He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake.
—Psalm 23:3
Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.
—Psalm 37:4
The end of my undergraduate education had come, all too quickly. I had to decide what to do next. While I saw all of my life as worship to Jesus Christ, I wanted to spend concentrated time seeking God’s presence and person. So at my church’s New Year’s service, a time to consecrate the year ahead to God, I responded by committing to attend a one-year course at Bible college. This was, for me, a Psalm 23 moment. Father, I prayed, lead me to graze on green pastures, to be by still waters, and to spend my time in your house.
Taking a year off from pursuing a career was an expression of love for Jesus. At the time, I had doubts about how such a school could really address my deeper needs, so choosing to go was an act of deep trust. But I wanted to mature in my relationship with him.
The decision to die to my sexuality had changed me. Strangely, I was even becoming grateful for my struggles. They had pointed me to God. That much was undeniable.
I still had unanswered questions. Lots of them. But I knew God’s presence was with me every day. The relationship just required patience. He would not necessarily tie up every loose end or answer every question. But the faith was there. I’d seen him work. He’d work again.
In hindsight, that year at a small Bible college was the best year of my life in terms of growing closer to him. I heard his voice clearly, encountered him powerfully. One particular class had a profound impact on me. The teacher suffered from an acute respiratory disease that caused a spluttering cough between his words. It was a poignant reminder of our mortality, that our bodies, our desires, and this world are not as God ultimately intends. Between the professor’s coughs, I received words of life.
One day, after that year ended, I slid into my car and headed to a job interview at a Christian aid organization. Turning up my favorite worship song, I praised God for making me right with him through Jesus, lifting the pressure of death and sin from my shoulders.
As I drove, I reflected that I was convinced like never before that “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39).
I walked into the small, open office, nervous and excited for my interview. If I got the job, perhaps my inner activist could finally find an outlet through helping communities in developing nations.
I recognized a few people, familiar faces from Christian events I’d been involved in. One stood out in particular. I stared a little. He didn’t see me. Where do I know him from? The subconscious confusion lasted only a split second. It was Michael. Wait, Michael?
Michael. My friend from that fateful love triangle at university five years ago. I couldn’t believe it. Last I knew, he was an atheist. He really disliked Christians. What were the chances he’d be here, on the other side of Sydney, working for a Christian organization? Yet here he was. I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. I was so ashamed to see him after what had happened between me and Samuel, his ex-boyfriend.
I turned quickly, rushing to the bathroom area to remain out of view. Needing confirmation, I pointed over to his desk. “Who’s that?” I asked a staffer nearby. She smiled. “That’s Michael. He volunteers here.” Afraid of being spotted, I ducked into the bathroom. God, what’s going on? Why is Michael here? What are you trying to say?
I heard Jesus’ voice respond to me: You are justified by my death and resurrection for you. Do you really believe it? Do you really believe my blood was enough?
I’m not sure I really do. I was shocked at my response.
I’ve freed you from the past, he told me. You are no longer condemned. You are a different person, my new creation. Don’t be ashamed. Walk back out there.
I took a deep breath and walked out.
I got the job. As the weeks passed, I was asked to become Michael’s overseer. I knew we needed to talk. I had so many questions, and something vital to say to him.
At first he didn’t want to meet me for lunch outside of work. I couldn’t really blame him, but we needed a private space to talk. Finally, he agreed.
Sitting across from him, I said, “Michael, I know this may seem crazy to you, but I am an entirely different person from who I was five years ago. I’ve been saved and transformed by Jesus Christ. I live a very different life.” I looked down, then back at him. “I just want to say how sorry I am for what happened with Samuel. I was in the wrong. Will you forgive me?”
He put down his coffee. “I’m sure you’re convinced of all that, David, but that simply won’t do.”
Michael didn’t openly forgive me. But somehow I left that meal with a closure I never thought I would have. Driving home, I heard Jesus say, David, I didn’t just die for your sins. I also died to transform the consequences of your sins.
