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Matthew Walker
Life Gets Better With Christ by Matthew Walker
In my youth I lived about 10 years as an active member of the gay community. I read gay literature, boycotted Pepsi, dated guys, attended and served at AIDS benefits and steeped myself in gay culture. I was a victim of bullying and true hate speech and I buried a few friends and one family member after their lives were cut short by the ravages of HIV. I crafted an identity out of a feeling that started when I was around 4-6 years of age. It was a feeling common in the childhoods of most gay men and women. It’s a feeling of ”feeling different”. I was led to interpret that feeling to mean that I was gay. It was only later in life that I began to wonder, “Who told me that the benign feeling of ‘feeling different’ meant that I was gay?” That interpretation was fostered by the verbal contributions of my peers and the contemptuous need of society to label anything that appears different. But maybe, just maybe the feeling didn’t mean that I was different. Maybe it meant that I was set apart for something different.
I have long since physically left the gay community, but my heart is still there. Because my own life was touched by homosexuality, I know the trials and tribulations that gay men and women go through today. I know that just like me, there are men, women and teens trapped in a gay-identified world that they long to be free from. There are others who are still quite happy being gay. The liberal media would have us believe that the Church’s strong voice in the world is the cause of many gay teen suicides. When I was growing up, it wasn’t the church that caused me inner turmoil with my sexuality. Deep down I knew the attractions I was starting to feel were wrong. They were awkward for me. The church didn’t have to tell me that. It wasn’t the voice of the church, I heard. It was the voice of God making me aware of how the sin I had been born into had manifested in me, but also how I could bring peace to the chaos brewing in the area of my sexuality.
I felt like killing myself as a teen not because of the church, but because of a very real spiritual enemy that was trying to destroy me anyway that he could. His whispers and lies twisted the Bible into a condemnation of me, not of the sin that was overtaking me. I was honest with myself about how homosexuality developed in my life. Many gay men and women use the act of “coming out” as a great dismissal of the developmental history that shaped their gay identity. Genetics becomes the great enabler that keeps many bound to a life of destruction. My heart breaks a little more each day as false hope is communicated to susceptible youth with slogans like “It gets better”. When I hear how many kids are empowered to embrace homosexuality, because some celebrity has come out, it simply takes the wind out of my sails. Today we desperately need courageous Christians who are willing to stand up against the gay agenda and say enough is enough. Unfortunately many times it’s a message churches are unwilling to tackle. There are millions of kids out there looking for answers and looking for a savior – is that not a compelling enough reason to get involved? The truth is that life only gets better if Christ is actively involved.
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