“However, I experienced a ton of harassment in Plano. Early in my transition, I was shopping in East Plano and had an employee of the grocery store loudly say to every customer and coworker in earshot ‘you never know what’s down below.’”
Read more "Those Three Years"I walked in silence as God unfolded the last piece of origami from that experience for me. God stopped me writing at I AM because I’m not a man. One year prior, I had come out of the closet kicking and screaming, holding onto the doorframe with a white knuckle grip… but the truth had finally come out. As I walked, I was awed by what I was being shown. Creation had conspired to show me the truth, fifteen years before I was willing to admit it to myself.
Read more "Epilogue"The part that makes me most sad is that the people in your communities that most need to hear what I have to say dismissed me a long time ago. That’s part of the problem with the way you handled me when you found out I was transgender… you cut me off, ostracized me, and threw the one bible verse related to gender expression in my face.
Read more "With the Sinners"If I’m honest, so many of the pictures were taken to share on Instagram or Facebook. I wanted to share with you a very carefully staged portion of my life. I couldn’t just have my son take one picture of me in front of a cool wall. I made him take, like, 20 pictures.
What the hell is that?!
Read more "A Desire to Connect"“What about Jesus?”
I asked him what he meant by that.
“Why can’t we just hold to what Jesus says and throw away the rest of the bullshit? Why isn’t there a church that does that?”
I didn’t have an answer for him. His question was too innocent and too deep for my pat answers and rote theological treatises.
Read more "Interlude 5"“Do you know how I know you have a problem with alcohol?”
I shook my head.
One of the other group members, a former military guy and admitted alcoholic, spoke up, “Because you didn’t dump it down the sink. Shit, man, that’s a valuable liquid as far as guys like you and me are concerned. We wouldn’t dump liquid gold down the drain.”
It had never occurred to me to dump it down the drain.
I realized that my Baptist/Bible Church theology was too narrow. I watched God use Lutheran missionaries just as much as he used me. God spoke through my Evangelical Free friends and my Methodist coworkers. There was room for all of us underneath the canopy of God’s love yet we often bickered over our differences instead of celebrating the fact that God’s love went beyond those differences.
Read more "上帝"The start of college continued in much the same vein as high school: wearing stupid Jesus shirts, going to way too many church events, and half-assing my education. I was the best little Republican Fundamentalist Jerry Falwell could’ve ever hoped for. My Jesus wanted tax cuts for the rich, bombs dropped on anyone who fucked with America, and demanded moral purity via legislation.
Read more "Rigid"When I tell people I lived in China, they usually follow up with the question, “What was that like?” How do you sum up two years in another country? You simply can’t reduce a place like China to a one sentence answer. There is so much beautiful subtlety to their culture. There is so much […]
Read more "Beautiful Subtlety"
Dallas Begnaud 