Last night I woke up in the middle of the night and had the strangest urge to pray for Bruce Jenner. I felt God’s heart weeping and breaking. Not just over Bruce Jenner, but the Bruce Jenners of the world. Those who are confused and broken. So lost in themselves that they can’t escape.
So I prayed. And then my heart ached. So heavy with compassion. Because no one is paying attention. No one is listening to his cries for help. Instead, in this fallen, dark, warped world, they are applauding his trauma. They are cheering him on in his heartache. They have pushed him to do something that he, himself, isn’t so sure about. (He said it himself.)
This morning I woke up and forgot nearly everything I had prayed about. I wanted desperately to share my thoughts on this with the blogging world. But every thought is now lost and gone. So I woke up this morning and proceeded to read my devotionals. From Jesus Calling, God speaks,
“Remember that you live in a fallen world: an abnormal world tainted by sin… Make Me the deepest desire of your heart. Let Me fulfill your yearning for perfection.”
Bruce indicated that he—and what he is doing to himself—is “the new normal.” I don’t disagree with that statement, because we now live in an “abnormal world” where all abnormalty is called normal.
“Woe to those saying to evil 'good,' And to good 'evil,' Putting darkness for light, and light for darkness, Putting bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.” Isaiah 5:20 (YLT)
God predicted all of this. He’s not surprised by this “new normal.” However, He’s incredibly grieved and sorrowful. Angry? Probably. But mostly raging with anger over how the devil has deceived us so greatly and taken so many precious lives.
No. I will not call you Caitlyn.
We often forget that God made man in His image. I don’t believe it’s merely the outside image that we mirror, but more importantly, the Heart of God that we reflect. Happiness, joy, sorrow, grief, anger, love… They all encompass Who God is…and who we are, too.
There are many blogs, articles, stories, etc. out there on Bruce Jenner, and I have read many from each angle. So I won’t reiterate those thought processes.
I have been a born again believer since 1998. I thought I knew what “interceding” prayer was until the other day when I read: “Moses interceded with the LORD his God…” from Exodus 32. For some reason the term “intercede” finally made real sense to me. Because the Israelites, at the time, didn’t even know they NEEDED intercession. They were down in the valley of the mountains dancing around a golden calf, singing, “This is our god who saved us.” And God was furious, to put it mildly! God was ready to strike them all down dead. Period. Be done with them. But Moses stepped in and stepped up. And I love what he says to the Creator of the Universe!
“Turn from Your great anger and change Your mind about this disaster planned for Your people.” Exodus 32:13
The Bruce Jenners of this world are heading for disaster. A disaster of their own making. God can’t stop us from ourselves. We have free will. And so he cannot stop the consequences of those decisions. We must face them head on.
Listen to transgenders. Really listen to them.
Many years ago, before I got saved, I hung around a seedy crowd. One person in our circle was a transgender who was going through the process of surgically becoming a woman. He was such a mess. Always depressed, Always suicidal. I can’t recall how many midnight phone calls I had to talk him down from killing himself. Oh, the anguish this poor man suffered. He turned to alcohol and drugs to try and soothe the emotional tangled web he was in, and it never worked. I often wonder if he is still alive today…
Not to change the subject, because this does pertain to the my topic, but many gay people like to ask heterosexuals, “When did you choose to be straight?” They think they are tricking us into saying that we never “chose” to be straight to prove their theory that they were born this way. But listen to a homosexual’s story. You can’t miss the story of abuse or molestation, unless you’re trying hard to avoid the truth.
But we can’t fall into this trap of not choosing, because we do choose to be straight. We choose to stay faithful to our spouse. We choose to accept who God created us to be. Let me explain.
In today’s world, many of us are tempted with the notion that gay sex is alluring, hot, steamy and incredibly better than heterosexual sex...and “normal.” Because it’s glamorized now. It’s sung about in songs like, “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry, and she liked it, OH, how she liked that cherry chapstick kiss. So even the straightest of straight are tempted by this notion of something better. And that’s the lie of the devil. That’s how he tempts us. With ideas of the next best thing. To fulfill our lust for pleasure.
Eve knew not to eat from that tree, but the serpent, through its deception, gave her a new perspective (illusion) on the tree. And all of a sudden, that tree was SO tempting, so alluring, so glorious. It offered so much! She just HAD to have it.
