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Real Answers™
dt21
Copyright: ©2008 Debbie Thurman
650 words

THE TRUTH THAT TRANSFORMS

By: Debbie Thurman

It seems we can never quite get away from the cultural confusion associated with homosexuality. It’s a complex and volatile topic, to be sure. Everyone with a brain knows you can’t “pray away the gay,” right? Isn’t that what Christian music artist Ray Boltz proved recently by coming out as a gay man?

How timely, then, is the new movie, “Save Me,” starring Judith Light as the loving and compassionate matron -- still grieving her gay son’s suicide -- who assists her husband in running a Christian residential home attempting to help homosexual men “convert” to heterosexuality.

Light told The Washington Blade she modeled her role after the mother of her gay manager and mentor, Herb Hamsher (who is also a producer for the film). “I love and adore her,” Light said of Hamsher’s mother. “This is a 91-year-old woman who is an evangelical Christian and reads her Bible every single day -- to this day. … “I can put myself in her shoes. I know how much she loves her son.”

Yet Light remains pro-gay and the movie is meant to show the futility of such programs.

Hamsher said his mother never tried to “cure” him, but he gave her an ultimatum: she could not maintain her religious belief system and have a relationship with him. Yes, that’s called hyprocrisy. Accept me and what I believe, but don’t expect me to accept you unless you reject your faith.

The American Psychological Association maintains, “There is simply no sufficiently, scientifically sound evidence that sexual orientation can be changed.” The guild organization is not so quick to admit there is also no scientific evidence that homosexuality is an inborn trait. And if something -- as yet perhaps not fully determined -- causes one to develop a predisposition to same-sex attraction, then it follows that its effects can be ameliorated for those who desire to change.

But then, people like Mike Haley and I really don’t exist -- to some angry gay activists, that is. We represent an inconvenient truth and an existential threat since “born gay” is a deeply rooted identity for them.

You see, Mike spent a year in a real residential program for men struggling with same-sex attraction while I spent a year in intensive counseling with a Christian licensed clinical social worker -- a former lesbian. It took additional years of support from loving people and a deep and abiding faith in Jesus Christ, but somehow, we came out changed and have stayed that way for a long time. We each have gone on to serve others like us, he through Focus on the Family’s Love Won Out conferences, and I in facilitating a church-based recovery group for women seeking to overcome same-sex attraction while running a Web-based outreach called TheFormers.com. Mike and I have lots of company. We are all the red-headed stepchildren of the gay community.

So, how did we do something Judith Light calls “impossible”? How does any miracle occur? “Incurable” patients are healed, estranged relationships are restored, destructive anger melts away, alcoholics and drug addicts walk away from their old habits and stay sober and clean.

It’s not science, but something much higher that transforms so dramatically. The gay community may have made a religion out of sketchy science, but it’s the real faith of people -- like Herb Hamsher’s mother -- in a real God that does what no power on earth can do for those who want to be transformed. The opportunity for change is freely offered, not forced. Jesus is a gentleman. He stands at the door and knocks, refusing to break it down.

Are Mike and I and our fellow “formers” immune to temptation today? No one is. But we know God’s “grace is sufficient … for power is perfected in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). It’s only after we come to the end of ourselves that God gives us new, overcoming life.

 

Debbie Thurman is an award-winning commentator and author who writes from Monroe, Va. Her e-mail address is debbie@debbiethurman.com.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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