Full of Grace and Truth

Rachel Gilson started experiencing same-sex attraction when she was a teenager and was trying to process what that meant for the rest of her life. I was pretty eager to get out of my cow town.

Literally, my high school had a working farm on the campus. I was pretty eager to get to Yale, to the East Coast, to be at a place where I could explore my sexuality more freely, where I could kind of dive into both that part of my life. Both that part of my life and big ideas.

And I think it was a huge grace of the Lord to me that he saved me so early in my experience of college so that I actually didn't have much time to plant my feet there. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. What was it that caused Rachel Gilson, early in her college career, to reconsider the purpose for her life and her sexuality?

We'll talk with Rachel about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. Three of us had an opportunity a while back to be with a group of moms and dads, and we were talking about relationships between parents and adult kids, and it was a great interaction that we had. And it got to Q&A time at the end. That was interesting.

I know where you're going now. When you said it was a great conversation, I said, yeah, I agree. And then, boom, the mic opened. Any time I'm talking with parents of adult kids or parents of teen kids today and you say, okay, who's got a question, the subject of sexuality, gender, same-sex attraction, if that's not the first question, it's because the person was too afraid to ask at first, right?

But it almost always comes up because parents are looking for answers and help. Yeah, and it was actually a great conversation. The questions were raw. They were real.

There were tears, you know, from parents that really are grappling with what the society is grappling with. What do I think? What do I believe? How do I respond?

What should be my posture? How do I love my child? And Bob had all the right answers, so it was great. He did.

I'm glad he was with us. Over the years on Family Life Today, as we've talked with different people about this, it's been clear to us that Jesus, John describes him this way in John 1-14, he was full of grace and truth. And some people come at this issue and say, I've got to be full of truth, and they closet the grace, and some, I've got to be full of grace, and they closet the truth. Jesus would not have done that.

He would have been full of grace and truth. And that's hard for us to figure out, because most of us are going to lean in one of those two directions. We're either going to lean grace or lean truth, and we've got to figure out how do I be full of that part that I'm not typically going to lean in that direction toward. We've got a guest joining us today who I'm glad to have as a part of this conversation with us. Rachel Gilson is with us on Family Life Today. Rachel, welcome.

I'm glad to be here, and I just want to amen everything in that intro right there. We're excited that you're with us, Rachel. Rachel helps give theological direction to all of us who are a part of the staff of CREW, and you've been on CREW staff how long? Well, I joined in 2011, which was right when the name changed from Campus Crusade for Christ to CREW, so all the swag we got was immediately vintage. Rachel has just written a book that is part memoir and part coaching manual.

I mean, I really think it provides both of these functions for us. It's a book called Born Again This Way, and I'm imagining some of our listeners don't catch the hip pop culture reference that she makes in the title, but we should start there. Tell everybody who doesn't get it why you picked that name.

Well, partially it's because I was born with a strong sarcastic streak. Wildly popular performer, Lady Gaga, wrote at least a song, I don't know how many years ago, Born This Way. It's kind of an anthem celebrating that, hey, however you were born, and particularly if you were LGBT attractions, that is what you should celebrate, that is what you should lean into. So my experience has been someone who experiences same-sex attraction but is a disciple of Christ. So my whole life in Jesus has been figuring out what is the relationship between my desires and the God who loves me. Primary of my life is being born again. And yet, Rachel, you didn't grow up in a Christian home. Share with us a little bit about your story of growing up. I grew up in Southern California in a very not religious household, actually, so even though the people around me were very church-going, my family, we weren't even Christmas and Easter people.

We just sort of did whatever. And so, by the time I got to high school, I was really interested in big ideas, but as I tried to talk to the kids around me who identified as Christian about big ideas, they just didn't seem to have the kind of answers I was looking for. So I kind of brushed Christianity off by the end of high school as a place people went to when they didn't know how to think for themselves, you know, somewhat of a crutch. Now, I've since discovered that Christianity is actually the greatest intellectual tradition that's ever hit the planet, but I didn't quite have a view of that as a teenage girl.

So I was pretty hardened in my atheism by the time I was going off to college. Also in high school, I realized that my sexuality felt so much more at home with other young women as opposed to young men. I had some sexual relationships with young men. I've always enjoyed the company of men, so I thought, well, this is where I'm supposed to go. But it always felt a little off and a little awkward.

