Good morning. Revelation 12:11 says "they overcame him by the power of the blood, the word of their testimonies, and they did not love their lives so much as to shrink back." Giving my testimony is not something that is my favorite thing to do but the most exciting part of it is that I see that God’s word talks about us talking about how he helps us to come out of things in our life and I think that we – we owe that to individuals that are struggling through things. So I’ve made an attempt to, whenever I’m given the opportunity, to be able to profess what he’s done in life and it’s a very exciting thing to help somebody. But one of the things that I’ve done in my working with youth is I always try to make a stand to say, you know that the true testimonies of God’s provision and God’s grace are those people that don’t get involved in things and come out of it. I really believe that those are the kids and the people that are the heroes, those that maintain their virginity and different things like that so I always like to state that, especially when I speak to a group of youth.

Let me get started with my own testimony. I was born in Southern California. I was raised and brought up in a family that had a very strong spiritual heritage. Years and years back my family has always been very involved in church and very excited about what the Lord has done in our family. I have two older sisters that are ten and twelve years older than myself, so when I was born, Dad was very excited that there was going to be a son. My dad owned sporting goods in Southern – sporting goods stores in Southern California so his desire for me was that I was going to be the best football player, best baseball player, best basketball player, best everything I could possibly be. But I chose to be a swimmer which was a sport that Dad thought was kind of a sissy sport, you know, and we’ve always kind of joked in our family because I could have had the best, you know, the latest Nike’s of the best shoulder pads or the best Rider helmet, but you know, I chose a sport that took a piece of material about this big and a little pair of plastic goggles. So that’s always kind of been a joke in our family. 

But growing up as a kid, Dr. Nicolosi talks about the importance of the disidentification with the feminine and the identification with the masculine. That didn’t happen for me in my life. What happened was, my dad, his way of making me a man was that he thought that he was going to push me in areas of sports that I wasn’t interested in and then when I would get frustrated, he would do such things as call me Michelle, call me his third daughter, different instances like that. So times with my father became very painful. So the disidentification process with the feminine never occurred because times of being with my dad and being involved in masculinity were times of pain. So that never happened for me. 

As I continued to grow up I realized that I really, really wanted my father’s attention but I was much safer being in the area with my mom and my two older sisters. I remember one time when I was little, I was five and I had a pitch back. You know what those are? That’s where – it’s a little metal sheet thing and it’s got a net in it and you throw a ball in it and the ball bounces back. You know, it’s one of those toys for a kid that doesn’t have any friends. I had one of those, and I remember Dad was teaching me how to bat and he said, you know, okay, now let’s learn to switch hit. I’m five years old. I see the trampoline over in the corner. I have attention span of a five year old. Dad gets frustrated cause I’m not as interested in what he wants me to become. I’m wanting to run off to the trampoline. Dad would say, you know, why don’t you just go in the house and be with your mom and your sisters, that’s where you’d rather be anyway. I think he perceived it as a rejection. 

Now that I’ve talked to my dad about these things, we’ve seen a lot of what happened. There was a lot of my perception going on and a lot of his perception and him really not knowing how to deal with it. But I was starving for male affirmation and attention. I wanted nothing more than my dad to raise me in his arms and say, you know, you’re the best son – the best thing that ever happened to me. I love you. And life would have been probably a little bit better. But that didn’t occur. What happened for me was at the age of – at the age of eight though – as I said, we were raised in the church. All of us were raised in the church. And at the age of eight I accepted the Lord and I really do believe that for me that experience that happened to me at the age of eight was a very real experience. I knew Jesus as well as an eight year old can know Jesus and I wanted him in my heart and I do believe that was a very real thing. But I also began to feel some of what Dr. Nicolosi was saying was some of that difference. I began as I said to continue to grow up starving for my dad’s affirmation and attention. 

