Working Through the Pain!

If you’ve never struggled with same-sex attractions, you may find it difficult to understand the pain that those who do are going through. If you do struggle with homosexuality, you know that pain all to well and may be having a difficult time not allowing that pain to overwhelm you and damage your relationship with God, with others, and with yourself.

For these reasons we are including (with their permission) the correspondence of two men in one of our HA groups as one cries out for help and the other offers encouragement.

Points to Ponder

Rock of integrity in the universe when the heart of God has ceased to value the supremely valuable?" [John Piper, Desiring God, (Portland, OR: Multnomah, 1986), p. 36]

"A student once asked the president of his school if there was a course he could take that was shorter than the one prescribed. 'Oh yes,' replied the president, 'but it depends on what you want to be. When God wants to make an oak, He takes a hundred years, but when He wants to make a squash, it only takes six months." [Miles J. Stanford, Principles of Spiritual Growth, quoted in Charles Swindoll, The Tale of the Tardy Oxcart And 1,501 Other Stories, (Nashville: Word Publishing, Inc., 1998), p. 173]

"The wise man adjusts himself to the Bible, but the fool adjusts the Bible to himself." [Our Daily Bread, (September 10, 1978)]

"Of the estimated 332,578 male adults and  adolescents living with HIV/AIDS, 60% were MSM [male to male sexual contact] 19% were IDUs [intravenous drug users], 13% were exposed through heterosexual contact, and 7% were MSM who were also IDUs." [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report, 2004. Vol. 16. (Atlanta: US Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2005), p. 7]

"Homosexuality...is one of the results of the Fall, just as every other proclivity to sin is.... There is no such separate condition as homosexuality--just sinners with different forms of sexual weakness and different degrees of identity confusion.... Homosexuals are men and women like the rest of us, and all of us sinners are either wrestling with or giving in to our particular sexual vulnerabilities." [Dr. John White, Eros Redeemed: Breaking the Stranglehold of Sexual Sin, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), p. 151]

"It is as true of Christians as it is of Christ,--there can be no life without death, there can be no sweet without bitter, there can be no crown without a cross." [J. C. Ryle, "John," Expository Thoughts on the Gospels II, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, n.d.), p. 167]