At the age of fifteen Emily Thomes discovered she was attracted to girls. Despite her father’s disapproval she started dating a girl in her neighborhood. Thinking she had been “born that way,” when her friends questioned her about her choices, she readily owned up to them saying, “Yeah, what about it?”
Christian friends who disagreed with her lifestyle choices she thought were backward and “legalistic.” They should re-read what the Bible says because if they truly understood the Bible and what it means to love and not be judgmental, they would accept her for who she is.
In her late teens she pursued the lesbian lifestyle with abandon having one relationship after another with different women. She slowed her lifestyle down a little when she was engaged to a woman who had two children. But at the age of 22 she was invited to a Bible study.
She expected to be ridiculed for the way she lived and to use that as a reason to discontinue going to the Bible study; that didn’t happen. What did happen is she heard for the first time other women talking about their relationship with God, something she did not have.
She started wondering, “What if it is all true?” And began questioning her choices, “Are you sure this is who you are?” And she started looking up those verses in the Bible about homosexuality.
She came upon these words in First Corinthians 6:9-11, “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, not the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”
Emily realized, “Those who practice homosexuality, which was me, and also drunkards and a bunch of other things I had been,” put her outside the will of God. Then she read verse 11, “And such were some of you.”
She understood in that moment, “There were people in the same place and they were saved and they were changed and that God could do that for me too and I needed that. I could hold on to my sin and reject God or I could turn to him.”
And that was Emily’s coming out of the lesbian lifestyle, “It’s not gay to straight. It’s lost to saved. God calls us not to heterosexuality, but to holiness.”
In her book “The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert” Rosaria Butterfield chronicles her coming out of the lesbian lifestyle as a feminist professor who is today a mother and wife of a pastor.
It is not conversion therapy; it is simply conversion. “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come,” 2 Corinthians 5:17.
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