ever since i finished heated rivalry i can’t stop thinking about ilya confessing his love to shane in russian over the phone.
the way that scene was composed gave me an awfully familiar, terrifying feeling of tension.
it was beautiful and heartfelt, but it was also scary.
i’ve lived in moscow for six years. a strange place. it almost feels like it’s constantly looming over you, crowding you against the walls. you walk fast. you look over your shoulder constantly. you don’t smile at strangers. you squeeze your keys tightly in the pocket of your winter coat.
seeing ilya crouching down, enclosed by walls covered in graffiti, bathed in reddish light and looking out at the dark, snowy scrap of city outside reminded me so much of myself.
there used to be a subway station right next to my house in moscow. it looked almost the same — defiled by graffiti, lit by flickering, old lamps. i’d have to cross the passage to get on the other side of the street and i remember hating it. i could never explain why, but i always felt uneasy walking through it. i would quicken my pace, heartbeat jittery, just to reach the air and noise outside again.
seeing ilya sitting there, pouring his heart out, i felt the tension running through me again. the need to say the important things weighing on your heart, but fearing you would be overheard. that constant paranoia of someone finding out you’re gay. painfully familiar to me.
the monologue was also written perfectly and connor storrie’s performance was show-stopping. as a native speaker, i could tell how much work he put into handling the russian language well. all the pauses were in the right places. the choice of words was perfect. it felt so real…the desperation in it, the longing, the fear.
i would love to talk about how what he actually says in the monologue perfectly captures the cultural dilemma ilya’s up against and how relatable it all was to me as someone who grew up surrounded by that culture, but i feel i’d have to make another post.
i haven’t been to moscow in many years, will likely never return again. but seeing this scene in the show, it brought me back there temporarily. not necessary for a good feeling, not even nostalgia. just back to a part of me that is long gone.
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My relationship with Christ is complicated. Not because He's complicated but because I am. I constantly need reminded to believe in Him, to trust Him and our Heavenly Parents, to remember the Atonement is a real, on-going event.
I try to refuse grace. My mental illness tries to trick me into thinking I'm beyond redemption, my soul too dirty, my burdens too heavy, that somewhere along the line I reached the point of no return. I withdraw, not just from people, but from Christ too.
But He doesn't leave me.
He waits, eternally patient, for me to remember Him. In the sacrament, in the small blessing of full night's sleep without nightmares, in the lyrics to a song, in the scriptures and in conference talks.
One day, I will be clean, okay, and healed, and it will be because of Him.
A boy I once used to spend time conversing with used to ask me what God was teaching me lately. What God was teaching me. So often I think I confuse the idea of testing and tempting with teaching.Â
Looking back on memories of days where I was lost in the world and felt beyond the Father's reach, I can now see how He was present in every moment. Every tear shed. Every kiss given away. Every night, and day, spent in the shelter/prison of my bed.Â
His heart was breaking for me, I can see that now. I can feel that now.Â
Through those darkest moments I know He was there. He was teaching me. He was bringing me to a greater purpose. Every experience of life has left me with an everlasting hope. A hope that light will prevail, and darkness will be destroyed. Terminated. Defeated.Â
My heart breaks for those who do not yet know this hope. My anger rages at the enemy who makes it his mission to keep those from knowing this hope. I feel helpless when I'm faced with situations in which I don't know all the answers. But I do not give up. Because my power is in Christ. My spirit is firm and my heart is confident. My light cannot go out.
There has been a request that I write out my testimony for all my lovely followers to read. I haven't really written it out in detail, since I believe that a testimony really doesn't come to an end until one's life ends. If you too are interested in reading it, please message me, comment, or like this post. I just want to be sure that people are actually going to read it. :P
A little bit about my faith and my search for truth (and Truth)
I'm up at this hour, so I may as well type this up.
