“I had several crushes on my netball seniors and teachers in secondary school. Whilst I had heard many stories about lesbian relationships, I never thought anything about them. At that age, having a crush didn’t equate to wanting to be in a relationship.
When I was 19, I fell in love with my best friend at school. Things just started happening between us. At that time, I couldn’t identify as a lesbian, mostly because of my internalised homophobia. There was a part of me that thought the relationship wasn’t “normal”, and so I was sure things between us would end one day and we would both get married to good Christian guys. At that time, I had just received Jesus into my life, thanks to her and many other good Christian people that God placed in my path who had prayed for me. However, before I got the chance to grow any further, my ex and I gradually stopped attending church and cell group since we thought we were doing something “wrong” that God would disapprove of. We spent five years of our lives together, two of those in Australia — the best two years of my life. We decided then that we would break up once we returned to Singapore, and we did. But we remained very close emotionally to each other. Soon after we broke up, we started dating guys, but I wasn’t really connecting with my guy as much as she was with hers.
Through a lesbian friend’s blog, I managed to find an online dating portal, Fridae, and met my second partner there. It was then I began to come out to myself. It was through her that I started on my journey to reconcile what it means to be gay and Christian. Our journey together later took us to Free Community Church, Singapore’s only inclusive church. It was there I found the space to worship God authentically, just as I am. That space was helpful to me as it allowed me to be grounded in that security that indeed, God loves me for who I am. After I came to terms with who I was, my relationship with God grew exponentially. I began to find the joy and the heart in serving and in meeting people who were in the same shoes as I was. My rationale since then has always been this: it’s better to be close to God and let him work out your issues with you, rather than avoiding him just because you think being gay is wrong. After being at peace with God about my sexual orientation and getting the elephant in the room out of the room, God was able to highlight other aspects of my brokenness that required addressing, things that were kept hidden because of my grappling with being gay.
Truly, God is still working with me on my journey to be who He has intended me to be: a beloved child of God, secure in His love for me, empowered through the Holy Spirit to be a blessing to those around me, making His name known. Although I can say now that I believe it is not wrong to be in a same-sex relationship when lived out in accordance with the love commandments of Jesus, there certainly is “baggage” from my past that comes up once in a while, and it sometimes makes me wonder if I am wrong. That’s where I appreciate fellow comrades who have gone ahead of me and whose lives have been a blessing to me. Through all of these, I can truly say I have grown as a Christian and as a person.”