“The woman approached the tree, eyed its fruit and coveted its mouth-watering, wisdom-granting beauty. She plucked a fruit from the tree and ate. She then offered the fruit to her husband… Suddenly their eyes were opened to a reality previously unknown.” Genesis 3:6, 7
I won’t lie, before I got saved I flirted with the idea of homosexuality. As someone who jumped from one man to the next, the idea of kissing a beautiful woman got my blood going. Because that’s what lust does. Fortunately, I never acted on those impulses, but I got close. I chose instead not to fall for the deception and the lie. I chose to be straight.
I also currently choose to stay loyal and faithful to my husband. It’s no different than choosing to be gay. This is my choice. And again, throughout the past several years I have been tempted periodically by other men to cheat on my husband. But I refuse not only the offer, but the very thought of doing so! I resist the THOUGHT.
My point is that the world tempts us to do things that seem appealing and better than simply being “normal.” It lures us in with lustful implications that could make us feel better. We eat the fruit and pass it along to someone else claiming it’s perfectly fine. And just a mere few years ago, homosexuality and cross-dressing (transgenderism) was considered abnormal in the clinical world of psychology. Some psychologists today refuse to acknowledge that this has now somehow changed just because the homosexual community is so adamant in removing it from the books, so to speak.
This is real. Forget scriptures that say it’s an abomination. Forget that. Forget all of it. These people are HURTING! These people are STILL God’s children. Never does He take His eyes off of them. Never. He knows the pain they endure. He knows they are suffering, and no one is willing to deal with that. Instead, we accept their pain and applaud it.
We aren’t helping them by “accepting” their decisions. We are killing them emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. In our love FOR them, we need to speak truth. Not words of hell and damnation, but truth like I spoke about my own life. That we are all tempted. That we all face life-altering decisions. That we all face our own demons from our past that has led us down a road of self destruction in one form or another. Mine were promiscuity, lust, drugs, alcohol.
My truth is that I was molested by my first step-father at the age of eleven. But worse yet, and something I have never declared out loud in public, is that I was molested much earlier, at the ripe age by seven my cousin, who was an older girl. I was very young and thought that what she was doing to me was “normal.”
I don’t write this to make anyone feel sorry for me. I write this because we all have a story to tell, and all of us with stories like these are fighting for our lives, to resist the sexual lies that will only take us deeper into our own hell. And the ONLY WAY I ever escaped mine was by surrendering to Jesus. It wasn’t the world who berated my behaviors that made me want to change. No, they only dug my hole deeper. But it was those who spoke the love of God into my life—His absolute understanding and forgiveness of my choices—that transformed me forever. And it was through being born again by the power of His precious blood that altered my choices to begin resisting sin successfully.
Some people don’t want to change. They are believing the lie that “this is the new normal,” and they like the attention, they like making a loud clanging noise in the world, and they love making other people pay the price for disagreeing with it. They thrive on it. They were “born that way.”
But there are others who are desperately hurting. They truly feel that they didn’t “choose” this life, even—yes, even—if they believe they were born this way! I had a friend a few years ago who felt this way and took his life over it. Hung himself from the deck of his apartment. Many of us—and he had many, many friends!—were shocked by his suicide because he was one of the happiest, funniest people we knew. But he was gay, and apparently his heart had not accepted it as “normal.” And while we all laughed at his jokes, and applauded his braveness in being openly gay (before it was the cool thing to do), he was hurting, but we weren’t hearing.
As a young Christian, many labeled me with the anti-gay stigma until I retorted back, “Love is love…” I wasn’t outspoken about the homosexual lifestyle because it didn’t “affect” my life one way or the other. I had no real opinion on it. I knew gay people and loved them. I didn’t want to be perceived as being judgmental; well, because I wasn’t thinking much about it. Meaning, I didn’t care. Really. I didn’t “care.” Wow. I’m very saddened to admit that. As a Christian, as a representative of Christ, I SHOULD care. But I didn’t.
And then I did care. In the worst way. I began speaking out against it. And honestly, I don’t want to be known as someone who is “against” anything. I want to be FOR things and FOR people and FOR love. But it didn’t come off that way.
And God is renewing my heart. I’ve traveled the course on this topic from wholly acceptance to downright rejection. But now God is showing me mercy. God is giving me a heart to hear. And like Moses, I want to intercede for God’s people who are hurting like Bruce Jenner, who don’t even realize their own suffering.
My prayer is generic and most general, I know, but God knows my heart, because He placed this in me now. I hope that the Christian world will begin to take a stand on this issue. Not against it. Not for it. But for the Bruce Jenners of the world. Stand in the gap for them in prayer and in love.
And if you know a Bruce Jenner…listen. Trust me. You’ll hear it. And when you hear it, speak Truth in love. God will do the rest.
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