner's differences and not insisting that he or she meet your needs only in the precise way that you want them met. Find out how your partner shows his or her love for you, and don't set absolute criteria that require your partner to always behave differently before you're satisfied.

Agree to Disagree and Move On. Most couples will encounter some issues upon which they will never completely agree. Rather than continuing a cycle of repeated fights, agree to disagree and negotiate a compromise or find a way to work around the issue.

Distinguish between things you want versus things you need from your partner. For example, for safety reasons, you might need your partner to remember to pick you up on time after dark. But calling you several times a day may really only be a "want."

Clarify Your Messages. A clear message involves a respectful but direct expression of your wants and needs. Take some time to identify what you really want before talking to your partner. Work on being able to describe your request in clear, observable terms. For example, you might say, "I would like you to hold my hand more often" rather than the vague, "I wish you were more affectionate."

Discuss One Thing at a Time. It can be tempting to list your concerns or grievances, but doing so will likely prolong an argument. Do your best to keep the focus on resolving one concern at a time.

Really Listen. Being a good listener requires the following: (a) don't interrupt, (b) focus on what your partner is saying rather than on formulating your own response, and (c) check out what you heard your partner say. You might start this process with: "I think you are saying..." Or "what I understood you to say was..." This step alone can prevent misunderstandings that might otherwise develop into a fight.

Restrain Yourself. Research has found that couples who "edit" themselves and do not say all the angry things they may be thinking are typically the happiest.

Adopt a "Win-Win" Position. A "win-win" stance means that your goal is for the relationship, rather than for either partner, to "win" in a conflict situation. Ask yourself: "Is what I am about to say (or do) going to increase or decrease the odds that we'll work this problem out?"

Healthy and Problematic Expectations in Relationships

Each of us enters into romantic relationships with ideas about what we want based on family relationships, what we've seen in the media, and our own past relationship experiences. Holding on to unrealistic expectations can cause a relationship to be unsatisfying and to eventually fail. The following will help you to distinguish between healthy and problematic relationship expectations:

Respect Changes. What you want from a relationship in the early months of dating may be quite different from what you want after you have been together for some time. Anticipate that both you and your partner will change over time. Feelings of love and passion change with time, as well. Respecting and valuing these changes is healthy. Love literally changes brain chemistry for the first months of a relationship. For both physiological and emotional reasons, an established relationship will have a more complex and often richer type of passion than a new relationship.

Accept Differences. It is difficult, but healthy, to accept that there are some things about our partners that will not change over time, no matter how much we want them to. Unfortunately, there is often an expectation that our partner will change only in the ways we want. We may also hold the unrealistic expectation that our partner will never change from the way he or she is now.

Express Wants and Needs. While it is easy to assume that your partner knows your wants and needs, this is often not the case and can be the source of much stress in relationships. A healthier approach is to directly express our needs and wishes to our partner.

Respect Your Partner's Rights. In healthy relationships, there is respect for each partner's right to have her/his own feelings, friends, activities, and opinions. It is unrealistic to expect or demand that that he or she have the same priorities, goals, and interests as you.

Be Prepared to "Fight Fair." Couples who view conflict as a threat to the relationship, and something to be avoided at all costs, often find that accumulated and unaddressed conflicts are the real threat. Healthy couples fight, but they "fight fair" - accepting responsibility for their part in a problem, admitting when they are wrong, and seeking compromise. Additional information about fair fighting can be found here.

Fighting Fair

Maintain the Relationship. Most of us know that keeping a vehicle moving in the desired direction requires not only regular refueling, but also ongoing maintenance and active corrections to the steering to compensate for changes in the road. A similar situation applies to continuing relationships. While we may work hard to get the relationship started, expecting to cruise without effort or active maintenance typically leads the relationship to stall or crash! Though gifts and getaways are important, it is often the small, nonmaterial things that partners routinely do for each other that keep the relationship satisfying.

Outside Pressures on the Relationship

Differences in Background. Even partners coming from very similar cultural, religious, or economic backgrounds can benefit from discussing their expectations of how a good boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse behaves. What seems obvious or normal to you may surprise your partner, and vice versa. If you are from different backgrounds, be aware that you may need to spend more time and energy to build your relationship. Take the time to learn about your partner's culture or religion, being careful to check out what parts of such information actually fit for your partner.

Time Together and Apart. How much time you spend together and apart is a common relationship concern. If you interpret your partner's time apart from you as, "he or she doesn't care for me as much as I care for him or her," you may be headed for trouble by jumping to conclusions. Check out with your partner what time alone means to him or her, and share your feelings about what you need from the relationship in terms of time together. Demanding what you want, regardless of your partner's needs, usually ends up driving your partner away, so work on reaching a compromise.

Your Partner's Family. For many students, families remain an important source of emotional, if not financial, support during their years at the university. Some people find dealing with their partner's family difficult or frustrating. It can help to take a step back and think about parental good intentions. Families may offer well-intentioned advice about your relationship or your partner. It's important that the two of you discuss and agree on how you want to respond to differing family values and support one another in the face of what can be very intense "suggestions" from family.

Friends. There are some people who seem to believe that "I have to give up all my friends unless my partner likes them as much as I do." Giving up friends is not healthy for you or the relationship, except in circumstances where your friends pressure you to participate in activities that are damaging to yourself and the relationship. At the same time, keep in mind that your partner may not enjoy your friends as much as you do. Negotiate which friends you and your partner spend time with together. You might ask: "Which of my friends do you enjoy seeing and which ones would you rather I see alone or at other times when I'm not with you?"

