The worst fear come true
I was fourteen years old when I realised I was same-sex attracted. I still remember the feeling. It was not confusion, exactly — it was clarity, and that was the problem. I knew what I was feeling, and I knew what I had always feared, and those two things had just become the same thing.
I felt like my life was ending.
That is not an exaggeration. I was a teenager who loved God and loved his church, and I had just discovered something about myself that I believed made me permanently broken. The shame was immediate and total. I told my parents that same day — but they thought it was a phase, and we did not speak about it again for years. I buried it as deep as I could and hoped it would go away.
It did not go away.
A God who was always disappointed
Throughout school, my same-sex attraction was a constant, low-grade source of distress. I managed it the only way I knew how: I tried harder. I believed — sincerely, not cynically — that if I prayed enough, confessed enough, and "killed" this sin struggle with enough discipline, it would eventually leave me. That was the framework I had been given, even if no one had given it to me explicitly. It was simply what I understood to be true: struggle hard enough and God will reward you with freedom.
What this did, in practice, was keep me in a permanent state of spiritual failure. Every time I experienced an attraction, I confessed it. Every time I confessed it, I braced for the next one. I lived in a cycle of sin, shame, and confession that never ended, because the attraction never ended. And I drew from this an obvious conclusion: God was perpetually disappointed with me.
I hid at church. I smiled and sang and shook hands and carried this enormous secret alone. I had no idea that there were others in those pews carrying something similar.
When it all came apart
By the time I reached Grade 11, the weight of hiding had compounded into something I could no longer manage. I developed religious scrupulosity OCD — a form of OCD that latches onto faith, turning theology into a minefield of fear and compulsion. Depression followed. And in the middle of all of this, my gran died.
That season was the darkest of my life. But it was also, in retrospect, the beginning of the way out. Because it was dark enough that I finally had to tell someone. I started seeing a psychologist, and I told him about my same-sex attraction.
He did not flinch.
An unexpected prescription
The psychologist was a Christian, and he was treating my OCD using a method called exposure and response prevention therapy. The principle is straightforward: instead of performing the compulsive behaviour — in my case, confessing every attraction and beating myself up — you sit with the discomfort and do something different.
What he asked me to do was this: the next time I experienced an attraction, instead of immediately confessing to God and cataloguing my failure, I was to remind myself of God's love for me.
It sounds simple. It was not simple. It was, in fact, one of the hardest things I have ever attempted. My whole instinct was to treat attraction as evidence of my unworthiness. He was asking me to respond to it with the opposite — with the truth that I was loved as I was, not conditionally upon the absence of struggle.
Slowly, it began to work. The shame did not disappear overnight, but something loosened in me. I started to experience my faith differently — not as a performance I was always failing, but as a relationship with a God who actually knew me and had not run.
Ordinary people
The second turning point came through a support group for SSA Christians run by True Freedom Trust, a charity based in the UK. I joined online, tentatively, not sure what to expect.
What I found was a room full of ordinary people.
That sounds like a small thing. It was not a small thing. I had spent years believing that my same-sex attraction made me uniquely defective — an anomaly in the body of Christ, a problem to be managed in isolation. And here were men and women who shared my experience, held my convictions, and were simply living their lives. Faithfully, imperfectly, openly with each other.
For the first time, I was not alone. Not just in the abstract, reassuring sense of being told you are not alone — but actually, concretely, in a room with people who understood from the inside.
I am still in that group today. It changed my life. And it is a large part of why Reclaim Ministries exists — because I wanted something like it to be available closer to home.
Where I am now
My same-sex attraction does not cause me much distress today. That is a sentence I genuinely could not have imagined writing at fourteen.
It is not that everything is resolved. I still feel tempted to hide, especially with people from older generations who may not have the categories for this conversation. There is still some shame that surfaces when I share this for the first time with someone new. And I still have seasons of loneliness and discouragement — that has not gone away.
But I have a community at church that knows me and loves me. I have friends I do not have to pretend with. I can see God using my same-sex attraction for his kingdom — in conversations, in ministry, in the particular compassion it has given me for others who are struggling. That gives me meaning. I am not waiting to be fixed before I can live fully for Christ. I am living fully for Christ now, as I am.
That freedom was not available to me when I was carrying this alone. It only became possible when I let others in.
What I want you to know
If you are reading this and you are in the place I was — hiding, ashamed, convinced that no one else knows what this is like from the inside — I want to say something directly to you: you were never meant to carry this alone. That is not a platitude. It is the shape of how the Christian life is supposed to work. We are not built for isolation. We break under it.
The most important thing I did was become vulnerable with safe people. Not everyone is a safe person for this conversation — and that is worth acknowledging. But safe people exist. A trusted friend, a good pastor, a counsellor who understands both faith and sexuality. Find one. Tell one person. You do not have to tell the whole church. Start with one.
And if you are in a better place — if you have already found some degree of freedom and community — I want to encourage you too. Get stuck into Christian community. Do not live your faith at a surface level. And consider joining a support group, even if you feel fine. You may discover that your presence is exactly what someone else in that room needs. Your story — the fact that you have come through something and are standing — matters more than you know.
You are not alone in this. I promise you that.