Putting In The Hard Work to Let Go the Past

I have posted several times recently on the issue of not continuing to allow oneself to be a victim or trapped by one’s past and the need to take affirmative steps to make changes in one’s outlook and mind set to accomplish this goal, be it through therapy or other spiritual means. With this background, I came across a post on a friend’s blog about two people in his life that perfectly illustrated the choices we all are confronted with in deciding which path we choose to follow (I have modified the language slightly):

“He is someone who has traveled a pretty harsh road, but he is so determined to not let his past and not let those experiences impact negatively on his present and future. I have no doubt that it’s a difficult path and I can even see the struggles at times in his eye’s. However he keeps powering ahead. He is so willing to put in the hard work. That’s a quality I admire in people.

It’s interesting because in contrast, I see another friend who refuses to deal with the difficult situation before her and just dwells on the past. Even though to fix things would be difficult, if the effort was put into the endeavor, she would come out happier and healthier. I hope she decides to take this path at some point because she truly deserves to be happy.”

I realize that I myself have not always put the needed effort into escaping the wounds and old paradigms of my past - it is ever so easy to wallow in being a victim – but overall I believe I have made significant progress in not allowing this baggage to continue to control my present and future. Has it been an easy process? Most certainly it has not. Has it been worth the effort? Most definitely.

God's Perfect Love Requires No Ex-gay "Cure"

Some language in a post on Ex-Gay Watch by Eugene Wagner really touched me and very much describes the evolution I had to made spiritually to arrive at a place of self-acceptance with my sexuality. I cannot express it any better, so here's a portion of his post:

If there’s one pivotal event that I hope I adequately account for in every retelling, it’s how I came to truly understand, for the first time, that God loves me exactly the way I am, and that I don’t have to change who or what I am to earn his acceptance.

It’s equally important to understand that God brought me to this point before I began questioning everything I’d been taught by the church about my “condition,” and not the other way around. I certainly didn’t interpret God’s unconditional acceptance as a license to do whatever my whims might happen to dictate, and I still don’t.

Words cannot fully convey just how revolutionary it was to come to the realization that not only did I not have to become somebody else in order to appease God, but he didn’t want me to be somebody else. Yet somebody else was precisely what I was trying to become through my efforts to “reclaim my natural heterosexuality.”

For better or for worse, whether because of genetics, hormones, psychological influences or some combination of the three, my homosexuality is a permanent, integral part of who I am, and God made it clear to me that he wasn’t interested in fundamentally altering the personality of somebody he had already fallen in love with, as even a partial shift in orientation would have entailed for me. Maybe it’s different for someone whose attractions were more fluid to begin with, but I wouldn’t know.

For the full post, see: http://www.exgaywatch.com/wp/2007/06/perfect-love/