Day 22c: I Am Victorious in the Sunset

Day 22c: I Am Victorious in the Sunset

So, every weekend or so I go excercising. Either by running for a good 20-30 minutes straight or by bike-riding. Well, today I decided to go bikeriding after dinner around twilight and it was BEAUTIFUL outside. Twilight is my favorite part of day, so seeing the red/orange/blue all swirling in the sky made me give a genuine smile. I was really happy to be biking. Well, unfortunately I made the tragic mistake of biking towards the lake 5 minutes from my house, cause I literally biked through a wall of flying insects. They were the tiniest little bugs in the air that ended up hitting me in the face for nearly 2 minutes straight. By the time I got out of this hell-hole, I kid you not, I had a coat of flying bugs on my sweatshirt. To say the least, I did NOT want to bike down by the lake path, so I stopped at the nearby park which wasn't really surrounded by grass so there weren't as many bugs. And so I went to the park and sat down on one of the benches, and I just decided to sit and look at the sunset. And I spent a good minute just staring. Letting my eyes wander around the swirly reddish-pink clouds or the winding yellow streaks. And it reminded me of God. It reminded me of how I used to be before this year, and I suddenly became extremely ashamed. So yeah, sorry I never mentioned I was Christian, but I just couldn't deal with writing about my faith on this site. I'm sorry if you've been reading this for so long and just assumed I wasn't religious, but I am. To make a VERY VERY long story short, I grew up as a very strong Christian. Read my bible, highlighted it, made notecards for bible verses and memorized them, prayed every morning and night, thanked God for my life and his grace for dieing on the cross, volunteered as a worker in church, went to EVERY sermon on Sunday. Yep, I was living for Jesus. But then something went very very wrong. In 8th grade, I had my first gay crush. And about a year later, I actually acknowledged my feelings for guys, which TORE ME APART. I literally felt torn apart because I spent the next 3 YEARS condemning myself for my homosexual thoughts. I remember everytime I masturbated to a guy, or whenever I dreamdt about just hugging another man, I would be so ashamed. I was beg God for forgiveness, beg for 5 minutres straight, just lieing in bed saying all these prayers about how sorry I was. I was very confused as you can tell......... I soon came to loathe my feelings, and myself for being such a homosexual. I was convinced I could change, and I asked God to change me. You can laugh at this; I even masturbated to naked woman, trying to get off to them cause I thought if I orgasmed, my brain would naturally start being attracted to woman. It also took me a LOT LONGER to ejaculate, lol. But, it was one of my many attempts to rid me of my sin, or my attraction for men. It wasn't until January that I accepted myself for who I was. Over the last year, I spent long weekends looking up help online from various Christian groups telling me their opinions on homosexuality. And I was sure to get unbiased sources because my religion really mattered to me. Some groups believed that God calls homosexuality a sin, others believed only homosexual acts were a sin, and still others believed that similar to how woman's rights verses and slavery verses no longer apply due to cultural strains, similarly homosexuality is not considered a sin. I came to accept that homosexuality was NOT a sin, although adultery/lust was still a sin. (I WILL EXPLAIN MY REASONING LATER; THAT IN ITSELF IS A WHOLE OTHER ENTRY!!!!) In my view, if I thought a girl looked cute, that wouldn't be sinful, so neither should it be when I looked at a cute guy. But, in the same manner, it would be sinful to look at a girl lustfully (like I imagine her naked and fuck her or something dirty like that), so looking at a guy lustfully was also wrong. In this way, I was sure not to abandon my religion completely; I just couldn't keep shaming myself for something that was natural to me. --------------------------------------- Back to the Sunset ------------------------------------------ Well, after I accepted myself, I felt really really great. In fact, so great that I almost abandoned religion altogether. I think cause I was so tired of being so ashamed of myself, I felt like I needed a "break" from God. (And I know, religious people, that this may sound completely wrong and sinful, but please simply understand me and not judge me.) It was up to the point where I left God as the doll in the back of my closet. I stopped reading the Bible for a long time, right now as I'm typing this I can hardly remember 5 Bible verses, I stopped caring so much about pleasing God, no longer felt shame for gay porn, oddly enough. Yeah, I drifted very very far from God. But, at the sunset I felt something prompt me to sit down and just look at the sunset. And the beauty of the colors in the sky was enough to remind me of him. And it brought back a flood of memories. And then by sheer intuition, I got out my mp3 and I said to myself "I need to hear 'Amazing Grace'." And so I played it, and I