Steven LaChance Blog

My relationship with God is not a complicated one. I live on very even ground with Him. We have an understanding, a quiet agreement that I am who He made me to be. Sometimes I believe that being gay has actually made me one of His chosen. Think about it. You come into this world as yourself. You feel it before you can even name it, that sense of difference, that quiet awareness that you are not like everyone else. It is not something you choose. It is simply who you are.

Then the world begins to tell you otherwise. It starts softly, through looks and whispers, through the way people change the subject or step back a little when they notice something in you they cannot explain. Later, it becomes words. Hard ones. The kind that press down on you until you almost forget how to breathe.

For me, much of that weight came from sitting in the pews of a Lutheran church as a boy, staring up at stained glass while the sermon washed over me. That was where I learned there were people who believed my very existence was wrong. Imagine hearing that as a child, that the way you love, the way you feel, is a sin. There is an unseen weight that comes from that. A fear. A shame. A slow-building hate that has nothing to do with God and everything to do with man.

It takes years to undo. Some never do. Some spend their lives trapped in that darkness, confusing the cruelty of people for the voice of God. But if you are lucky, if you are strong, you find your way back to the light. You begin to see the vast difference between human judgment and divine love.

That is why I believe we are chosen. Because even though the world has cast us out, we still reach for God. We still love Him. We still find beauty and truth in the idea that He created us in His image, every single one of us. And maybe that is the greatest act of faith there is, to love the Creator even after His followers have told you that you do not belong.

It is a love that has been tested and proven. It is not the blind faith of someone who has always been accepted. It is the faith of someone who had to fight their way through condemnation and still found God waiting on the other side, arms open, saying, “You were never lost. You were always mine.”