Eight Basic Steps to Maintaining a Good Relationship

Be aware of what you and your partner want for yourselves and what you want from the relationship.

Let one another know what your needs are.

Realize that your partner will not be able to meet all your needs. Some of these needs will have to be met outside of the relationship.

Be willing to negotiate and compromise on the things you want from one another.

Do not demand that a partner change to meet all your expectations. Work to accept the differences between your ideal mate and the real person you are dating.

Try to see things from the other's point of view. This doesn't mean that you must agree with one another all the time, but rather that both of you can understand and respect each other's differences, points of view, and separate needs.

Where critical differences do exist in your expectations, needs, or opinions, try to work honestly and sincerely to negotiate. Seek professional help early rather than waiting until the situation becomes critical.

Do your best to treat your partner in a way that says, "I love you and trust you, and I want to work this out."

#healthy relationships

Getting Over a Break-Up

You've just had a break-up and are feeling down, you're not alone. Just about everyone experiences a break-up at some point, and many then have to deal with heartbreak — a wave of grief, anger, confusion, low self-esteem, and maybe even jealousy all at once.

Millions of poems and songs have been written about having a broken heart and wars have even been fought because of heartbreak.

What Exactly Is Heartbreak?

Lots of things can cause heartbreak. Some people might have had a romantic relationship that ended before they were ready. Others might have strong feelings for someone who doesn't feel the same way. Or maybe a person feels sad or angry when a close friend ends or abandons the friendship.

Although the causes may be different, the feeling of loss is the same — whether it's the loss of something real or the loss of something you only hoped for. People describe heartbreak as a feeling of heaviness, emptiness, and sadness.

How Can I Deal With How I Feel?

Most people will tell you you'll get over it or you'll meet someone else, but when it's happening to you, it can feel like no one else in the world has ever felt the same way. If you're experiencing these feelings, there are things you can do to lessen the pain.

Here are some tips that might help.

Let It Out

Share your feelings. Some people find that sharing their feelings with someone they trust — someone who recognizes what they're going through — helps them feel better. That could mean talking over all the things you feel, even having a good cry on the shoulder of a comforting friend or family member. If you feel like someone can't relate to what you're going through or is dismissive of your feelings, find someone more sympathetic to talk to. (OK, we know that sharing feelings can be tough for guys, but you don't necessarily have to tell the football team or your wrestling coach what you're going through. Talk with a friend or family member, a teacher, or counselor. It might make you more comfortable if you find a female family member or friend, like an older sister or a neighbor, to talk to.)

Don't be afraid to cry. Going through a break-up can be really tough, and getting some of those raw emotions out can be a big help. We know this is another tough one for guys, but there's no shame in crying now and then. No one has to see you do it — you don't have to start blubbering in class or at soccer practice or anything. Just a find a place where you can be alone, like crying into your pillow at night or in the shower when you're getting ready for the day.

ind to Yourself

Remember what's good about you.This one is really important. Sometimes people with broken hearts start to blame themselves for what's happened. They may be really down on themselves, exaggerating their faults as though they did something to deserve the unhappiness they're experiencing. If you find this happening to you, nip it in the bud! Remind yourself of your good qualities, and if you can't think of them because your broken heart is clouding your view, get your friends to remind you.

Take good care of yourself. A broken heart can be very stressful so don't let the rest of your body get broken too. Get lots of sleep, eat healthy foods, and exercise regularly to minimize stress and depression and give your self-esteem a boost.

Do the things you normally enjoy.Whether it's seeing a movie or going to a concert, do something fun to take your mind off the negative feelings for a while.

Keep yourself busy. Sometimes this is difficult when you're coping with sadness and grief, but it really helps. This is a great time to redecorate your room or try a new hobby. That doesn't mean you shouldn't think about what happened — working things through in our minds is all part of the healing process — it just means you should focus on other things too.

Give yourself time. It takes time for sadness to go away. Almost everyone thinks they won't feel normal again, but the human spirit is amazing — and the heartbreak almost always heals after a while. But how long will that take? That depends on what caused your heartbreak, how you deal with loss, and how quickly you tend to bounce back from things. Getting over a break-up can take a couple of days to many weeks — and sometimes even months.

Some people feel that nothing will make them happy again and resort to alcoholor drugs. Others feel angry and want to hurt themselves or someone else. People who drink, do drugs, or cut themselves to escape from the reality of a loss may think they are numbing their pain, but the feeling is only temporary. They're not really dealing with the pain, only masking it, which makes all their feelings build up inside and prolongs the sadness.

Sometimes the sadness is so deep — or lasts so long — that a person may need some extra support. For someone who isn't starting to feel better after a few weeks or who continues to feel depressed, talking to a counselor or therapist can be very helpful.

So be patient with yourself, and let the healing begin.

#how to get over a break up #Getting Over a Break-Up

Biology, Gender and Orientation

Biology is the physical (outward appearance or biological makeup), while gender relates more to identity. For most people, biology and gender match; this is called being cisgender. For some people, their gender is not in line with their biology; this is called being transgender.

Think about where a heterosexual, cisgender male would fall onto this spectrum. His biology and gender would be male, and his orientation would be toward women. A gay cisgender man would have male gender and biology, and his orientation would be toward men. Now think about a trans woman. Her gender is her female, and she may or may not have used hormones/surgery to help bring her body in line with her gender. Her orientation is totally separate, though. You would determine if she was homosexual or heterosexual by using the gender which she identifies with. If she is attracted to men, she is heterosexual, but if she is attracted to women, we would consider her homosexual.