At the age of eleven there was a man that began to work for my father, began to pay this attention to me. It was unbelievable. He took me to the beach, taught me how to surf, took me to Disneyland, took me to the latest movies. It was just a wonderful relationship. I really felt like for once I found some worth when I was with this guy. He would affirm me for my body. You know, he always said, you know, you have a very lean body. Different things like that. And what I started to realize was this, I felt some kind of value or some kind of worth when I was with him. The problem was is that attention turned sexual so from the age of eleven to the age of eighteen I was a victim of sexual abuse. And I can say victim of sexual abuse today because I know that no twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine year old should be sleeping with an eleven, twelve, and thirteen year old boy. But Proverbs 27:7 says the man that’s full loathes honey but to him who is starving even what is bitter tastes sweet" and I was so starving for male affirmation and attention that when I had this bitter substitute I gobbled it up. 

And I found on the way here this book. I was reading the Sacred Romance. And I’ve often tried to explain this to people and it’s hard for people to understand but I found this in this book and it’s an incredible statement. I’d just like to read it to you real – very quick. It says, 
 

Very seldom are we ever invited to live out of our hearts. If we are wanted we are often wanted for what we can offer functionally. If rich, we are honored for our wealth; if beautiful, for our looks; if intelligent, for our brains. So we learn to offer only those parts of us that are approved, living out of a carefully crafted performance to gain acceptance from those who represent life to us.

And this man represented life. He represented male, masculine life for me. And this goes on further to say, "We divorce ourselves from our hearts and begin to live a double life." And that’s exactly what happened for me. So this happening with the sexual abuse, my dad telling me at times that I’m feminine, in you know, more or less words, and then growing up on campuses, hearing the words fag and sissy and queer, that label went on very quickly. I felt different. I knew that this was the label that defined who I was. So in junior high it was a very tough time for me. I wanted to fit in. My family never knew about the sexual abuse until later but I remember as a young boy, eleven, twelve, and thirteen, at school I would be throwing up constantly. I would be in a class – I had permission in all of my classes to leave any time I wanted because I would just throw up. My parents thought I had an ulcer. They thought it was because I was swimming and swimming was becoming intense. I was at this point holding age group records in Orange County. So I was very good at what I was doing there but didn’t get Dad’s affirmation because it wasn’t a sport that he was interested in. 

High school was very difficult again for me. I grew up and what worked for me in the gay life – and by now I’m sixteen years old. I can drive and I’m not far from Laguna Beech and for those of you that don’t know Laguna Beech, Laguna Beech is equivalent to probably San Francisco in Southern California. So very quickly I learned where I could go to receive this type of affirmation and approval and I used what I had. I was a blond, young surfer boy and that’s a very prime commodity in Southern California. So I was very approved and very much embraced into homosexuality. I went to the gay beaches, went to the gay bars. And you say, how does a sixteen, seventeen, eighteen-year-old boy get into gay bars? It’s very easy in certain societies to be able to do that. 

So I totally embraced my homosexuality, continued to grow up and really had this whole thing going on where I loved the Lord on this hand with all of my heart and stayed involved in church this entire time I was growing up. I was the kid that was always there when the doors were open. But on the weekends as well I was also at the gay bars, at the gay beech, at the gay gym, seeking that approval and that worth. It was really the only time I felt the worth because when I was in church, what I heard was that homosexuality is an abomination. And yes, God’s word says that and I believe that with all my heart. One thing Southern Baptists do right is teach God’s in-errant word. And that is later the thing that helped me walk out. But I would hear homosexuality is an abomination and how that would work for me is homosexuality is an abomination. I'm a homosexual. Therefore, I’m an abomination. So church became a very uncomfortable place for me to be. It wasn’t – I wasn’t hearing about – I was hearing about the power of Jesus but I wasn’t hearing about the power of Jesus to save homosexuals. So I just thought we were the scum of the Earth so church didn’t become a place that I wanted to go. 

