“Is it wrong to be gay?” my eight-year-old son asked me one day.
I looked over at him and thought I knew the answer. I thought I understood what it meant to be gay, and I thought I knew what the Bible said about it.
“Well,” I told him, “I just believe what the Bible says. It talks about two cities God destroyed for their sins. And I believed one of those sins was homosexuality.”
He turned and looked out the window.
We drove on in silence.
Even then, my answer did not feel theologically sound. But it still did not move me to study further.
I believed being gay was a choice. A lifestyle. A sin.
Or so I had heard. Or so it felt.
And anyway, I figured, it was between them and God.
It did not affect me.
Or so I thought.
My Barbie World
I had always liked boys and never liked girls.
No one taught me to. I did not choose it. It just happened. I was born heterosexual.
When I played with Barbie and Ken, Barbie kissed Ken, married Ken, and had babies with Ken. When I played Legos with a cute boy from church, I made us play “prince and princess.” He had to save my Lego girl and kiss her. I was six.
In middle school, my friends and I talked about which boys were cute and who we wanted to marry. We came up with ridiculous ways to get near the boys we liked. I still remember sitting in a movie with the church youth group, trying to move my knee closer to the cute boy beside me.
I loved flirting with boys.
I loved when they flirted back.
The thrill. The fun. The romance. The longing to someday be the princess loved by the prince.
And it was okay.
It was accepted.
I grew up in a straight world.
I watched Disney movies and loved the romantic feeling I got when the prince came to save Cinderella. My knees went weak when Gilbert Blythe turned around and winked at Anne of Green Gables. I remember the giddy excitement every time the cute movie-star boy showed up on screen to flirt with the girl.
Everything catered to me.
My feelings were normal.
My crushes were cute.
My future was celebrated before I understood it.
Liking boys was not a sin.
It was okay.
It was accepted.
But I Never Knew
I never knew there were kids around me who were not like me.
I did not know there were girls who wondered why they were not drawn to the prince, but to the princess. I did not know there were boys who felt the same butterflies I felt, but for another boy.
I did not know there were children growing up ashamed of the very feelings I was allowed to enjoy.
While adults smiled at my Barbie-kissing, prince-loving, boy-crazy childhood, other kids learned to hide.
Instead of being called cute, they heard words pointed at them that said “sin,” “abomination,” and “lifestyle.” Some heard that God hated people like them. Some were told they would be better off dead. Some were kicked out of their homes. Some were pushed out of church. Most were bullied.
They spent years begging God to change them. And when it did not go away, they were told they had two choices: be alone for life, or marry someone they did not truly love.
So many learned not to get too close to anyone, because falling in love would only hurt more.
Forced into loneliness, rejection, silence, and shame, many fell into depression, addiction, and despair.
Far too many did not survive.
And if you are one of those kids reading this right now—hiding, tired, certain you are the only one—I need you to hear me. There is nothing wrong with you. You are not a mistake. You are already loved, exactly as you are.
I did not know any of this then.
I never asked.
I never looked closely at what the Bible actually said.
And then people I loved began telling me their stories.
The Year It Became Personal
My husband had begun questioning years before I did, back when he was the lead pastor of a church. But when he started studying what the Bible says, and does not say, about homosexuality, I did not want to join him.
I assumed I already knew the answer.
And honestly, it felt unfaithful to even question it.
Limited time, ministry demands, a big move, and the launch of a new business slowed his studies. But the question never left him. He was not settled. God kept tugging at his heart.
Over the years, even after we stepped away from full-time ministry during Covid, LGBTQ friends and family kept crossing our path.
The question became harder and harder to ignore.
Then one day, I found out why my eight-year-old son had asked me that question all those years before.
He told us he was gay.
Suddenly, this was no longer distant. It was no longer abstract. It was no longer “between them and God.”
It was my son.
And soon, my daughter began to understand her own story too.
Through our studies, she learned that not everyone felt like she did. She thought everyone was capable of liking anyone, and that God simply told people which way they were supposed to choose.
That hit me. Hard.
I had assumed everyone was straight because I was straight. She had assumed everyone felt like her and was simply told which love was allowed.
Both of us had been trying to make sense of the world through what we had been taught.
And both of us had been wrong.
The question was no longer outside our family.
It was sitting at our table.
It had our children’s names.
And we could not afford to be careless with Scripture.
Faithfulness to God and love for our children demanded our full attention.
So we studied. We prayed. We wept.
We approached this subject with fear and trembling, knowing what was at stake. We were not trying to escape Scripture. We were trying to read it carefully. Honestly. In context. Wherever it led.
We chose to question human interpretations of the Bible, not the Bible itself.
We chose to examine what Scripture calls sin. Not to justify sin, but to make sure we were not calling something sinful that God never condemned.
We talked with pastors, theologians, and trusted friends. We joined Bible studies. We traveled to conferences. We read widely. We immersed ourselves in Scripture, hermeneutics, theology, history, and science.
And along the way, we met faithful LGBTQ Christians.
Not stereotypes. Not arguments. People.
People who loved Jesus. People who loved Scripture. People who had prayed, suffered, studied, obeyed, and stayed faithful in places where they were often not fully welcomed.
We listened to their stories. We watched their lives. We saw humility, courage, repentance, worship, faithfulness, and fruit.
And after much prayer and study, we could not find anything in Scripture that identified same-sex attraction as sin. We could not find anything that prohibited faithful same-sex marriage. We could not find a command that marriage must be defined by one male and one female in order to be holy.
Instead, we came to see that God loves LGBTQ people, created them as they are, and welcomes them fully into the body of Christ.
We also began to see how much the church has lost by silencing, shaming, and pushing away people God never rejected.
One morning, my husband and I sat together on our back patio with coffee in our hands, surrounded by trees. And we finally admitted out loud what had been slowly happening in both of us.
Our theology had changed.
We did not loosen our belief in Scripture. We changed because of Scripture.
We did not redefine sin. We realized some things we had been taught to call sin were not.
We did not abandon the Bible. We dug deeper into it.
And we realized that faithfulness sometimes means following Scripture even when it leads somewhere biblically unexpected and theologically uncomfortable.
I cannot go back and answer my son differently in that car.
I cannot undo the silence of my past.
But I can listen now. I can study now. I can speak now.
And I can say what I wish I had known then:
I did not leave the Bible to love my children.
I followed the Bible more carefully and found them already there, already loved, already welcomed, already held in the heart of God.
Not away from the Bible.
Deeper into it.
And my faith is not weaker because I questioned.
It is stronger because I finally listened.