This can sometimes seem confusing because we cannot understand why someone would "go through all the trouble" only to put themselves in a homosexual relationship when we presume they could have been happy and had a "normal heterosexual relationship" to begin with. There is also a kind of stereotype that transgender people are actually just "really gay" or something, which is totally false. Trans men and trans women transition because they are unhappy with their sex at birth - it has nothing to do with who they are attracted to. Having SRS is not about your sexuality or making your relationships acceptable to others... it is about finding peace, happiness, and wholeness in yourself and who you are meant to be.

There are lots of reasons a trans person might choose to have or not have SRS. Off the top of head, SRS surgery may be cost-prohibitive for most people. And I'm sure there are all kinds of societal pressures, medical factors and other things to consider that could impact a person's decision. It's also important to remember that SRS is only one aspect of transitioning. Not only that, but some people who identify as transgender may be "genderqueer" and not really be comfortable with a totally male or female gender role, which might negate the purpose of SRS. when a person realizes that they are transgender, I think there are so many things you have to think about that could color a person's experience. Lots of people don't "figure out" that they are transgender until later in life because they just have no concept of what transgender is. It can be very hard to describe what you feel if you have never heard anyone describe anything like it before, or if you don't even know a word for what it means. I have known a handful of people who came out in their teens or twenties as gay, only to realize years later that "gay" didn't really describe what they were actually feeling. I would suspect that the "30 year old who was happy with his sex at birth" was not really happy with his sex at birth... but it took that person as long as it did to finally put a finger on it, and then to build the courage to be honest with herself and with others about her experience.

I'm thinking now deeply in this regarding what apostle Paul said in romans 1:27 and what is mentioned in leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. I'm trying to make a connection between difference between biology and gender and my conviction regarding scripture , The connection shows to me that what was written in bible was about "gender" not "biology" because at that time I believe commentators did equate term "gender" with term "biology" and then they linked it with homosexual orientation/behavior..This leads me to realize that the bible was talking more about term "gender" not "biology" and its relationship with "orientation". (although almost all readers will understand it as "biology" not "gender" and that's where all arguments are placed)

In other words, the bible was talking about those who change their "gender" desires (Although they are happy with their sex at birth) in order to drive their orientation to be directed toward the same sex. From the bible point of view, It speaks about a connection between false gender desires and orientation . But the truth is that this is not always the case (although it does exist) that's why I support SRS and heterosexual unions for trans. folks (because it's more about gender/ genetic than orientation).

#Gender and Orientation #difference between gender and biology #Biology

The Motherly Love of God?

To think of God as a father or mother would hit us deeply even if it only raised gender issues but by linking God with parenthood it can send our sensitivities through the roof. Our strongest emotional bond during our most impressionable years is with our parents. If something goes even slightly wrong with that foundational relationship, causing the love and trust that children instinctively want to give their parents to be violated, it affects profoundly our every other relationship until our dying day, unless we experience a remarkable degree of healing. Even among those who think they have survived their childhood unscathed, many think of a father as colder and sterner than a mother and this unconsciously affects their feelings for God.

Yet another emotive layer to this mix is that those who truly know spiritual truth correctly recoil from any whiff of pagan religion. Rightly or wrongly, any hint of God being anything other than emphatically male conjures in many people fears of paganism or departure from biblical truth. Occasionally fear might protect us, but it also has the disturbing potential to paralyze what should be our relentless quest to know the God of the Bible with ever increasing depth and accuracy. Our only true protection is to led by the Spirit, not driven by fear.

So the issue of God’s gender and linking God to parenthood by using the word Father, profoundly interacts with the deepest part of us, affecting us not just intellectually but causing the feelings of many of us to cool towards the warmest Person in the universe.

People who think themselves better than those whose emotions cause an irrational reaction against the thought of God being a father, seldom have any right to feel smug because they are often the very people whose rational and spiritual pursuit of truth is stymied by an emotional reaction against the notion of God being like amother.

The real God is the God of truth. And fear, emotions and prejudice are the enemies of truth.

Regardless of the position taken, much that is said on this subject reveals more about our personal hang-ups and biases than it does about the heart of God. To have any hope of diffusing some of this we need to take a wider view before zeroing in on the issue of whether it is biblically accurate to think of God as a mother.

Life’s Greatest Adventure

Let’s begin by intensifying our passion for discovering all we can about God and by gaining deeper insight into why life’s greatest adventure centers on continually growing in our intimate understanding of the most beautiful Person in existence. Like a babe’s knowledge of its mother, our knowledge of God can be warm, intimate, fulfilling and continually growing but there still remains much beyond our capacity to understand. Our lack of understanding can at times be frustrating, as it is sometimes for children not understanding adult wisdom, tastes, sexuality, and so on. Growing in our knowledge and understanding of God, however, should be as exciting as lovers getting to know each other.

The Almighty is so much bigger than us that the never-ending challenge is to keep bursting the confines of our own hang-ups and narrow human thinking and shallow reading of Scripture. We need daring humility, a courageous passion for reality, and a yearning for divine intimacy if we are to continually expand our understanding of God to include more and more of the full biblical revelation of who God is.

Even a brief meditation on the following Scriptures will affirm that our highest calling and life’s most thrilling adventure is to know God as intimately and as fully and as accurately as humanly possible.

