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Recently I received e-mail from a 14-year-old lesbian who is struggling
with rejection from her parents and her fundamentalist church. Where do
GLBT teenagers turn for spiritual help when their own parents and
churches turn against them?
Where do you turn for spiritual resources that you can trust and that
you can rely on for genuine help?
All four Gospels are the logical source for Christian spiritual support
that is practical and reliable. Mark is the shortest and can be read
with great benefit in one sitting. Matthew is long and detailed and
assumes a lot of knowledge of the Jewish religion and traditions at the
time of Jesus.
When I taught college courses in the Gospel of John, I memorized the
whole book and found it to be well worth the effort. Filling your mind
and your memory with the material in the Gospel of John can provide you
with a vast spiritual resource that will keep you focused on the truth
that Jesus promised would set you free.
First, let go of the spiritual resources that don't work for you. Your
own experience is your best teacher. If abusive legalistic religion has
hurt you, abandon it and look somewhere else for spiritual help.
Trust your own sense of what is right for you. You have learned a lot
from your own spiritual journey. Think through and write down the
spiritual resources that have already been helpful to you. What has
helped you may not have been helpful to your family or friends. Your
spiritual life is uniquely yours. Listen to what God is telling you
through your own mind and heart.
Many of the e-mail responses to my web site come from people who have
learned to trust their own feelings and to accept themselves in spite of
religious abuse and rejection from their own families and churches. A
lot of GLBT people are making great personal spiritual progress on their
own.
You can learn a lot that is helpful from other people in your life, but
you have to be selective. Nobody has all the answers, and no other
person really sees you and your life exactly the way it is. Find and
select your friends with intelligence and care. Jesus did, and even
Jesus selected a Judas.
Sometimes we are attracted to other people because of their good looks
or other superficial characteristics. Don't let attractive people
seduce you into self-destructive ways of thinking that don't really fit
you. You can learn from the successes and the mistakes of others
without letting them control you. This is true of your parents, family,
close friends and others who have emotional ties with you.
God is the world's expert on spiritual resources that really work for
you. When all else fails, and it will, turn to God. But that,s the
real problem, isn't it? Who is God and what is God really like for
you? The hateful vengeful "god" of much traditional religion is false
and misleading. God is not discovered at the end of an argument. God
is experienced as a spiritual event in your own life.
The saying of Jesus in John 14:6, "I am the way, the truth, and the
life, and nobody comes to God except through me," does not mean that
people could not experience God unless the knew about Jesus or followed
the traditional church interpretation of Jesus. It simply means that
the way to experience God is the way Jesus experienced God: through
radical trust and obedience.
Jesus made it perfectly clear that God is not "out there somewhere" but
that God is within you and surrounds you at all times. God is your most
reliable and available spiritual resource. Don't let others take that
away from you because of their ignorance or bad judgment.
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Steps To Recovery From Bible Abuse Rembert Truluck
Websites:
Other Articles By Rembert Truluck:
Why Homophobic Legalists Don't Listen
Jesus as the Key to Spiritual Self Defense
Also In This Issue:
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