Over our final months of working together, Michael’s attitude toward me changed. While still avowedly agnostic, one day at a prayer meeting, he revealed that he had contracted a serious disease and his father had been diagnosed with cancer. Our community was able to be there for him. I was grateful for the opportunity to apologize to him personally, and, in the limited way that our strained relationship allowed, to be a friend in his time of need. There was not full restoration. But there was a new kind of equilibrium. A peace.
Is this not the unique power of the Christian gospel? For all the remaining messiness, for all the rough edges that result from the consequences of our actions, can anything else reconcile and restore the most broken situations and people? Oh, the hope for all of us! It is profound.
The Sunday after that job interview, I met my friends from Bible college at church. After the sermon, a team of ministry leaders invited people to come up for prayer. When I stepped forward, an Armenian man named Leon, whom I knew only from afar, said the oddest thing: “David, God is showing me you will study in beautiful old libraries, poring over old books, with a Bible open at the center of it all. God has called you to study, speak, and write for him.”
I hadn’t told anyone (except my parents) that weeks before, at the suggestion of a mentor and friend, I had applied for a course in theology at the University of Oxford. I took this message from Leon as confirmation from God that Oxford would happen.
And sure enough, it did. Six months later I had left my job at the aid organization, crossed the world, and found myself back in the beautiful streets of Oxford, preparing to study theology. As a student concurrently at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and the University of Oxford, I hoped to grow as a writer, speaker, and communicator. I was to be trained in apologetics and evangelism by greats like John Lennox and Michael Ramsden, and I was given access to those old libraries Leon had mentioned. This is surreal, I thought. It felt like a dream.
As I walked down the long streets from my college, I could not believe I was here. I had been admitted to one of the world’s great universities. The sound of church bells and the sight of blooming flowers covering the lawns filled me with joy, and the old buildings reminded me of one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Everywhere I looked in this city, God was speaking his love tenderly to me.
I walked past the Martyrs’ Cross outside Balliol College, commemorating where the English Reformers Latimer and Cranmer were burnt at the stake for their beliefs. Before his death, Latimer wrote, “We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.” There was something about their sacrifice that filled me with hope. Despite the daily struggle I still faced over my sexuality, I knew that like these men, I was willing to die for my faith. We were connected by the same Spirit.
All around the university, rainbow flags flapped in the wind. Their presence both troubled and pleased me—a reminder of still feeling in-between. Were they a sign of my liberty or of my oppression? I didn’t fit in the gay world anymore, and I didn’t fully fit in the Christian one either.
I turned my eyes back to the mosaic of the Martyrs’ Cross on the asphalt. We will all die, I thought. But the question is, what we will die for? Like the martyrs who died on that ground, I had to be willing to give my whole life to following Christ, even if that meant living a deeply unpopular life and being mocked or disdained.
I continued my walk past Blackwell’s bookstore, where Daniel, my mother’s colleague, had bought me Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene ten years before. As I selected books for that term’s classes, I purchased John Lennox’s Gunning for God, his response to Dawkins’s New Atheism. What a difference these years made, I thought.
I made my way through the backstreets and past the old sights: the Bodleian Library, Sheldonian Theatre, and Radcliffe Camera. After walking through High Street and past Merton College, I entered the old gate of Christ Church Meadow. As I stood looking at the football pitch surrounded by budding daffodils and crocuses, I pictured my fifteen-year-old self standing just yards away and remembered my words of self-doubt: I’m not good enough. I’ll never study here.
Yet here I was.
God had lifted up, loved, and saved that self-doubting gay boy. He had brought him, through the most unlikely of events, back here. A decade before, I was one of the last people in the world who’d be training as a Christian apologist. But now I stood with a bag full of books and a heart full of love for Jesus.
Under those impossible spires, God the Father was giving me, his son, the desires of my heart.