Romans 1:21-22 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools

Jeremiah 9:23-24 This is what the LORD says: ‘Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,’ declares the LORD.

John 17:3 Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

Job knew God so well that we read:

Job 1:8 Then the LORD said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.’

Yet still this man of God had grasped so little of God that he later declared:

Job 42:5-6 My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.

Not even those who believed in Jesus really knew God:

John 8:31, 54-55 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said . . . ‘My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me. . . . you do not know him, I know him. . . .’

Isaiah 55:9-8 ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the LORD. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. . . .’

Psalms 119:18 Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.

Matthew 16:17 Jesus replied, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. . . .’

Jeremiah 29:13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

Exodus 33:18-19 Then Moses said, ‘Now show me your glory.’ And the LORD said, ‘I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.

Mark 12:28-30 One of the teachers of the law came and . . . asked him, ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?’ ‘The most important one,’ answered Jesus, ‘is this: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”’

Ephesians 1:17 I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.

Let’s pray:

Dear Lord,

The magnificence of your glory, the perfection of your ways, the depths of your intellect, the scope of your powers, the vastness of your love, and every other aspect of your nature, far exceeds human comprehension. Nevertheless, relative to what we are currently capable of grasping, we do not want to settle for a hazy or inadequate or even fanciful view of you. We want to know the real you. To know you is to love you, and to love you is to want to know you more.

If we have misunderstood you or limited you, leaving ourselves with feelings for you that are colder than you deserve, we ask that you melt our hearts with a deeper revelation of who you really are. If you are more wonderful, more beautiful, more desirable, more thrilling, more lovable that we realize, we ask that you open our eyes to see you more fully.

We ask you to explode any blockages that our past hurts or prejudices or worldliness or small thinking might have created. We want you to captivate our hearts, taking us on a never-ending journey of discovery of the breathtaking beauty of your heart.

God’s Courage

Deuteronomy 32:15 . . . He abandoned the God who made him and rejected the Rock his Savior.

More than twenty times the Bible calls God a rock. That’s a bold act because by calling himself a rock God leaves himself wide open to misinterpretation.

This is typical of God. Consider for instance when Jesus lost a huge portion of followers by saying that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood. He could easily have expressed that far less offensively but instead of carefully explaining, he used it to differentiate between those who genuinely wanted the true God from those who preferred a god of their own fancy; a god who requires little faith because he is within the scope of their own intellect.

If you want a staid, predicable God, you are doomed to an inferior earthly life and perhaps even a terrifying eternity.

To qualify for life’s greatest adventure you must be willing to tolerate mystery. If you want a God you always understand – one who will not so frustrate and mystify you that you often feel offended – then you do not want the true God at all. You want a fanciful god of human invention, not the God who is too driven by his love for us to limit himself to human ways rather than use all his resources – his infinite intellect, supernatural ways, access to dimensions that we cannot even conceive of, and so on – to lead us into what is best for us.

The Bible choosing to call God a rock is not in any way a denial of the fact that God has many abilities beyond that of a rock, such as intelligence, senses and emotions. Likewise, the Bible calling God Father cannot of itself be taken to deny that God has attributes far beyond those of a father.

To say that God is a rock does not mean God is unfeeling. Likewise, to say that God is a father cannot of itself be taken as implying that he is lacking in motherly softness or feminine tenderness. To know whether God is more feeling than a rock and has motherly compassion necessitates a deeper exploration of biblical revelation than hasty presumptions based on a couple of words.

We might despise rocks as cold and hard but it would be foolish to reject the Judeo-Christian God as cold and hard if, in fact, the Bible reveals that God is loving, gentle, kind and compassionate, and that he is a rock only in such ways as dependability, agelessness and a place of shelter and safety. It would be a tragedy of eternal proportions if we were to rob ourselves by rejecting the God of the Bible just because some preachers or certain superficial readings leave us with the false impression that God is cruel, harsh or egotistical.

It would be a serious mistake to create a God of our own making that suits our own whims and fantasies. We must come face to face with the real God, as truly portrayed in the Bible, not as we guess him to be as a result of a superficial encounter with him or shallow reading of Scripture.

Just because some people think warmly about fathers does not mean that even for them there are not thrilling, staggeringly beautiful aspects of God’s nature that are not adequately covered by the word ‘father.’ Not having hang-ups about fathers does not mean a person has grasped all the depths and beauty and love and purity and goodness and wisdom of God. No matter how much we know of God’s heart, there is still more to learn, and no matter how deep and sophisticated our conception of God, our understanding is still shallow and over-simplistic relative to who the almighty, eternal, holy, infinite Lord really is.

As a friend, commenting on an early draft of this webpage, wrote:

God is a rock, but not just a rock! God is also a father, but not just a father. To say God is only Father would be to apply human constraints on a limitless God.

God is Not a Man

Many societies twist and distort males, forcing them into a mold that is contrary to God’s conception of masculinity. Jesus – the perfect man and the perfect revelation of the heart of God – cried often and had a tender heart. In fact, wherever we look in the Bible – even among men sometimes mistakenly thought of as being somewhat callous, such as warrior David, Old Testament prophets, loud-mouth Peter, and the apostle Paul – we find men crying. I suggest you let your eyes glide over .You might be amazed at the impact of seeing all the references gathered together. That many of us think it unmanly to cry shows that there is a softness about the biblical conception of masculinity that is often lacking in our view of what it means to be male.

Nevertheless, one of the most basic biblical revelations is that God is not a man. Neither is he to be represented by the image of a man.