The gay community was waiting with open arms and man, it was there, it was the approval, it was the worth that I needed as a young boy. I continued to grow up and did a lot of things. I would go to the Christian camps. I remember one summer being at Hume Lake. I was fifteen and I said, "Lord, you’ve got to take this thing away from me. I want to serve you. I want to know you with all that I am. I’m not going to stop praying until you take this gay thing or whatever is going on in my life away." I remember kneeling next to my bed and just praying, "Lord, I’m not going to stop praying" – you know, only to fall asleep and wake up feeling just as gay, just as different as I had when I started to pray. Remember going to Hume Lake when I was fifteen and I really felt this call in my life to want to rededicate my life. I always really wanted to serve the Lord and just continue to try to do things and do things. 

This performance that this book talks about. I performed and performed, thinking that if I was just good enough, God would take it away. And I went forward and I really felt like the Lord called me into full time Christian service in the area of youth. So I really had that heart, that on my heart and that memory is just emblazoned in my mind. So I continued to grow up, continued to get more and more involved in homosexuality. I just continued to suck me in. I found more and more worth within that lifestyle. I went again and was struggling – I’m into my twenties now and I had boughten into the lies that I was being taught, that I was hearing. When I was in high school, I did go for counseling at one point and said, this is what I’m feeling. The counselor said to me, you know, you’re born this way, you just need to accept that this is how God has made you. So when you’re a struggling adolescent and you go to someone that you trust and this is what you hear, these things become reality, they become your reality. They become the thing that you hold onto. So as much as I didn’t want to hold onto that, I had to because it’s what I knew and what I was starting to trust. It became very – I became very depressed. There was no way out. 

Dr. Nicolosi talked about the suicide rate and I believe personally that yes, gay kids are at risk but I think it’s because we’re telling them that there is no hope rather than a homophobic society. So I continued to grow up. I went to Biola University. Again, as you can see, continued the Christian thing. For those of you that don’t know, Biola is a Christian college down in Southern California, Bible Institute of Los Angeles. I did really well there. I wanted, again, like I said, my degree was in Christian education, you know, was helping in the church with the youth, but again, involved in the bars on Friday and Saturday night. It was just an incredibly miserable time in my life, this double life that I was living. But I didn’t, I wasn’t hearing any way to get help. Like I said, I was at Biola and I’m in my twenties now and was very much still continuing the struggle and wanting to believe that there was a way out.

One day I was at a gay gym and I was – found myself in an illicit situation with another individual. We got outside the gym and he said to me, he said, I'm sorry, I can’t go on any further with this, and I’m trying to walk away from homosexuality. That was the first time that I had heard about that, was in an illicit situation with another gay man that was struggling to walk away from it. And I thought, you know, what are you talking about – you’re born gay. I began to, you know, all the rhetoric, I just began to spew on this guy cause I had boughten into it. So he said, well, let’s get in my car and I want to drive around and talk to you about this because for two gay men, or two men to be in a car in front of this gym was not a good thing. Not like I cared or anything, but I just thought, okay, you know, we’ll get in this car and drive around. So we began to drive around and he was talking about his friend named Jeff Conrad and he said, this man is studying the root causes of homosexuality and how a person can walk away from this and what a person needs in their life to walk away from this life dominating characteristic and I just was listening to it buy yet I was hesitant. Mind you, this is 11:45 at night. The gym closes at midnight. It’s 11:45 at night. We’re driving around Mission Viejo, California and he says, let’s pull into this parking lot over here and talk about it. So we pulled into another parking lot – he began, he was continuing to tell me about this man named Jeff Conrad. All of a sudden his eyes got really big and he goes, oh, my gosh, there he is right now. I got the goose bumps and I felt the Lord say to me, was my arm too short to rescue you? And I just knew it was my turn to shut up and the Lord had something for me. So he motioned Jeff over to the car. To make a long story short, Jeff had taken one shift, he worked at Ruby’s on the pier in Balboa Island and had taken one shift that night at the Mission Viejo Rubies, had never worked there before, but you know, you can see the coincidence of it all. But anyway, Jeff came over to the car and I was leaving in two weeks to go work at Hume Lake again, as a counselor this time, not as a student. Again, serving the Lord to see if my homosexuality would kind of take care of itself. But he said, well, what I’ll do is I’ll write you while you’re gone. 