There has been this shift in my faith and the things I believe in the past year. I used to be so against the feelings that I have for other men. I used to be so concrete in my thinking. I wasn't a Conservative Christian by any means at all, but I still had a narrow way of looking at faith and theology. Any other belief system, to me, wasn't worth following at all. Like I posted earlier, I thought I had everything figured out about my beliefs during my freshman year of college. I was in an evangelistic choir that traveled the nation. I had seen people healed and delivered of addictions. I had just come out of an internship program in the church I attended (used to be Master's Commission). I had spent a year learning about the Bible and God and the church's mission and servanthood, and I knew everything there was to know about faith.Â
Experiences mold you, though. They transform who you are, and even the steadiest of foundations can be rocked or even shattered when too many waves hit you. Things happen. Things fall apart.Â
I have friends that are concerned about my spiritual well-being because I've become so different. I'm writing this to explain what has happened in the last year that has so radically changed my thinking.
Freshman year of college, fresh out of the internship, I was bold in my faith. I wasn't afraid to pray for people. I wasn't afraid to talk about how good the Lord was. I wasn't afraid to open up to people and tell them the things that had happened in my life that had made me who I was. I told them of the abuse, the absentee father, the homosexuality. I bared my soul in front of people I had barely known just so I could help them somehow, but with the same mouth that spoke so highly of the Lord, I spoke curses upon myself, hating myself because of my sexuality. I had been conditioned from a very young age to hate homosexuality, and it's stuck with me to this day. I used to cut myself because I hated myself, and it stemmed from my sexuality. I punished myself this way.
But still, I loved the Lord. I passionately loved Him, and I worshiped Him in spirit and in truth, and I was always honest with Him. I told Him that I hated myself. I told Him that I wanted to be done with homosexuality.Â
And I've seen so many people delivered from things, but after praying for 11 years of your life and seeing no results, you start to become jaded. You start thinking something is wrong with you, like maybe God can't hear you. I was also taught at a young man that ONLY the prayers of a righteous man were the prayers that God heard, and I was far from righteous.
But freshman year passed by swimmingly. I made good grades, good friends, and I was relatively happy. Besides the nights that I would cry for no reason, I was completely fine.
That summer was the best. My friends, my brother, and I would stay up late, smoking cigars and pipes, playing poker, and talking about the Lord. I still dealt with the sexuality, but there were just so many more good things happening than bad.
My foundation had been holding strong until one night in sophomore year. I had met a boy who wasn't unlike me, and at this point, I thoroughly believed that I was going to end up with a wife at some point. It had been prophesied ("prophesied") over me when my family found out that I was gay. I thought I was stronger than I was, and that night, I kissed a boy for the first time in three years, and it shattered everything I thought I believed.Â
Soon after this, my nights of crying turned into days that I couldn't move out of the bed. My grades plummeted, and I didn't know what was wrong. My friends told me to go to counseling, but I said no. My sister got pregnant unexpectedly. She was the golden child, and she got pregnant out of wedlock, and my entire family was freaking out, and I can't do anything about it because I'm two hours away from home. When I got the news, all I could do was sit on a park bench and cry, and I just wondered how my life just became the opposite of everything I expected it could be.
I started thinking of suicide again for the first time in years. I had suicidal thoughts at least once a day. I literally remember asking God what I should do if I wanted to kill myself, but I didn't tell a soul. I harbored all of the pain and hate inside of me, hoping that one day, God would just take it away like I had been promised by everyone except for Him.
Around December of 2012, I started meeting people (on tumblr, of course) that made me start wondering things. I thought I had known everything, but my foundation had been sufficiently cracked to the point of being destroyed entirely. I started to wonder if my sexuality was something that would ever go away like I had been promised. I started thinking, "Maybe they were just wrong." They were holding on to the hope that maybe one day, I would be a normal kid, a normal guy, and maybe they twisted what they heard into what they wanted to hear.
But when I came back to school, I was brought back into the same evangelistic choir, and I was surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses that continued to choke the very life out of me, and I thought, "No, I was wrong. I should know better by now." So, I served out my time trying to serve the Lord through His ministry, but this pesky thought in my head just kept rolling through. What if I am wrong?Â
My depression worsened, and I finally went to the counseling center that ran through the school. I was diagnosed with depression, but my counselor took specific interest in my sexuality. Being that it was a Christian school, I was expecting her to want me to change, but I was shocked to hear her say that she was friends with a lesbian couple that got married, but still went to church and loved the Lord.
I thought that there was no way. With my conditioned attitude, I immediately was cut off, but at the same time, I yearned for male companionship.