Numbers 23:19 God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?

1 Samuel 15:29 He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a man, that he should change his mind

Romans 1:23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man . . .

I know a woman who from a very tender age was not just molested but sexually tortured. Understandably, she became so sexually inhibited that as a teenager she recoiled from so much as a glance at her partly unclothed body such that she had no idea what even her pubic hair looked like. Very many sexual abuse survivors have shared their hearts with me, along with many married couples, yet today this woman stands out as so remarkably healed that although she is highly moral, within the sanctity of marriage, the average Christian wife seems riddled with hang-ups in comparison with her.

This outstanding healing came about by God, without any human intermediary, personally and very intimately teaching her about human sexuality and marital love. What allowed this to happen was this woman’s assurance that God is not sexual and so fully trustworthy in the realm that terrified her.

As she discovered, God is not anti-sex. He is the Creator of sex. Nevertheless, he himself is not a sexual being. To develop sexual feelings towards him is as inappropriate as it is to have sexual feelings for any non-human, whether non-living objects, animals, demons or angels.

God is not a man. Neither is he a woman.

Almost every application form asks for your sex and date of birth. God couldn’t answer either question. They apply to earthly creatures but not to the infinite Lord. He couldn’t even give you his street address or telephone number.

‘What is God’s sex?’ is as meaningless a question as, ‘How old is God?’ To have sex (gender) implies not only sexuality but a certain incompleteness outside of union with the opposite sex. There is no incompleteness in God.

To think of God as either male or female – as humans are – is theologically mistaken. God is neither fully male – which would imply some sort of need or yearning for a female God, nor is he an emasculated male, as if there were something lacking in him. The Almighty is perfectly whole and self-sufficient.

God is not only not sexual, he is not even physical. He is warm and personal and yet he is spirit. He has many qualities of which our own are reflections, and we have such compatibility with him that we were literally made for him, and yet he is breathtakingly different to us. As a mother and baby are so intimate and yet so different in their abilities, God is even more intimate and different to us.

Since all humans have gender, few, if any, earthly languages have the capacity to refer to a being who has a personality without automatically assigning a gender to that person. This has nothing to do with the nature of God, but the nature of human language. So to know whether the Bible teaches that God is male, one has to delve deeper than the mere use of the male pronoun. The Lord referring to himself as if he were male must not be interpreted in a strictly literal sense, anymore than we should interpret literally God calling himself a rock, a tower, a shield, a lion, and so on.

When it is Insulting to Call God, ‘Father’

There are hearts for whom the words, ‘Daddy is home’ are the most chilling, terrifying words that could ever pierce the air. Tragically, these dear people cannot even imagine how those same words flood millions of hearts with delight, making them feel warm, secure and content. That children can beam from ear to ear at the sound of a father’s entry staggers their imagination. So different is their father that they find it almost beyond belief that there are those for whom their father is not only their protector and hero; Daddy is fun. There are children who know that in their Daddy’s eyes they are as close to perfection as any child could get. These greatly loved children know it is not because they are special; they think all fathers are like that.

When seeking to portray something that nothing in the universe can match, it is a communicator’s nightmare that what for some people conveys the most powerfully evocative and accurate picture, is for other equally important people so far off beam as to be considerably worse than nothing.

If the Christian God is even remotely like the person many people know as father, we would have good reason for rejecting and despising him.

For vast numbers of us today the word ‘father’ produces little of the warmly secure feelings of being cherished, doted on, protected and wisely guided that the word was intended to have when originally delivered to humanity. In present-day western society, fatherhood has suffered such horrific breakdown that what God’s Word meant by Father is as foreign to many of us as ox-drawn plows and other features of Bible times.

God: the Best of Both Genders?

Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

This famous Scripture shows that women, as much as men, are in the image of God. It also hints that both male and female were required for God’s image to be complete. In fact, it might be that a man and woman made one through marriage portray the fullness of God better than individuals. We certainly know from the biblical teaching of the body of Christ that the fullness of Christ is better portrayed by the entire church than by individuals.

God is neither male nor female, but in whatever respect one gender excels, in that respect that gender better reflects the nature of God. For example, the typically greater male physical strength – significantly more important in pre-mechanical eras than now – means that in their ability to offer the security of physical protection, men in biblical times portrayed slightly better that aspect of God. On the other hand, if women tend to be a little less callous than men, in this respect they are that bit more like God. In their ability to nourish and comfort, women typically better portray that side of God’s nature.

We need to keep expanding our view of God. For instance, down to the minutest detail, God knows exactly what it is like to suffer period pain or impotence; not because God has male and female characteristics, but because he is all-knowing. The Lord knows you more intimately than you know yourself.

The Almighty, without feeling the need to explain his actions, has chosen to reveal himself to humanity as a God and not a Goddess. One possible reason is that in the biblical era men usually filled leadership roles. However, I suspect a significant factor behind God’s choice has to do with the nature of human sexuality. Men, tending to be more sexually volatile, seem more likely to fall into perversion than women. Consider, for example, the horrific incidence of child sex abuse instigated by men, relative to the somewhat lesser incidence of female-initiated sexual abuse. (And this without men breast-feeding babies or spending the long periods alone with them that is typical of mothers.) As much as it may shock you, a few women actually nurture sexual feelings towards God. I suspect that male sexual vulnerability is such that perverted feelings for God would be more prevalent in humanity if God were commonly thought of as being female.

So not only does God’s application of the male gender not imply male superiority, it might actually be an accommodation to a weakness in fallen males.