And this began a 5 to 7-year process were Jeff would write me back and forth. I would move. I did a lot of different things. Like I said, went away to school. In this book, You Don’t Have to be Gay is the culmination of that relationship. This is probably – well, this is the best book for teen boys that are struggling with homosexuality because what it shows is the positive male relationship – positive non-sexual male relationship and also discusses how to walk away from homosexuality and what some of the root causes are and it’s really encouraging to be able to read this because for a kid, you feel like you’re in somebody’s mail because it’s written in letter form, like it might say, April 1st, you know, dear Mike, blah, blah, blah, and it shows the relationship, so kids really like to read it because it’s fun. It’s not just a basic boring kind of psychological book. So I highly recommend that and that is on sale at the bookstore. So anyway, continued like I said to delve into homosexuality cause I didn’t trust this. I didn’t trust these things that Jeff was telling me. 

So what does any good boy do when he graduates from Christian undergraduate? He goes off to seminary. So I applied for seminary in Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, got accepted, walked through the doors of that seminary and began thinking, now I’m away, I’ve moved again. What you’ll notice a lot of times with the gay men is they do a lot of times where they move, especially those of us that are trying to get out of it. You know, it’s the relocation idea. If I get somewhere else it’ll take care of itself. But you know when you move somewhere you take your luggage with you everywhere you go and my luggage was there with me. So it wasn’t very long until I discovered Dallas and went there and finally I just got sick and tired of being sick and tired with this whole double life. I left seminary after a semester and I just said forget it. I came out to my family. I came out at work and it was just this freedom that I felt. I met the perfect guy in Dallas and I just thought this is it. I can be the one gay Christian that does this and can do it right. 

But yet I knew because I was still frustrated with seminary that it was going to take a lot to make that happen. He and I would go to church together at Prestonwood Baptist in Dallas and it just became again a life of just miserable things. He was – like I said – the perfect male. I thought, oh, okay, if I come out to my family and they see and aren’t homophobic and start to see and embrace me and him and our relationship, then, then my life will be better. That didn’t help. If we – then I thought, oh, we just need to buy a home. If we can buy a home and settle down and I can have the security of a home, then that will help. That didn’t help. Well, what about looking into adopting? I’ve always wanted kids. I knew that I was not going to be able to have kids – that I was – you know, I’d flushed that years ago because I was gay and gays, you know, can’t have kids unless they adopt or artificially inseminate. And we were looking towards doing that. All these things I kept doing and doing, thinking that it would make me happy and I just continued to get more and more miserable. My family this whole time was very open, still very open, but I knew their stance on homosexuality. They didn’t talk to me all the time. They didn’t say, you know this is wrong, you know this is wrong. Instead what they did is they opened their home. I would go home for Thanksgiving, would take my lover with me at the time. 

By the way, this was a two-year relationship which was for me, I considered that my long-term relationship involved in homosexuality and we were both, it was open on both ends of our relationship so the whole monogamous thing as Dr. Nicolosi talked about is just an absolute fallacy. But I would continue to go home and I found love and acceptance in my home. My sisters were going on in their lives. They were getting married. They were having kids. I would go home for Thanksgiving and I would think, you know, this is really what I want. This is really what I want. I would grab my nieces and nephews. I would hold them. And you know, I’d be watching. Sorry. And I would just, I would just weep to myself. You know, my family would see it every once in a while. But, they’re like what’s wrong. And I’d say, you know, I just miss watching the kids grow up. And that wasn’t the reality. The reality was I thought, I can never have this. You know, I’ve ruined my life. I can never have this. 

