Taking off My Mask

by Danny
(Indianapolis)

Let me start by telling you that I fought it. I fought being gay with every fiber of my being. I wished it away. I begged it away. I lay prostrate on my face night after night begging a Holy God who required perfection for help. I will be the first to admit that I have never been much of a fighter but this I fought.

I lost - time and time again I lost! I know that to so many of my friends and family there will not ever be any reconciliation that this is me and that I am exactly who God created me to be. I can understand this, as I am just now allowing myself to come to terms after 33 years of life, at least 25 of which I knew, without a shadow of a doubt that I was Gay.

A Spirit filled Christian, baptized when I was 5, accepted by a God that knew intimately all that I was and all that I would be! Gay! Raised in a strict Pentecostal religion in which nearly everything outside of breathing and eating was a sin that would send me to hell and here I am Gay. Gay - the supposed abominable, the unpardonable.

Oh my God what did I do to deserve this? I don’t understand. You’re a father. A father doesn’t desire to harm or torment his children, and yet here I am - Gay!

Please believe me, I can’t remember a time in which I haven’t begged God for relief. I knew what I was taught. I knew the supposed disgrace. I went without everything that I felt was making me this way, and still no relief.

In begging God for deliverance from this I asked Him for a wife, believing that marriage was the cure. If only I would marry and have sex with a woman then everything would be okay.

He answered me in part. God gave me a wife yet she wasn’t just a wife, He gave to me an angel. He gave to me what I thought I wanted. She is by far to me still the most beautiful person in the world inside and out. He caused our hearts to intertwine until they seem almost inseparable and yet here we sit, breaking because despite all that she is, I can’t be a real husband to her.

I can’t be at all what she deserves and the angel that she is tells me that the little that I have given her has been and will continue to be more than enough. This is a woman who followed me through mood swings, irritability, emotional and physical unfaithfulness, emotional torments and anxieties at being found out.

She followed me from city to city and state to state to chase after a husband who was running from himself. She just watched in great support as she was taking great ridicule for staying with a man who would not keep a job to support her and her two small children.

Danny, her sorry husband who would quit job after job because someone either suspected or outright found out who I really was. She never asked me any questions, only trusted me and defended me to the hilt to any one, included her own mom and dad, whenever anyone said anything at all negative about me.

She would say that He is a good man. You will see. He is a good man of God. I watched this little Baptist girl grow spiritually to great heights in God. Night by night I listened to this angel lying beside me in bed, call out to Jesus.

Oh how I admire her. She has been to me tranquility and peace of mind more than she will ever know. She has been to me a sword and a shield and a protector, but unfortunately she wasn’t my deliverance. All that she is and was and did could not change who I am. It did not make me able to live the life of a straight man, no matter how much I wanted to.

I have been called to be real. I have to step into all that God has created me to be, leaving any trace of a mask behind. I do not want to even breathe if I can’t be real. I don’t want to live if I can’t be as open and apparent before man as I have been before God all of my life.

All of the hiding, all of the masks that I wore have come off. The walk that I tried to walk, the talk that I tried to talk, the life I tried to live never ever fooled God. He has seen through every mask that I put on, trying to be something that I could never be.

And yet God has gifted me and loved me beyond all that I have imagined. Many times in the past few weeks, the question has been asked of me:

“Are you reconciled that you are who God created you to be?”

I can sit here tonight with tears flowing down my face and tell you,

"Yes. Yes, I am!"

Nearly all of Christendom may believe that I am damned and dying, just for being the gay man God created me to be but I know the truth. My heavenly Father is here with me right now as He always has been. He is here holding me and loving me, and telling me louder than anything that I have ever heard spoken from Him,

"Danny, I love you, I know you. I have always known you. I filled you with my Spirit at 5 years old for my reasons. You are mine and I have great things in store for you. You have questioned so many things thus far. I have heard them all and my answer to you, Danny, is to just be yourself. I will bless you, I will anoint you. Take off your mask and just be real!