There is also a heartwarming reason for God preferring to reveal himself as Father. If, in this fallen world, fathers are more likely than mothers to be cold and aloof, then people will need God as the warm, approving father they never had. It might grate on us initially, but the ironical reality is that the less able we are to see a father as being kind, loving and gentle, the more we need to see God as Father because, like it or not, suppress it or not, we have a deep, painful ache within us for a good father figure, and nothing can meet that need like a relationship with Father God.

This webpage, however, is for the many of us for whom that is too much, too soon.

Another complication is that human language and thought patterns restrict our ability to cope well with the concept of a person who has no gender. Our language leaves us with no option but to say ‘he,’ ‘she’ or ‘it’ when referring to God. The Lord is most certainly not an ‘it.’ God is so personal that alongside him we are coldly impersonal. This forces the selection of either the masculine or feminine pronoun.

Until quite recently in our history, the English language was such that the words ‘man’ or ‘men’ often referred not exclusively to males but to every man and woman in the human race. The Hebrew language (the original language of the Old Testament) was the same. Thus Genesis literally says in Hebrew:

Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him [note the singular male pronoun]; male and female he created them.

Clearly in some contexts the Bible’s use of ‘he’ or ‘him’ in its original language is gender-neutral. It might well be that it is in this gender-neutral sense that the Bible uses ‘he’ or ‘him’ when referring to God. In many contexts when the original says ‘men,’ we would be very mistaken if we assumed it only refers to males. We might be making a similar mistake if we read too much into the apparently masculine references to God.

Studies have shown that even in modern English literature, referring to a male to illustrate a point is seen by readers as excluding the other gender less than if a female were cited. So even in modern English, to refer to God as ‘she’ might more pointedly imply that God is female than referring to God as ‘he’ implies God is male. Some people are beginning to avoid all references to pronouns when referring to God and simply say ‘God’ each time. Given the direction our language is going, this, although tedious, might be technically more accurate.

Whatever God’s reasons for choosing to reveal himself using the masculine pronoun, I respect God’s wisdom and holiness too much to dare tamper with his decision by using the feminine pronoun. I seek, nevertheless, to broaden my understanding of God to embrace the full breadth of his revelation, which includes what we might label feminine characteristics.

Feminine Aspects of God

The Interpreter’s Bible Dictionary sees it as highly significant that the Hebrew term for the uniquely female organ, the uterus (womb), is used in the original Scriptures to describe God’s compassion.

God’s wisdom is obviously an integral, eternal aspect of God. Scripture frequently speaks of this highly rated aspect of God’s character as if it were a person. Scholars believe John’s concept of the Logos, the Word that was God and became flesh (John 1:1-14) was derived from the Old Testament understanding of Wisdom as much, probably more, than from the Greek idea of Logos. And yet Wisdom, the one with whom are riches and honor and righteousness (Proverbs 8:18) and who shared with God in the creation of all things (Proverbs 8:27-31) is consistently given a female gender in Proverbs and by Jesus (Proverbs 1:20; 4:6; 8:1,11; 9:1; 14:33; Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:35).

God as Mother

Ponder these words from the lips of God:

Isaiah 66:13 As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you . . .

By what it inserts in brackets, the Amplified Bible leaves no doubt as to how its scholars interpret the words immediately prior to these:

Isaiah 66:12 For thus says the Lord, ‘ . . . you shall be nursed, you shall be carried on her hip, and be trotted on her [God’s maternal] knees . . .’

In a beautiful picture of maternal love, Jesus expressed the depth of divine compassion with the words:

Matthew 23:37 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.

Since Jesus came to show us the Father (John 14:11-6) it is not surprising that we find in the Old Testament a similarly beautiful picture of God’s love:

Psalms 36:7 How priceless is your unfailing love! Both high and low among men find refuge in the shadow of your wings.

Tender, Compassionate Jesus, Versus God the Father

Millions upon millions of people see Jesus as tender and giving and compassionate; a friend of the outcast; a defender of the downtrodden; someone personally and voluntarily overwhelmed by the depths of human suffering. They see him as warm, approachable, innocent. He is all that is loving and desirable. He is a dove; a soft, inviting blanket to cozy into in a shivering world; a protector who would gladly take a knife or bullet for you. What is startling, however, is that many who rightly hold this view of Jesus see God differently. Nothing could break Jesus’ heart more than someone imagining the Jesus is kinder or gentler or more forgiving than the true God.

Reading about someone is very different to meeting that person in the flesh. This is one of the reasons why there are a million mistaken views about God. A significant part of Jesus’ mission was to sort out the mess. God, as he really is, is exactly what you see in Jesus.

John 14:7,9-10 If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him . . . Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.

John 5:19 Jesus gave them this answer: “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. . . .”

John 10:30 I and the Father are one.

Jesus’ God – the true God – is so different from the God of most people’s imagination that one of the favorite names early Christians had for God was “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”.

Let’s select one of these:

2 Corinthians 1:3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort

No wonder the New Testament is filled with such Scriptures as:

Hebrews 1:3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his [i.e. God’s] being . . .

Have We Got It Back To Front?

When wanting to gain insight into God, is it Scripture’s intention that we should use as a springboard not so much our feelings towards our parents as our parental feelings toward our own children?

Let’s read Scripture with new eyes:

Matthew 7:11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

Jesus was not saying, think of your father: God is like that. He was saying, think of your tender feelings and sacrificial love for your own children: God is like that. Moreover, he was saying that God’s love is so good and pure and selfless that alongside him even our best attempts at love are evil.