You know, sometimes I joke, well, you know, maybe it's because I was just hooking up with teenage boys and they're a little bit awkward, right, which isn't totally wrong. But my other understanding of Christianity was, well, this is full of people who don't like people with my sexuality. And I found this, even though I had never been mistreated by the church or by any Christians, it was just sort of an attitude I picked up from the air around me. So, you know, by the time I was going into college, I thought Christians are stupid and Christians are bigots.

And like, goodness, who wants to be associated with stupid bigots, you know? So let me back up to the first time you had some sense that maybe your way of perceiving attraction was different than your peer group. I happened to meet a girl in high school. She was a senior, I was a sophomore, we were in the same AP European history class. And really she just wanted to use me to help study for a test because I was a nerd, I was focused, she was a senior, easy breezy. So she invited me over to her house.

And I knew it was opportunistic, right? I knew she didn't want to be my friend, she just wanted to study with me. But you know, when you're a sophomore, you want to hang out with the seniors.

That's pretty cool. So when I was spending time with her, helping prepare for that test, it was just sort of this moment. I was with her, we ended up mostly talking all night instead of studying.

Who's surprised? I remember, it was almost like a little click in my heart where I thought, wait a minute, I really like her. Wait a minute, do I like like her?

Very technical terms, of course. And I couldn't quite shake that maybe this feeling matched how my peers actually described feeling about boys. So I spent about a week kind of processing, is this allowed? Is this okay? Like, I do think that's how I feel, but it doesn't seem like it's right.

And this, you know, this was back when Will and Grace was still edgy, not nostalgic, you know, so this was 2001. But I remember sort of digging through my junk drawer of morality available, and I couldn't find any possible reason why this wouldn't be okay, right? Way before the phrase love is love became culturally popular, it was where I landed.

I thought, well, it's not hurting anybody. So I decided to just go all in. And as I gained romantic and sexual experiences with other young women, I thought, oh, yeah, this is definitely my home. And that's in the context of having been romantically and even sexually involved with guys at the same time, right?

Yeah, I mean, basically, I was running like a scientific experiment. And did you talk to anyone about that, Rachel? Like, did you discuss any of that with your parents or peers or siblings?

I talked about it a little bit with some of my friends. My only sibling in the house was a younger brother who was three and a half years. You know, I wasn't going to be talking to him about this kind of stuff. And my parents were going through a divorce at the time. My dad wasn't in the house. My mom was going through her own sort of difficult things. So it wasn't something I brought to her to process. I'd really kind of been out on my own. Luckily, I wasn't going to the Internet too much with those questions.

I think that would have led me down a rabbit hole. But it just seemed it felt right, you know, and everything around me had taught me that what feels right is right. So was your assessment I was born this way? I certainly don't have anything in my life that I can point to that I would consider a cause of my same-sex attraction. However, I don't think that that automatically makes those desires something that I need to obey, right? Who owns me? Do my desires own me? Do I own me?

Or does Jesus Christ own me? To me, that's a fundamental question that has to be asked more than whether or not something in particular caused these temptations. So when you go back now and try to deconstruct what was going on in Rachel's heart and life as a high school student, were you culturally influenced? Were you hormonally influenced? Was it biology? Was it nature, nurture? What's your sense of what was going on then? You know, on some level, so much of my focus in discipleship hasn't been on interrogating where the feelings have come from, but rather what my faithful response to them should be, that I don't know that I've even considered that it matters very much.

Maybe it was cultural, maybe it was biological, but at the end of the day, either way, I have a responsibility to say no to temptation to sin and to say yes to Christ. The reason I ask is I'm talking to moms and dads these days who are, here's what they're hearing their kids, the conversation their kids are having are, you know, I think maybe I'm like 70 percent hetero, but maybe 30 percent gay. Sure. And then they're in a classroom situation where a teacher will say, now, we've got a new student and this new student, maybe this has to be explained some way, this student is different or something's going on. All of a sudden, attention is drawn to this student for their sexual whatever it is.

