... finding joy and peace within ourselves isn't a function of looking into ourselves, and/or understanding ourselves, and/or learning to understand how our culture/parents caused us to be screwed up adults. Our joy and peace comes from knowing God, who gives these gifts freely as we grow to be less focused on ME, and learn to be more focused on GOD, and His plans for our lives. Joy and Peace come from God...

I was raised by my agnostic mom, but because of innate religiosity, I went to church by myself to Christian Church/Church of Christ. I can remember having gay feelings from my earliest memories of attractions, and have never felt comfortable with any kind of intimate touching with females, though women have always been my best friends. But because of my church teachings, I always thought homosexuality was sin, and denied my feelings, and/or believed they were lies from Satan trying to drag me away from God. I had always prayed fervently for healing, and had other people pray for me, and had remained celibate. I always got the same response from God, though--go back to Scripture and when I did I always found the same answer--that homosexuality was sin. However, I only used cursory tools for my search--BAGD, TWOT, Kittel's, etc. Finally, several years ago I decided to take out a chunk of my life and do an in-depth search, using everything I could find to do an exhaustive linguistic study of the relevant words and passages in Scripture. In doing so, I came to the confident conclusion that the English translations have been mis-interpreted (the results of this research are at http://www.jeramyt.org/gay.html -- for those who are reading this response who haven't checked it out). At any rate, I realized that God had been answering me the whole time by telling me to go back to Scripture, when I thought He wasn't listening. His answer was that He wasn't going to heal me because there was nothing from which to be healed, and He proved this to me by pushing me into a fuller understanding of Scripture. At least this is what I believe I found in Scripture. 

Blessings!! 

Jeramy Townsley
Indiana University
http://www.jeramyt.org

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