The Divine Dilemma

The insurmountable difficulty is that there will always be people for whom an analogy evokes the intended warm feelings of love and security far more effectively than any abstraction, and at the same time there will be some people, though fewer, for whom the analogy is a disaster. Any group of humans – children, lovers, grandparents, sisters, pet owners, pastors, nurses or any others you could name – who for some of us epitomize tenderness, loyalty, devotion, selflessness, wisdom and all things good and wholesome, will be symbols of raging hurt for a few of us.

Communicators can only appeal to the intelligence and charitableness of their audience to realize that when they select an analogy they are thinking of the finest examples of that group of humans. There will be some dear people, however, whose emotional pain screams louder than their ability to be coldly intellectual. Ironically, those for whom an analogy is an excruciating disaster are the very ones who desperately need to discover that God is the one person who can fill their gaping wound with his loving compassion and faithfulness.

Your Dadda

Three times, the New Testament in its original Greek refers to God as Abba(Mark 14:36; Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6). The peculiar thing is that this is not even a Greek word. It was the word Jesus used when speaking his native language. Mark, apparently because he felt there was something precious – almost sacred – about the expression, left Jesus’ choice of words untranslated. We can’t be sure whether Paul’s use of the term was influenced directly from Jesus’ earthly preaching or came from the apostle’s own revelation, but he, too, clearly felt there was no Greek equivalent that adequately reflected the depth ofAbba.

It is popularly thought that Daddy is the best English approximation, but we can do a little better. For the people Jesus addressed, Abba was a baby’s first attempt to call out to its father. The closest English is Dadda. It is not entirely coincidental that it even sounds a little like Abba. It is derived from baby talk. Being one of the very first words a normal baby ever utters, it must be easy for a baby to say. (In some households the word would be Pappa, but again you’ll recognize the similarity.)

The significance of this choice is that Dadda engenders feelings of tenderness and intimacy and trust that might not be there with the more formal Father. The word Dad might suggest someone a little boring or taken for granted, but Daddaor Daddy has connotations of someone who is special, maybe even exciting. Names used by older children might also bring with it overtones of a disciplinarian, since fathers are likely to be stricter with older children than with babies. The point is that this tender expression was Jesus’ and Paul’s choice of the most appropriate form of address to God.

If thinking of God does not elicit within you warm feelings of love and acceptance and security, then you are missing a significant aspect of what God was wishing to convey to humanity by the use of this word. When things get tough, God would like us to have the carefree confidence of a little child leaving her broken bike with Daddy and happily running off to play, certain that Daddy will fix it.

There are some very moving Scriptures about the depth of God’s compassion for his children. The eye can slip over them in casual reading, but I urge you to view these Scriptures one on top of another, letting the impact mount until they touch you deeply.

Grasping for analogies

Of course, divine love is not merely equal to that of earth’s best parents. God’s love, being perfect, is incomprehensibly superior to all human feelings.

Psalms 27:10 Though my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will receive me.

Isaiah 49:15 Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!

Matthew 7:11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

God’s love is so immense that we are forced to scan the full range of human attachment and love and compassion to find a mere shadow of God’s feelings for us.

We have noted that in grasping for glimpses into divine love that we might understand, Jesus in just one chapter, likened God’s love to a woman, a shepherd, and a father. The woman was deeply anxious about her lost coin, which might have been part of her dowry, having great sentimental and emotional, as well as material, value. Today’s equivalent would be a stone from an engagement ring. The shepherd, upon finding the sheep, actually carried it home, joyfully lugging the quite heavy eastern animal on his shoulders. The highly forgiving father had apparently been on the constant lookout for his ungrateful son, day after day, month after month, year after year. Seeing him a long way off, he runs the distance, throws his arms around him and showers him with kisses in an emotional display that could call for no less than the slaughtering of the prize calf and throwing a party (Luke 15).

Another hint of God’s love is the commitment of the most faithful husband or even the excitement of a newly wed:

Isaiah 62:5 . . . as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.

Yet another way that Scripture tries to convey to us what is ultimately indescribable is by using our commitment to our own body. The New Testament often refers to Christians as being part of Christ’s own body. What could be more intimate? Christ nourishes you, protects you and feels your pain, like you would feed, look after and to rush to soothe the pain of any part of your body.

God treats his people as the apple (pupil) of his eye – that most precious part of the body which we instantly shield by blinking or taking whatever measures are appropriate to meet its every need. Thus we find this description of how God treated the Israelites:

Deuteronomy 32:10 In a desert land he found him, in a barren and howling waste. He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye.

In a rush of metaphors, the inspired psalmist prayed:

Psalms 17:8 Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings

And the Bible’s attempts to convey God’s love keeps coming. Many people think Jesus must have had a very special love for his earthly mother. He did. There’s a wonderful side to this, however, that is often overlooked. The special feelings Jesus had for Mary are the very same feelings he has for you. It is with that extreme devotion that he loves you.

Or maybe for some of us, the love of a brother or sister is more meaningful. No problem. Jesus said:

Matthew 12:50 For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.

Jesus’ longing to be our brother, pushed him to astounding extremes:

Hebrews 2:11 Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers.

(14) Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil –

(17) For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. (18) Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

Romans 8:29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

Comprehending the Incomprehensible

Ephesians 3:17 . . . And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,(18) may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, (19) and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Emphaisis mine)

As brilliant as Paul was at communicating, he found himself forced to resort to prayer because he wanted his readers to gain insight that no amount of explaining or describing could ever achieve. He longed for them to experience the supernatural miracle of knowing that which was beyond knowing.