So I went on and I finally had reached my end and become so miserable in Dallas, I called Jeff and I called my family and I said, look, I’ve had enough of homosexuality. My life is more than being a homosexual man. I went to gay hairdressers, gay beach, gay gym, everything I did was homosexuality. I thought, there’s got to be more to life than homosexuality. And Budd – I mean Budd – Jeff, that’s my nickname for him. Jeff would continue to write me over the years and finally I just said, if the Jesus that Jeff Conrad knows, if he can be that faithful to me, surely the Jesus that Jeff Conrad knows can be that much more faithful to me so I wanted to get to know the Jesus that Jeff represented to me. It wasn't the Jesus that I’d heard about this distant Jesus in church but it was a Jesus that loved me and died for me even in the midst of my homosexuality. So I called and I said, I want to come home. My brother-in-law said, Mike, there’s only one place for you. That’s in our home. Come home. 

That was in the year, I left lifestyle in December of 1989, came home and I failed miserably in 1990. I was actually counseling with Joe Dallas, not that that’s any representation of his counseling by any means. I was just – I was a mess. I was a sexual addict. I was absolutely a sexual addict. To let you know how deep I got into homosexuality, a couple years earlier I had been arrested for prostitution. The ultimate was if a man was willing to pay for me, if he would expend that commodity on me, I knew that that somehow gave me worth. So anyway, came home, and that summer Jeff said to me, there’s this conference called Exodus. I think we need to go. So I said, okay. I want to do whatever I can. I went there. Make a long story short, I heard about a residential program through Exodus that was housed in San Raphael, California. I thought, this is what I need. Because two years later, the previous two years I had been working in adolescent treatment with kids that were in long term treatment so I saw the ability that kids were able to have walking out of whatever they were involved in through people being around them twenty-four hours a day and I thought, you know, I’m a sexual addict. This is what I need. 

So I went to this program and I thrived. I did incredibly well. It says our boundaries are set in pleasant places and that’s exactly what they did for me. They said, Mike, this is the left side of the road. There’s run away cars over here and if you go over there you’re going to get damaged. Here’s the right side of the road. There’s thorn bushes and everything else over here. If you run between these two lines, you can run. And man, I took that and I did. I ran. I did incredibly well. I just thought, this is what I’m looking for. I’m looking for people to slap me upside the head when I need that and I’m looking for people to provide the loving shoulder when I needed that. And that’s what that program provided. I applied for my teaching credential while I was there because again, I remembered this call on my life to want to work with youth but yet I knew that I couldn’t be a youth pastor which I had originally started to do because I used to be gay and that just wasn’t going to happen. So I applied for my teaching credential and was refused because I had a sexual arrest on my record. So I became very angry at God. I thought, you know, you’ve called me into wanting to work with youth and now this is what’s happening. 

So like I said, I continued to do very well and I just thought, well, maybe this is what I’m supposed to do is work for Love and Action. So I went through the ranks and I finally got on staff with Love and Action, not to mention that when I got back home that summer in 1990, from Exodus, I met a girl named Angie and she was dating my best friend. They broke up and we became very close friends and she was a woman that began to walk beside me in this whole process. So to make a long story short, I worked for Love and Action and they decided that they were going to relocate to Memphis, Tennessee, so I moved with them. Within this time I had gotten engaged. I got married December 4th, ’94 at four o’clock. It’s a easy one to remember and helps me stay out of trouble. So anyway, we got married, went on a week’s honeymoon to Cancun and moved cross country to Memphis, Tennessee. 

You take two Southern Californians, move them to Memphis, Tennessee and ah, it was not a pretty sight. But anyway, we were there. We showed up. I just have to tell you this real quickly. We showed up. We had no warm clothes. We wore  shorts. We were tanned. It was the middle of December. People were looking at us like we were crazy. We were. But anyway, we got there and I began to become very disillusioned in my position with Love and Action. I thought, you know, I really want to be reaching youth. 