Right. And the students are like, oh, so that's how you get to be special these days. So, we're seeing this increase in people who are self-reporting, I'm gay, and we're wondering how much of that is because it's being cheer-leaded in our culture today. Well, and I do think it's important for us to consider the fact that these kinds of social realities are happening in high schools, in middle schools, sometimes even in lower grades. I live outside of Boston, so we see this a lot. At the time when I was discovering this about myself, it wasn't yet culturally cool in the way that it is now.

It's actually amazing to me how much this has turned the corner, you know, in 20 years, 15 years. But I do think it's something we strongly need to consider as we disciple our children, both the ones that live in our household and just the children with us in church, to think really critically with a biblical worldview that looks at some of the things they're seeing in the outside world with an eye of skepticism, right? Like, well, what does make someone special? How do I tell right from wrong? And crucially, where are we supposed to go to understand our own feelings and whether or not we should listen to them? I think that believers that are walking with Jesus, that are raising young kids, are sometimes confused about how to communicate these kinds of things to their kids. What do you think? As you've walked this path and you're married now, how would you instruct them and what would you say?

Well, I think it's a really important question. I have a six-year-old right now, so... So you're there.

I'm there, but it also means I'm also not there, right? I've never tried to parent a 14-year-old or parent a 24-year-old. I've only parented up to a six-year-old.

But it is very much on my mind. I think one of the reasons that parents are feeling so unprepared is that the church for the past 50 years has almost been accidentally in agreement with God's doctrine. It's been very much instinctual that marriage is male and female, so we haven't had to dig into our own texts, our own scriptures, to find why is it male-female.

It's just seemed obvious. And so now that we're getting a lot of pressure to explain why we think what we think, if the parents haven't been catechized in a positive view of God's vision for sexuality, then how in the world are they going to be able to pass that on to their children, right? Because Disney movies and the church have both told us that marriage is really about marrying your best friend, having great sex, and maybe kids if you can afford them, right? So, two men can do all those things.

Two women can do all those things. If that's all marriage is, then no wonder we felt flat-footed when trying to explain to our children why people of the same sex can't have that. But when we go back to the scriptures, we actually find a more robust picture of why marriage exists and what the elements need to be to fulfill that vision that God's created it for. So, as you go back to, you know, you as a high school girl walking through this journey, I'm guessing the scriptures weren't something you were looking at at that time, right? Oh, certainly not. I mean, you're living out your life.

Are you at a point, and as you reflect back, was this something that was like, wow, I'm going to celebrate this, this is wonderful? Was there the opposite, or was it somewhere in between, like, I need to hide this? Yeah, was word getting out around campus that Rachel, you know how Rachel is, she's one of them. Well, so I was at a really small high school and fairly conservative, so it wasn't like my high school had Gay-Straight Student Alliance or anything like that. Mostly I had to convince a lot of straight girls to hook up with me.

There was not like a robust community of LGBT people. So, I never lived in the closet, would be the phrase. I never hid it, but I was pretty eager to get out of my cow town.

Literally, my high school had a working farm on the campus. I was pretty eager to get to Yale, to the East Coast, to be at a place where I could explore my sexuality more freely, where I could kind of dive into both that part of my life and big ideas. And I think it was a huge grace of the Lord to me that He saved me so early in my experience of college, so that I actually didn't have much time to plant my feet there. So talk about that, you get to Yale, how did that happen, what happened?

Well, it turns out, one, a Southern Californian wasn't very prepared for winter. We feel you right now, we understand. I feel a little like I got hoodwinked on that. So on the one hand, I thought very highly of my intellectual prowess, and then I showed up at Yale and realized, uh-oh, I'm not the smartest person in the world.

Actually, I might not even be in the top 50%. So that kind of sent one pillar of my identity crumbling. And then another thing that happened early on at Yale was that the girl I was dating at the time broke up with me. And so I ended up in a little bit of a pit of an identity crisis. You know, I was kind of tossing around for, who am I? If I don't have her, if I don't have my academic excellence, like, who am I? And it wasn't like, oh, I'm going to turn to Jesus, because I didn't believe in Jesus.