This conflict only complicated things. It literally felt as if the Devil and God were raging inside of me, and yes, I totally ripped that off from Brand New. I used to be able to feel the Lord's presence when I sang for him, but I felt nothing at all. I used to be able to hear from God, but anymore, I was having one-sided conversations with Him while I sobbed and swore and smoked my cigarettes. I was singing in choir services and seeing people worship the Lord, and I felt nothing at all. I wasn't moved. To be honest, I was annoyed and angry at them. How dare they be able to feel the Holy Spirit? What have they done that's so special?
I remember after a choir service, I went up to the changing room, and I just began to sob because I wanted so desperately to just quit the choir because I felt so out of place. I felt like everyone around me was on another spiritual level than I was, but I couldn't help it. Everybody seemed like they had everything together, and I felt like I was the only one that was being honest about my problems.Â
I was soon prescribed anti-seizing medication, a mood-stabilizer, the nurse said. I started taking them immediately, hoping and praying for change to happen.
Somehow, I managed to wind up in the circle of tumblr that I had feared for so long: the Glittecclesia. I saw the things that they talked about, and they frightened me. I wasn't used to so much liberal theology and thinking. I had put God inside the box that my personal narrative had built Him, and I realized that I didn't know God at all. I would talk to Him everyday with no response, and I didn't know Him.Â
I slowly (very slowly) started to become more okay with the person I was becoming. Maybe the pills were helping, but I started being able to open up to the idea that, at the very least, I was probably going to have these feelings forever. This was a huge weight off of my shoulders. I was trying so hard to change something that I couldn't change. I remember looking up to the sky and saying, "You know, I'm done. You can do whatever You want. If You make me straight somehow, that's cool. If I'm gay for the rest of my life, that's cool too. I don't care anymore." And I just had such a peace about it that I had never had before.
Now, I'm pretty sure that I'm queer, but anything can happen, and I'm not shutting any doors. I'm trying to understand what I believe theologically. I'm learning so much. I'm learning about God. I'm learning about myself.Â
I say all of this to come to this end point: Yes, I smoke. Yes, I drink. Yes, I swear. Yes, I'm gay. But at the end of the day, I absolutely love the Lord because of who He is and what He has done for me. If it weren't for the Lord, I would be dead, and I will stand by that statement until the day that I die. I will never be able to deny the existence of a God. I don't know where I stand on my homosexuality in terms of sin, but I don't believe I'm sinning in accepting who I am. I don't think coming to terms with being queer is something that God would condemn me for.
That's the thing. I couldn't care less about Heaven or Hell because I'm not experiencing them right now. I'm trying to love the Lord and bring His Kingdom to Earth. I love Him because of Him, not out of fear of Hell or the want of Heaven.Â
I still love the Lord, and I always will. I am a queer Christian, and at the end of the day, I still believe that grace will carry me home.
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What is your testimony? How did you come to believe?
well let's see. i grew up going to sunday school and the like. i was in like....2nd grade when i got saved i suppose but i was one of those kids that prayed the prayer every week just to make sure i did it right so that timeline could be a little skewed. Â
i think i'm fortunate in that God grabbed a hold of me when i was pretty young and so faith was never really....sometime i questioned...it was just part of life. but i would say i got more serious about it when i was 16. we had a speaker come to our school. the father of one of the columbine victims came and shared his daughter's journals and it was just.....eye opening. i don't remember very much of what he said but i remember one of the quotes from her journal was 'i will not be labeled as average' and that resonated with me for whatever reason.Â
then when i went to college i got plugged into an awesome fellowship where i learned what it was to serve and that combined with my photography degree has put some pretty wild plans into my heart. i want to do two things in life: help people and photograph it while i'm doing it. there are stories to tell and i think if people hear them and see the faces of humanity in need...they'll react to it, regardless of what their faith is...and isn't that really what life is about?
anyway..now i'm getting philosophical. but i think that's something that God's put on my heart and not really my own ambition. and i think how that desire plays out will be a huge part of my testimony in the future. Â
to be completely candid, i'm in a rough season of life and i'm stretched but it's the desire to serve that's so deeply rooted in me somewhere that's my anchor to all other things Christian.Â
