Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

Psalm 119:44 is one of the first Bible verses I remember learning as a kid, “I will praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

When you’re told there’s something wrong or broken with you most of your life, this isn’t the easiest verse to proclaim or believe about yourself.

I grew up believing the fearfully part, fearful that something was wrong, and not so much the wonderfully part. Why would God make in a way that others say is broken? . I lived years in silence and isolation. I hid behind the truth of who I was and how I was and tried to project an image I believed others and God would love and accept. Inwardly, though, I hated myself, didn’t love who I was, and wanted to desperately try to run from this part of me that I thought everyone would despise if they knew the full truth.

For years and years I prayed for God to change me, rejecting how I was and trusting that He had something better, that I could be someone better than I was, and that if I did all of the right things, I’d eventually be lovable and worth loving.

Then, one day in 2009, I went to my first Gay Christian Network Conference (now Q Christian Fellowship) in Nashville and in a quiet corner during one of the first sessions prayed the most radical thing I’d ever prayed before, “God, thank you for making me gay.”

Those words sounded heretical to me because for so long my prayers had been asking God to NOT make me gay… but for the first time in my life, in a room full of other Jesus-loving queers, I realized the things I thought were broken about me were actually beautiful. The things I had tried to hide where the very things I was meant to share with the world. And the shame I felt was actually meant to be pride in who and how I was created to be.

The journey since then hasn’t been easy and it’s been wrought with a lot of challenges, hard conversations, and forfeiting opportunities to be true to myself and who I know God created me to be. But it has been so, so worth it.

June is Pride Month and while I’m crazy for being a Christian in the gay community and equally crazy for being gay in the Christian community, I celebrate with many other LGBTQ+ believers in the fact that I am fearfully and wonderfully made… loved, not hated… accepted, not rejected… beautiful, not broken… worthy, not worthless… whole, holy, and above all, I know I am someone who God calls BELOVED.

If I could only go back to little Timmy in Kindergarten and let him know everything would be OK and how amazing his life would be, I would… but honestly, I would just tell him to scream the Bible verse even louder because I know it is as true today as the day I first learned the verse that I AM fearfully and wonderfully made. .

Happy Pride Month, friends.