You know, I thought maybe I should write for the newspaper, except I wasn't smart enough, or, you know, go to the gym more, except I was very lazy. So I happened to be in a lecture, I was taking a course of study through the Western canon, it was a philosophy class. And early in the quote-unquote spring semester, let's be honest, it was winter the whole time, but early in that semester, we were having a lecture on Rene Descartes, you know, the old dead European who invented the phrase, I think, therefore I am. And from that phrase, he invents this whole proof for the existence of God. And I remember sitting in the audience thinking, that's a really stupid proof for the existence of God. Which I still think, but while I was sitting in the audience, I remember thinking, well, what if there are better proofs for the existence of God? Like, this one's not very compelling, but there might be something better. But I sort of immediately tensed up like, no, no, that's not what we think about.

That's for stupid bigots, you know, it's just like, we're not going to go there. But once the can had been opened in my mind, I kind of couldn't shake it. So I remember, you know, I'm a good millennial, so I went back to my room and I would just Google religious search terms over and over again. Right? Because if you have a deep question, why not ask the internet?

That's just the most solid way you could possibly go about something. So I wish I had a log of all the different websites I went to, but again and again, I kept coming back to reading about the person of Jesus. And he was so much more interesting than I had thought. Had you ever read the Bible before? I had occasionally read some sections of Bible, like when I was in hotel rooms, I would love the Gideon's Bibles, like I would open them up and read the KJV language sometimes. And there even actually in high school, there was a small period of time where I would sometimes go to the Presbyterian youth group because there was nothing else to do.

And I would go there to play basketball and eat snacks. And I remember one time sitting in the back of the room at one of these youth groups thinking, I don't understand why you need Jesus and God. So even if the poor, you know, youth pastor was preaching the gospel, it was not infiltrating my head. So I'd had some obscure connection to Bible and things like that.

But this was the first time I was really reading it kind of for myself with interest. But I immediately felt a type of barrier. I was like, well, I'm going to marry a woman someday like that.

Even if I wanted Jesus, like this is categorically not for me. And the only two people I knew at Yale who identified as Christians were these two women who were dating each other. And one of them was training to be a Lutheran minister. So I thought, well, you know, maybe they can shed some light on this or maybe they can explain something. So, you know, I went to them as if by night, kind of trembling like, oh, how do you reconcile all these things? And they were sweet girls. I remember them saying like, oh, it's all been a big misunderstanding. You know, that's not actually what the Bible really says.

The Bible actually supports monogamous same sex relationships. And I thought, well, if that's true, that's very interesting. And so they gave me a packet of information explaining what the real interpretations were.

And I love packets, right? So I took that thing back to my room. I remember ripping through it. And it made a lot of sense. Like what they gave me made a lot of sense. It had an internal logic that I could follow. But I also thought, well, maybe I should look up for myself some of the Bible verses these interpretations are claiming to explain.

Seems like good due diligence. So I'd pull them up on my computer. And then I would compare what I found on my computer to what I saw in the packet kind of back and forth. And eventually I was like, well, uh-oh, I don't think this packet is doing as good of a job with this ancient scripture as it's claiming to do. And it was difficult for me because I actually really did want to believe what they gave me, but I just couldn't see it in the texts.

And so I remember throwing the packet away kind of feeling stupid for having held out belief that it could be real. And it was sometime soon after that I happened to be in the room of one of my friends who was a non-practicing Catholic. And she was getting something out of her room, like putting things in a bag or whatever, and I was standing in her doorway. And one of my favorite hobbies is to look at people's bookshelves and judge them.

So she had a really nice bookshelf right by her doorframe. And I was checking out the titles on that. And I saw a book with the title Mere Christianity by C.S.

Lewis. Now I hadn't been raised on Narnia, so I didn't fully realize the significance of this book. But the title alone made me want to read it. But I was also too embarrassed to let my friend know that I was interested, so I just stole the book. You know, it's not that big.

You can put it easily into your bag. And so I happened to be reading this book one day in between classes because it was easier and more interesting than my homework. And there wasn't like, like I don't remember where I was, I don't remember what chapter or paragraph or anything like that, but while I was reading it one day, I suddenly was overwhelmed with, oh my goodness, not only does God exist, like in a generic store brand way, but like the God exists. The God who made me, the God who is transcendent, who is perfect.

