Tag: growth
Allowing Myself to Thrive in Missional Community
“God has placed us together for a specific reason — that the times, stories, and experiences we share are beneficial for each other,” she said. This led to discussion about how community requires vulnerability. Even with a wide open invitation, I remained a silent listener in the community.
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Self-Hatred and the Struggles of Being Gay
As a kid, I said a lot of derogatory things about LGBTQ+ people. I cringe at the things I remember saying. When I realized I was gay, all of that hatred that I showed to others turned in on myself. That realization drove me to reparative therapy. The logic makes sense: I hate gay people, I am gay — thus, I need to not be gay.
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Here and Queer: Redeeming My Sexual and Gender Identity
I’m queer. That is how I now identify my sexuality. And it’s how I can best define my experience of gender, too. In my pursuit to grow more like Christ, I was setting aside part of my life as a mystery spot. How could I submit my sexuality to Christ if I didn’t even know what it was?
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Saying Goodbye to Emotional Dependency — and My Best Friend
A point came in our relationship when I realized just how dependent I was on him and just how one-sided our friendship was. For my own well-being, I needed to step away from the relationship. What follows is the lament and reflection I wrote in saying “goodbye” to our friendship.
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YOBcast Episode 050: Emotional Attachment
We’re back! After a brief summer hiatus, we return with our landmark fiftieth episode. Join Tom, Ryan, and Jacob sharing stories of emotional attachment: the good ways we attach to other men, and the not-so-good ways we attach. It’s a callback to a previous episode on emotional dependency. We differentiate between “dependency” and “attachment” and share both our positive and negative experiences in relationship with other men.
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Straight Men are Scary
Straight men have always been scary. They’ve long been “the other,” going all the way back to first grade. We may not share the same tastes for sports and media consumption, but we still share a common masculine heart. One fraught with hauntingly familiar masculine thorns.
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Is Being “Side B” Just Internalized Homophobia?
Do I live the way I live purely because of the way I was raised? Do I still harbor any internalized homophobia of myself and others? Is that why I’m “Side B”? Is this all coming from a place of pious self-righteousness?
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I Was Fifteen Minutes Away from the PULSE Shooting
In my pre-YOB days, I still felt a lot of self-loathing and internalized homophobia over my sexuality and had yet to come to terms with it. I spent that whole day unsure what to think or feel about PULSE. Dismayed by seeing so many people brutally murdered, of course, yet conflicted about how I felt about my convictions with my own sexuality.
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Receiving Brotherhood at the YOBBERS Retreat
I realized that these guys had come to this YOBBERS retreat for the right reasons. They came to honor Christ, love one another, and encourage each other. And that included me. I realized that I had come expecting to work and only work, with no expectation to receive anything.
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Finding Humility Through Beauty at the YOBBERS Retreat
Humility is not about being hard on yourself; it’s about fighting the urge to stand at the center of it all. As I stood there at this year’s YOBBERS retreat, an observer rather than a participant, God reminded me I wasn’t there to get as much as I could get, or even give as much as I could give. The YOBBERS retreat was bigger than me. I didn’t need to stand in the center of anything.
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