This is a very interesting (and heartbreaking) account of a Christian family's struggle with their son's sexuality. These parents didn't react with hate or disgust. They told their son how much they loved him. They told him that they would never stop loving him. But they did react with fear. And the tragedy of their story is that they came to overcome that fear and love their son entirely as he was "just because he breathes" and in the end it didn't happen soon enough.
People on this board use really ugly language when discussing gay issues, but this story humanizes the struggle in a different way. These are parents who LOVED their son. They LOVE their God. And they genuinely believed that they were reacting to his sexuality in the best possible way. In my opinion, their story is worth reading.
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People on this board use really ugly language when discussing gay issues, but this story humanizes the struggle in a different way. These are parents who LOVED their son. They LOVE their God. And they genuinely believed that they were reacting to his sexuality in the best possible way. In my opinion, their story is worth reading.
Though our hearts may have been good (we truly thought what we were doing was loving), we did not even give Ryan a chance to wrestle with God, to figure out what he believed God was telling him through scripture about his sexuality. We had believed firmly in giving each of our four children the space to question Christianity, to decide for themselves if they wanted to follow Jesus, to truly own their own faith. But we were too afraid to give Ryan that room when it came to his sexuality, for fear that he'd make the wrong choice.
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We had unintentionally taught Ryan to hate his sexuality. And since sexuality cannot be separated from the self, we had taught Ryan to hate himself. So as he began to use drugs, he did so with a recklessness and a lack of caution for his own safety that was alarming to everyone who knew him.
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Over the next 10 months, we learned to truly love our son. Period. No buts. No conditions. Just because he breathes. We learned to love whomever our son loved. And it was easy. What I had been so afraid of became a blessing. The journey wasn't without mistakes, but we had grace for each other, and the language of apology and forgiveness became a natural part of our relationship. As our son pursued recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, we pursued him. God taught us how to love him, to rejoice over him, to be proud of the man he was becoming. We were all healing, and most importantly, Ryan began to think that if we could forgive him and love him, then maybe God could, too.
And then Ryan made the classic mistake of a recovering addict: He got back together with his old friends, his using friends. And one evening that was supposed to simply be a night at the movies turned out to be the first time he had shot up in 10 months -- and the last time. Ryan died on July 16, 2009. And we lost the ability to love our gay son, because we no longer had a gay son. What we had wished for, prayed for, hoped for -- that we would not have a gay son -- came true. But not at all in the way we had envisioned.
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