remembered God's love for me. I remembered all the things I went through, how I came to conclusion by reason that God was real, that he loved me, that it wasn't just my parents who raised me Christian, and that I had a purpose in life. And then I listened to the song, forgetting everything around me and just listening to the lyrics. It was hard to remember them, but I replayed the song over and over until I grasped the concept of grace. And then I remembered the fruit of the spirit, "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, goodness, and self-control" and oddly enough, I basically thought about all the antonyms of each word...."hate, sadness, frustration, impatience, meanness, harshness, impious, evil, and out-of-control. And I thought how I was 5 years ago and how religious I once was, and then I thought of myself in terms of everything opposite of these good values. It made me sad to see how weak I was, how I spent a lot of my time trying to impress people that didn't even matter, when in reality all I should've tried to impress was God. And so after that, I just spent the next twenty minutes dwelling on how Jesus's life was full of those fruit. Basically, I found that.... Love: Jesus loved me enough to die for my sin, and that he offers me a resting place beyond this broken world. Joy: Jesus was ultimately happy in life, because he knew he had something special and meaningful planned in his life, and that he would soon see eternal bliss, which is enough to make anyone happy. Peace: He knew that all his troubles would soon come to an end in the afterlife. "This too shall pass." Patience: Jesus was always waiting for a brighter day; he was always hopeful of the final destination that would bring an end to all his pain. Kindness: Jesus showed kindness to the people around him, healing the sick and feeding those who were extremely hungry. He did this because it was his nature; to help others. Gentleness: Jesus was gentle to people because everyone is different in philosophy. Not everyone has the same morals and standards as you, so you must be gentle and not come with warfare. Faithfulness: Jesus was faithful to God, obeying him, and God in turn promised him to do everything good. Goodness: I guess this is just a personification of deity vs. the devil, where evil is always trying to destroy people, and goodness is just the notion that you want to help others. It's like when people refer to others who have a "good heart"; they like helping others. Self-Control: This is a tough issue for me, since I struggle a bit with porn. But Jesus had self-control not only sexually but physically. He could abstain from wanting things, from trying to be great, from living a life building up his fame. He was always controlling himself. So yeah, I spent 20 minutes just listing off the fruit of the Spirit and thinking of ways I could live this life, this life I once adhered to so diligently. I'm ashamed that I lost God from my life because I was so scared, when in reality God still loves me and has a good plan for me. And I'm sorry I let my homosexuality get me so carried away, sorry for being so happy about feeling "freed" from religion's bashing when in truth, no one was bashing me. God loves me even if I'm gay, because there is nothing wrong with liking guys rather than girls. Doesn't make you less loving, less happy, less patient, or gentle, or faithful, or good, or less controlling of your life. Stealing shows how you are less kind to others, rape can show how uncontrolling and mean you are, jealousy can show how unkind and how evil your heart can be, but being gay does not hinder ANYTHING. And I will no longer live my life fearing that I'll go to hell for liking guys, cause I still love God. I spent the next half hour thinking of my career plans, since just 2 hours ago my parents were asking me what I wanted to study. And since I grew just a whole lot closer to God, I figured that it was a good time to have one of those intense life reflection sessions. So I initially decided that it MUST be a job that I help other people who are much more unfortunate than me, and not just a job where I help myself. So I was in debate over being a doctor or being an environmental engineer. And I finally came to the conclusion that I want to be an environmental engineer because I can help poor people with civic projects such as basic water sanitation and things like that and still enjoy my job. The thing is, I took AP Biology and I HATED it; I could NEVER spend 8 years of my education learning that stuff just to be a doctor. Sure it's a noble job where I'll definitely safe people's lives, but I figure that God would most want me to go down the other path because I enjoy it so much more. So yeah, all that happened during the twilight hours of my solitude at the park. I just really hope that I rekindle my faith again; start reading the Bible again and reading verse cards, because those really helped me through the hardships in my life. It was only when the issue of homosexuality came up that I couldn't find God to turn to. But now, with that out of the way, I know that God loves me more than ever and that I'm here for him with open arms.