Bob
Recently I was a captive audience to a radio talk show as I rode in a friend's car. One of the listeners mentioned her son's poison ivy. A flood of telephone calls followed offering all sorts of remedies to sooth the boy's itching. Recommended were: calamine lotion; baking soda; cortisone pills; pouring evaporated milk over the afflicted area; rubbing it with the inside of a banana peel (after eating the banana, of course); and bathing in tomato juice, although in this case, the radio talk show host thought that this remedy was used to get rid of a skunk's odor.
As I listened to all this, I wondered how the radio audience would offer a remedy to my personal itch - how to convince all those listening that being transgendered was not sin. Is there a tomato juice remedy for this? Many had tried to do it before me. As Editor of the Grace & Lace Newsletter for transgendered Christians, I had posted many an article and argument concerning this, from the most elaborate discourse on Scripture to the simplest statement that "God made me this way."
We all know the discrimination and prejudices that exist against the transgendered. They face fears that family, church, and society will reject and abandon them. Who can read the journals and blogs of the transgendered and not hear their torment and feel compassion; not share their grief and pain? Who can read and not feel the agony in their stories of guilt and purges, of tormented lives and shattered relationships, of the unfulfilled dreams and unbearable reality that scream across the pages of the internet?
As I pondered these things, I was reminded of something that Lee Heller, founder of this newsletter, wrote the Christmas before she died in 2000. She wrote that being transgendered, God did not reject you. Rather:
"Give yourself a Christmas gift that God will bless and use. Accept yourself exactly as God made you, and then let Him use you in the unique way He made you. God designed you to live in your situation to give you an opportunity to be His witness EXACTLY where you are….take Jesus Christ into your heart and life, realizing you are like all humanity: born in sin and in need of a Savior. We are no different, in that sense, than anyone else. We have the same spiritual need all humans have. Give yourself the Christmas gift of Christ in you and the hope of Glory."
Be thankful for what you are and how you can serve Him with the talents you've been given.
If you can accept this promise, you will have no need to wash yourself in tomato juice.
