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“God made them male and female- two words not crafted by a person, or group, or society, or culture, or America for that matter, but used by God to describe what He'd make and exactly what He'd designed them to be. Out of the same God came two different bodies. And after creating them, lastly, after all that had been made before, God looked at them and everything else and called it and them good. The plants? Good. The stars? Good The fish's fins? Good. What about Adam and Even? What about their eyes, and how their mind made them see the same thing through a different lens? Or their hands, and how Adam's were wide enough to hold a hoof or two and Eve's small enough to fit a bird in it. Or Eve's voice and how it sounded like the morning and his, sounding like he'd just spit out a mountain. Or his brow bone, strong as a fist. Her face, soft as an amen. All of this, God said was a 'very' good thing. Why? Because a good God made it.”

“It's funny how, sometimes, the mind won't let the body remember what's been done to it. It chooses, at will, to take the abusive memory and bury it. As if to nurture away the pain by making us forget it's there. Not remembering trauma doesn't mean we're left without its effect. It still comes up and out, at a certain smell, sound, sight, touch, question, tone, location, person, people, personality. Waiting to be noticed and brought to the light. Letting it, and peeking into where it's from, is the path to making sense of ourselves and finding the particular healing we've been kept from having.”

“Vomit will always be vomit even if drizzled with chocolate, sliced almonds, and a cherry on top (2 Peter 2:21-22). When the temptation to see sin as what it is not arrives, the Scriptures are our light, our final truth, our escape out of the shadow moving toward our feet. The Word of God and not the word of the enemy is where we see the true identity of sin.”

“Adam and Eve, God's first image-bearers, made to love and reflect God in creation, had now become the world's first sinners. Everyone born after Adam inherited it. And, just like Eve, I from birth, would experience the remnants of her dealings with the serpent. Being born human meant that I had the capacity for affection and logic. Being born sinful meant both were inherently broken... Desires exist because God gave them to us. But homosexual desires exist because sin does. Loving Him, as were were created to do, involves both the will and the affections, but sin steals this love God placed in us for Himself and tells it to go elsewhere.”

“To leave her, us, our love, made no sense apart from the divine doing of God. She was both my woman and my idol. An unqualified god without an ounce of deity. She was the eye Jesus said to gouge out and the right hand He commanded me to cut off (Matthew 5:29-30). Though it was as painful as the extreme act of removing a part of the body, it was better for me to lose her than to lose my soul.”

“What You are calling me to do, I can't do it on my own, but I know enough about You to know that You will help me," I said to God, my new friend. I didn't know that the confession of my inability to please Him and the shifting of my back away from the sins I'd previously embraced was repentance. Nor did I recognize that my resolve to believe that He could be to me what no one else could, was faith. But it was. Without asking me my permission, a good God had come to my rescue.”

“Yet, unbelief doesn't see God as the ultimate good. So it can't see sin as the ultimate evil. It instead sees sin as a good thing and thus God's commands as a stumbling block to joy. In believing the devil, I didn't need a pentagram pendant to wear, neither did I need to memorize a hex or two. All I had to do was trust myself more than God's Word. I had to believe that my thoughts, my affections, my rights, my wishes, were worthy of absolute obedience and that in laying prostrate before the flimsy throne I'd made for myself, that I'd be doing a good thing.”

“Sin, when in the body, cannot not stay put. It's not a guest that stays in one room, making sure not to disturb the others. It is a tenant that lives in everything and goes everywhere. It can bleed into every part, choking out anything holy. The glass shattered and broke when it moved in. Adam and Eve, God's first image-bearers, made to love and reflect God in creation, had now become the world's first sinners.”

“Christ did not die to redeem us in part. Neither did He rise so that we might have life in portions. But with us having a body made for Him, as well as the mind, will, personality, and emotions that it contains, we must understand that God is after us becoming victorious over any and all sin that would hinder the whole person from serving God fully and freely.”

“I wanted to turn toward someone full of testosterone and beg him to be strong for us. To gather up all the stuff God gave him for a time such as this and protect us. I couldn’t protect her, or me. And I knew it. Knowing it irked me, quietly. It was such an inconvenient time for my conscience to remind me of reality. Why couldn’t it just let me keep eating dust and calling it food? These clothes, these women, these dreams, this voice, her submission to it, this heavy walk that made my mother cringe, weren’t they the truth? Didn’t they mean I had successfully transformed? Couldn’t I be what I wanted to be? Between me and God, in the secrecy of my conscience, my being a woman felt inescapably real. As much as I’d believed I could, when in the presence of a man made to be one, I knew there was a natural distinction between the two of us that even the heaviness of my voice couldn’t undo. In the other room, his voice still shook the walls. The louder it got, the more I remembered my first name.”

“Shoot, I thought Jesus was the only man who practiced what He preached, but Preston was a sermon without words. His character started slowly disintegrating the bricks pain had set up that worked to keep the fear in and the beauty out. As it did, my heart breathed deep and let out an affection with his name on it. And, I had no idea what to do with it.”

“We were brought together [in marriage] for the primary reason of pointing to the mystery of God’s gospel (Ephesians 5:32). Marriage was the way God wanted me to glorify Him. Becoming one flesh would not complete me. Marriage is not what would make me whole, but it would be God’s work in and through my marriage, along with whatever else the Potter chose to use to shape me as His clay that would. God was my first love. I’d married Him way before I did Preston, and I’d be married to Him even after death parted me from the man I vowed to love until then.”

“I knew the days after that [wedding] day wouldn’t all be a sugary thing. Some would be bitter. Others would bring new mercy. Either way, taking for myself a selah of this forever season called marriage, I approached it knowing it would be ,,, of God to continue His work of sanctifying me and glorifying Himself.”

“Love, as I'd understood it- through my mama- wasn't like the wind. Indifference was like that. Wind and indifference went wherever it pleased. Settling down when it benefited them, moving on without warning, even if it ripped a home or two apart on the way out. Love was like the sun- always there. It might've looked like it was moving- but it was forever still.”