In fact, actually the God to whom I'm going to owe an account of my life. And at that moment, all I felt was fear because I knew, I mean, I was arrogant. I was a liar. I was a cheater. I was sexually immoral. I was cruel. You were a thief. I was reading a stolen book. Yeah, exactly.

Like all of the evidence, right, was pushed firmly into the guilty category. And I really felt afraid. But at the same time, I also realized, I think the Spirit revealed to me that part of the reason Jesus had come was to place Himself as a barrier between God's wrath and me. And that the only way to be safe was to run towards Him, not away from Him. And so I remember sitting there thinking, well, I don't want to become a Christian. That's really lame. But at the same time, I was like, well, I can't pretend that this isn't true just because it's inconvenient for my life.

Like that strikes me as the height of stupidity. So I didn't, you know, have a nice campus minister sitting with me, but I kind of understood that I needed to pray. So I just sort of shut my eyes and said, fine, I'll be a Christian.

And then I went to class. You know, that was my introduction. You know, I'm just wondering if we should change our literature to include that as the prayer. This is the prayer. You can pray, fine, I'll be a Christian. The new sinner's prayer.

Right there it is. It's short and sweet. Well, it worked for you, didn't it? It did work.

That's right. I love your story. I love that Jesus grabbed you and He wooed you to Himself.

And you're smart, you're intelligent, and it was a process that you kind of discovered on your own through your own search. And for me, that says God loves you. I think of all of us as parents that are so petrified for our kids, and if we don't say the right thing, and if we do say the right thing, and should we act like this or say this and go to this church and go to this camp? And there's so many things, and yet when I listen to your story, I think there is a God who loves your child more than you do. And He will go to all costs to find them, to woo them, and to bring them to Him Himself. Even if it's a prayer like, fine, I'll become a Christian.

And I would even add this. I think someone listening has felt pursued by God, like Rachel did, and finally gave in, you know? I mean, we're laughing at the fine, but at some point it's like, you know what? I'm not going to run away anymore. I'm going to follow you and see where that leads.

Because it's interesting. It wasn't, I'm going to give up my sexuality. It was, I'm going to follow you, and then let's see what happens.

And we'll hear the rest of the story. And let me just say to listeners, you may right now need to pray a prayer that says fine. I kind of like that prayer.

Yeah. It's a prayer of surrender, which is exactly the posture that we need to take when we are surrendering to Jesus and saying, I'm going to accept what you have made so clear that there's no escaping it, and I'm going to accept it whatever the cost and whatever the implications. And as we'll hear, they wind up being significant for Rachel and wind up being significant really for all of us. Rachel has chronicled her story in a book she's written called Born Again This Way, coming out, coming to faith, and what comes next. We've got copies of Rachel's book in our Family Life Today Resource Center. You can order it from us online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get your copy.

Again, the title of the book is Born Again This Way by Rachel Gilson. Order online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get your copy. 1-800-358-6329, that's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. If you are a regular Family Life Today listener, somebody who's been with us for a long time and have benefited from these conversations every day, we want to ask you this week to consider becoming one of our monthly legacy partners. Legacy partners are those who support the Ministry of Family Life each month with a contribution as a way of ensuring that we can continue into the future to provide practical biblical help and hope for marriages and families in your community and all around the world. We've had some friends of the ministry recently who have come to us and have agreed that for all new legacy partners, those who join with us this week, these friends are going to match every donation you make over the next 12 months dollar for dollar up to a total of $25,000. That's a great opportunity for us to add new friends to the ministry, and we'd like to ask you to join the team and become a legacy partner. In fact, if you can do that, we'd like to say thank you by sending you a copy of my book, Love Like You Mean It, which has just recently been released, a book about 1 Corinthians 13 and how those characteristics of love apply in a marriage relationship. We'll send you three episodes of the new Slugs and Bugs TV series for kids. You can share that with your kids or with your grandkids. And we'll send you a gift card where you can attend a Weekend to Remember marriage getaway as our guests as soon as we are able to get Weekend to Remember getaways happening again.

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That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. And we look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for considering this, and thanks for becoming a legacy partner. Now, tomorrow we're going to talk about the arguments that are being made within the church today about why Christians ought to embrace same-sex marriage. We'll see what Rachel Gilson has to say about that and how she believes we ought to respond. That comes up tomorrow. Hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.