Whether due to geographic moves, church leadership changes, disagreement in beliefs, or even church harm, looking for a church is a common enough experience… but it comes with unique complications for LGBTQ+ folks. Having been on this journey for two years now, I’ve decided to document what I’ll be calling “The Great Church Search.”

If I’m honest, though, I can waste a lot of time avoiding my Dad. Scared to ask for what I need because some weird lie of independence has convinced me I have to set out to build for myself, make for myself, and care for myself. Old wounds make me fear rejection, and rejection makes me fear asking. I live not as an heir, a son, but as a worker, a servant, trying desperately to earn his keep.

During these darker nights, what I love most is observing the twinkling holiday lights, a vivid reminder to me that "on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned." (Matthew 4:16) Thanks to our Emmanuel Jesus, we are free to experience inextinguishable light, hope, and joy now and in the glorious life to come.

I have long maintained that Advent is the most queer of all liturgical seasons. This can neither be proven nor disproven, so most of my friends roll their eyes at me and refuse to take the bait, but I’m pretty sure I’m right. Advent is a time of longing for God and waiting in darkness, and we sexual and gender minorities have deeply formative experiences of longing and waiting.

All of us, both gay and straight, have a sense that we were not made for just this world and have an innate longing for more, but for side-B folk, this longing is often profound. It’s easy to feel like we are somehow in exile here with our longings unfulfilled, waiting for someone or something to rescue us.

My first Revoice, in 2019, was a discovery that the jungle did, in fact, have trails. And not only were these trails clear, they were ancient, tied to the faith I’d treasured, and they were filled with fellow travelers. I never could’ve imagined a community like Revoice existing. Here I was, arrogant enough to think I was alone in the jungle, when great trail-blazers were going before me.

So, here we are again on the other side of another National Coming Out Day and we didn’t come out. We saw many people we know who at long last finally came out and we wonder if our time will ever come. Our time to be fully seen and fully known. And if they don’t like us then at least they have all the correct information. Right?

I feel this most strongly in the mornings and the evenings - in the quiet moments when I’m alone with the burdens of the day, trying to rest. I turn off my lights and climb under my comforter, with nothing but my breathing and the echoing of my thoughts. It’s in these moments that celibacy can feel less like a gift and more like a sorrow.