God's Grace - Homosexual become Heterosexual
GOD'S AMAZING GRACE:
THE TESTIMONY OF STEPHEN BENNETT
In the fall of 1981, as an 18 year old aspiring artist with a dream, and a freshman at one of New York’s art schools, I reached one of the darkest periods in my life. On a cold rainy night, far away from home I acted out on feelings I had throughout my entire childhood and teen years - I had my first homosexual encounter with another student. After drinking alcohol at a school party and getting drunk for the first time ever, something I swore I never would do because of my family’s past, my life literally changed in one night. I was plummeted into my deep dark world of homosexuality. After only a few short months in art school, I suffered from a very severe depression, and dropped out of school and returned home to my family in Connecticut.
I found many of my old high schools friends had also “come out” as homosexuals and I became very active in the homosexual bar scene. I lived for the night - my drinking became worse, I started using cocaine to help alleviate my mental turmoil, and found much love and acceptance by other men. I had many numerous one night stands. I felt I was finally “me”. However, my drug addiction got worse to the point where I became a cocaine dealer just to support my habit - I lost my art business to drugs, as well as my dignity to a life based upon my perverse, sensual and decrepit lifestyle I couldn’t break free from. It was at this point many of my friends and one night encounters were getting “sick” and starting to die, and no one knew why. This sickness was the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.
Things only grew worse and for a period of six years I declined morally, mentally and physically. It was in the winter of 1987 after a 3 day cocaine and alcohol binge I cried out for help. After being up all night and running out of cocaine, I looked in the mirror and was shocked at the reflection. Due to my cocaine abuse, as well as years of bulimia, at almost six feet tall, I saw a 135 lb. living skeleton staring back at me and I just cried. I ran down to a pay phone on the street corner and called for help. I admitted myself into a drug rehabilitation program, and began my recovery as an impatient for three months at a nearby facility. It was at this point I began to see God working in my life.
Within a few short months I was alcohol and drug free, as well as free from my bulimia. I had gained about 25 lbs. and was feeling great. However, I still had a deep dark secret past hidden inside of me. What was I to do with my homosexuality? Deep down inside I knew it was wrong, yet I was just suppressing it. After dating a few girls, I found myself one night back again at a local gay bar. I didn’t drink or do drugs - but that night I met a man that I fell in love with, and began a three year live in relationship with him. I seemed I had it all - my homosexual lifestyle and love, without the drugs, alcohol and bulimia, a great job, beautiful home, and great homosexual friends. I attended an unsaved church faithfully every week - and felt I had it all. But God wasn’t done with me yet - in fact, He had just started.
My doorbell rang, and it was my friend Kathy, a friend for years who had seen me through the good and bad times of my life - and she had a Bible in her hand, and asked if she could come in. She had told me she left her religious background and became a Christian. She told me how Jesus changed her life, and how according to the Bible homosexuality was wrong - it was a sin and an abomination in God’s eyes - how according to the Bible I was not “born that way”, how it was circumstances, events and broken relationships from as early on as childhood, that led me down the homosexual path, and that Jesus Christ was offering me deliverance, restoration and most importantly, salvation - today. I listened intently, and something inside of me told me she was right. I told her I would take the Bible and she left. That day, the Word of God cut right through me - I saw my homosexuality for the first time as God saw it - as sin. Over the next year and a half, anytime something would happen between my partner and I sexually, I found myself praying for forgiveness to God I didn’t know, on my bathroom floor. God was tugging at my heart strings and I knew it.
The tugging was so hard and clear, I left my partner, my job, my family - everyone and everything I loved, and headed off to Provincetown, Massachusetts - a homosexual subculture - to live for a summer, to see if I could reconcile this pull between being a homosexual and a Christian. Did I have to choose one or the other, or could I be both at the same time in God’s eyes?