Each time Paul mentioned Abba, he did so in the context of receiving a revelation from the indwelling Spirit of God.

Romans 8:15 For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father’.

Galatians 4:6 Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father’.

So the only hope we have of truly knowing God’s love is by a spiritual miracle that begins with new birth. For help in entering this, the most significant of all human experiences, see

Healing of hurts

Vast numbers of us carry wounds because our earthly father was considerably less than perfect. Your loving Lord feels your pain and he wants to heal you in two ways

1. By continually being the Perfect Father you have always deserved. (If you have been emotionally wounded, this is something you secretly crave and yet something you fear. What makes it scary is the thought of again being let down. Thankfully, unlike any human, God fully understands and is utterly trustworthy.)

2. By removing the festering bitterness that would otherwise keep infecting your wound and preventing healing.

The following few paragraphs are extracted from. Maybe your resentment is as strong towards your father as implied below, maybe it is less, but the principles remain the same.

Suppose someone broke your hand. This makes you so mad that every day as you pass that person’s photo hanging on the wall, you punch it with your broken hand. The release of pent up anger might feel good, but the constant punching prolongs your agony and prevents your hand from ever healing. A desire to see someone else suffer inevitably ends up perpetuating our own suffering.

The devastating thing is that resentment is addictive. Like a junkie, we focus so much on the welcome relief resentment offers that we hardly realize it inflames the downer that follows, and so the agonizing cycle continues.

Despite our fanciful notions, it is unlikely that we could ever see anyone suffer so profoundly as to satisfy our lust for revenge. Moreover, as people keep discovering to their dismay, it is our pain that drives the desire for revenge and, except for Jesus, no one else’s pain cannot lessen our own pain. So the tragedy is that if we get stuck on the revenge path, in fifty years’ time we will still be no closer to a resolution.

For as long as we are dominated by the longing to see someone suffer, that person has succeeded in lowering us to his abysmal level. He hurt us. Now we want him to hurt. We degrade ourselves by entering the slimy world of hate, staggering through life a defeated person, floundering in the same moral mud in which our tormentor lives. In fact, sex offenders are often themselves abuse victims with heart-wrenching stories. They failed to resolve their anger and pain and so inflict it on others. Regardless of how it manifests, resentment enslaves and corrupts its victims. Pathetically, people blinded by anger or hate usually feel morally superior to other people who are blinded by anger or hate. Bitter people are beautiful people turned ugly. Thankfully the process is reversible, once we learn to forgive.

We move from victim to victor only when we break free from resentment’s death-grip.

I often hike in wilderness areas infested with snakes so venomous that without specialized medical treatment I would have only a couple of hours to live after being bitten. Suppose a snake bit me, then slid out of sight. I would be a fool to squander precious time angrily trying to find and kill the snake. First priority must be to seek medical attention.

For your own survival, focus on healing, not revenge.

I am convinced that just as martyrs are especially honored in heaven, so are those who have suffered greatly and yet have forgiven.

Forgiving others is tough. It is so critical to our own emotional and spiritual well-being that our spiritual enemy strongly attacks us on this issue. Nevertheless, divine help is available.

It’s sometimes subconscious, but people suffering great difficulty in forgiving others usually have as the basis of their agony the pain of having great difficulty forgiving themselves. The two sides of forgiveness – forgiving yourself and forgiving others – rise or fall together. Many people raging against someone else’s guilt are pressured to do so by an urge to keep suppressed the tortured screams of their own conscience. Their subconscious is forever frantically trying to deflect the attention off themselves by blaming others. Peace soothes our troubled mind when we dwell on the extent of the forgiveness and purity that we have in Christ. When we realize how much God has forgiven us, it becomes easier to act more Godlike and have that same forgiving attitude towards ourselves and others. For this reason, I recommend beginning with the webpages about .

Wrap Up

A failure of those close to you to love you like God loves will leave you bleeding emotionally. But everything that is missing in human love is found in the endless depths of the One who longs to hold you in his arms forever.

People so tragically hurt by one or more men that it darkens even their attitude towards God – the utterly sinless, genderless non-human – are suffering a crippling inner wound that God longs to heal. And, as already discovered by many astonished people who were once afraid to think of God as having any male qualities, at least part of that healing flows from finding in the safe, warm God, the love of the perfect Father.

Ironically, it turns out that those who most object to relating to God as Father are the ones who will eventually most benefit from relating to God as Father. Yet this is so difficult to grasp for those who are deeply hurting because of abusive humans, and they desperately need to snuggle into God’s comfort long before they can see God as the tender Father who will fill a gnawing emptiness within them left by a hopelessly inadequate human father.

Since God is nothing like an abuser, he does not force healing upon us. If a surgeon will not act until a person is willing to consent to the operation, God – whose respect for us is far deeper – will wait for you. Sadly, it often takes us a long while to muster the courage to heal. So if you do not yet feel ready to relate to God as Father, put that thought on hold, but do not perpetuate your inner pain by letting it hinder you from drawing close to the true God, who alone brings the comfort you desperately need.

Those close to you are imperfect, but the One who is closest to you is perfect. Everything that a starry eyed bride could wish for in love and security and faithfulness and devotion; everything a little child could hope for in a Mommy or Daddy or brother or sister or grandparent; God is all that and more.

#What gender is God?#The motherhood of God #fatherhood of God and the love of God

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