Well, my pastor’s 30th anniversary was that year of time that he had been at the church. A man came and spoke at our church and I just absolutely blanked out on his name – Tony Campolo. Tony Campolo came and spoke at our church that day and alls I remember him talking about was how God’s call is irrevocable and that went so deep into my heart because you know what I would do in my life is I would say, God’s grace is sufficient except for me because I was a homosexual. God’s grace is sufficient except for me because I was arrested for prostitution. I always had these conditions on it but what I had to realize is that God’s grace is sufficient, period. And what happens so many times in our life is that we minimize because of our own guilt and our own anguish and I just think Jesus is up there saying, "Look what I did for you on the cross. I died for you and you’re slapping me in the face by not owning what I have for you." So I continued to hear this and really wrestle through this whole issue. So two weeks later after Tony was there, the youth position had opened up at the church to be a youth pastor, so I thought, you know, alls they can say is no. I’m sure they will. It’s the buckle of the Bible belt. I used to be gay, was arrested for prostitution. It’s working with their kids and you know, of course, they’re going to say no. 

Nine months later, nine months later I went through a very long application process, gave my testimony to the parents, gave my testimony to the kids, talked to all the elders. I mean, it was like, hello? Let me hear what you guys have to say about your lives. You know, let’s get real here. Anyway, nine months later they gave me the position and it was a dream come true. It was unbelievable. The Lord restored me to the point where I could be a youth pastor at a church in the South. It was unbelievable. So my wife and I thrived. What did I say that was funny, the whole South thing? So my wife and I thrived in this position. We were loving it. We were just incredible. It was an incredible time in our lives. The Lord was blessing us and I finally found my niche. It was – I was incredibly happy. I was away from the whole ex-gay movement, feeling a very normal life. And that was something that was just – I always wanted my whole life. 

Well, last May I got a phone call. "Hello, this is John Paulk."  I knew John. John was my house leader when I went through that residential program. "We have a position here at Focus and I feel like you’re the one that’s supposed to take it." 

And I thought, "No thank you. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to work for Focus, those right wing fundamentals, you know, I don’t want to work there."

You know, that was my attitude. I’m away from the whole homosexual ministry. I have a normal life. I don’t want it. I struggled intensely with that process. To make a long story short one night I was up struggling through this process, and like I said, I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to go back. The church doesn’t really respect this ministry. The world, of course, talks about it in a negative light. And I was struggling with this and this is what I read:

"One night I got up and said, Lord, I just really need to hear from you.This is the will of God for me. I did not choose it. I sought to escape it. But it has come. Something else has come too: a sense of certainty that God does not want me only for a pastor. He wants me also for a leader. I feel a commissioning to work under God for the revival of this branch of his church. Careless of my own reputation, indifferent to the comments of older and jealous men. I am 36." 

"If I am to serve God in this way, I am no longer to shrink from the task but do it. I have examined my heart for ambition. I am certain it is not there. I hate the criticism I shall evoke and the painful chatter of people. Obscurity and the service of the simple people, my students, is my taste. But by the will of God this is my task. God help me. Bewildered and unbelieving I heard the voice of God say to me, I want to sound the note through you. Oh, God, did ever an apostle shrink from the task more? I dare not say no, but like Jonah I would feign run away."

Let me just share one last thing with you. About three weeks ago, my wife said, honey let’s – we just moved into a new house. She said, honey, let’s just go to bed early tonight. I’m tired, I don’t want to move in. So I said, okay, that sounds great. She said, I have something I want to read to you. So she pulled out her Bible. She had to wake me up first. She pulled out her Bible and she read this to me and it says.

"Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb is a reward. Like an arrow in the hand of a warrior, so are children in one’s youth. Happy is the man whose quiver is full of them." 

But this is a message I just want to share with you guys, that whatever’s happened in your life, God can pull you out of if. God has that dream that you’ve had and wanted. He’s placed that in your heart and in your mind. So what I’m here today is to say to you, don’t let your guilt and your remorse and the things that have happened to you stop you from what God has for you. Instead, embrace them and go on and see how He might turn around and use them for His good.