Well, in that summer of 1991 God opened my eyes to the truth and reality of the homosexual lifestyle - I saw it all in full swing, in all its glory - transsexuals, transvestites, sado masochists, men and women doing things one would never even imagine. After five months in Provincetown, I returned home to my partner asking for forgiveness for leaving him - I was sorry and I was going to put this “Jesus” business aside. Yet after only three short months in his home, by myself while wrapping Christmas presents, I happened to flip through radio stations and came across a Christian one. A man was singing a song (Scott Wesley Brown’s “This Little Child”) and I heard the lyrics about “men marching for their right to sin”. I knew exactly what the song was talking about - it was talking about me. I may have put God on the back burner - but He was still chasing after me.
And on New Year’s Eve of 1991 I attended a homosexual party with my partner, and for the first time ever in my life - I felt “dirty”. I hated myself. I hated my homosexual lifestyle. But I just couldn’t break free...
I called my friend Kathy on the telephone and told her I was going to move back to Provincetown, Massachusetts for good and completely give myself over to my homosexual lifestyle. I felt as if I lost my life and my soul. Deep inside, I was crying out for help - and that’s when Jesus Christ stepped in.
She read to me from the Bible, from the book of Romans chapter one, how God will “call” you - and if He keeps calling you, and you hear, yet harden your heart, it may come to a point where He will make you a “reprobate” in His sight and give you completely over to your sin, and allow you to believe “the lie”. At that point, according to the Bible, you have basically sealed your destiny away from Him forever.
It scared me so much, I asked her what did I need to do, and she told me right now to pray to Jesus - ask Him to deliver me from my unwanted homosexuality - and ask Him to forgive me for my sins, and to come into my heart and life, be my Lord and Savior, and to take control. At that moment, I did pray and nothing whacky or crazy, but I physically felt the peace of God upon me. That day in January of 1992, on the telephone, I asked Jesus to come into my heart – and I was born again. Something truly happened to me on the inside. That day God changed my life and I will be eternally grateful for what He did. Within two weeks, I moved out of my partner’s home and was on my way and new walk with Jesus Christ.
Within three months after accepting Jesus Christ as my Savior, the homosexual behavior stopped, but not the same-sex attractions. Why? I prayed the prayer, I did everything, I left the man that I loved. What more could I do? Why wasn’t I “set free?”
I knew deep down I had to deal with a very painful issue I didn’t even want to go near – yet one I knew I had to confront in order to move on with my new life in Christ. For me, it was a very damaged, broken relationship with my father.
For years, I only desired one thing: my father's love. I knew as Jesus had forgiven me for all of my sins - past, present and future – I now needed to extend that unconditional forgiveness to a man I deeply hated, yet one I truly loved. After confronting him one day, pouring out my heart and really talking for the very first time in 28 years -- our broken relationship was incredibly reconciled. Forgiveness was extended that day and the chains that bound me for so many years were unshackled. When my father and I hugged in his kitchen, and he told me that he loved me, I was finally set free.
Today, my father and I have a wonderful relationship. I love my dad and I know he loves me. Those memories and years of hurt and inner pain have been replaced by a real father and son love. We see each other often, call each other on the phone and God has restored alI of the lost years.
I realized for my entire life, I was vainly looking for the love, attention and affection of my father in the arms of other men. Today, the search is over: I now have the real thing: my dad.
I must say, it is incredible how my journey has been. Within that first year, never having been with a woman before, I was engaged to a beautiful Christian woman, Irene, who knew me as a homosexual, and was praying for me for years. We were married on June 13, 1993. Never having been with a woman before, all I can say is our wedding night was one of the most beautiful, pure experiences I ever had.
Today, almost twelve years later -- and very happily married -- God has blessed us with two other miracles - my beautiful daughter Chloe Catherine who is six years old, and my son Blake Stephen, four years old, born on Chloe's birthday. Chloe's middle name is in dedication to my friend Kathy who never gave up on me - a vessel of God, who He used to change my destiny forever.
posted by !+'S N.+ $. ME @ 10:46 AM
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