20 Days: A Battle for Truth at 25

While I am recovering from surgery this weekend, I have asked my dear friend David Goodwin to guest post as a part of my 25 Days of an (un)Mid-Life Crisis series.

I first met David and his lovely wife Diane almost a year ago when they decided to join my Online LifeGroup. In our short time as friends, we have become like family. They are the most consistent friends I’ve ever known and are people I have come to trust fully and love deeply. And we’ve never even met (as they currently live in Australia).

Today, David will be sharing his story from when he was 25. It is a powerful one, so I hope you will take a moment to read it. And give major props to God for bringing this man to victory… in more ways than one.

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My 25 : The Battle for Truth

While Crystal is imitating David after Dentist but trying not to be filmed following her surgery (believe me, if we lived closer, it would be on for young and old…), this other David (that would be me) is going to share with you why the age of 25 was so important for him.

And by him, I mean me. Confused yet?

If you’ve not caught up with my previous guest post over here, you should probably do that so you can understand a bit more of the context of what follows.

For 12 years, I battled with lies about my sexuality. And by battled, I really mean I didn’t fight them at all … I just accepted that I was who I thought I was, and that was that.

It didn’t occur to me that I could change, or for that matter, want to change.

Clearly I’d not read Romans, or much of Paul’s writing, all that well.

Sure, God kept nudging me, but I’d grown quite good at ignoring Him while still professing my devotion to Him. Hypocrisy was my middle name. I just figured I was either going to be miserable the rest of my life and not find love, or dump my Bible-based belief system in order to live out my deceived reality without guilt.

Neither felt right ‘cos the Holy Spirit was trying to tell me something (duh), but by the time I was 25, miserablism was winning. Padded out with a happy-go-lucky, smiley exterior, and too much comfort food.

But then, I had an epiphany.

I realised not only that I could change, but that whether I wanted to or not didn’t really matter, because I learnt that feelings lie.

The humanistic catch cry : “if it feels good, do it” should point us to the lying feelings thing pretty clearly, because we know that something feeling good isn’t a good precursor to making it ok (most of us know that anyway)

But somehow we still place a good deal of credence in our feelings over and above God’s word. He knows us better than we know ourselves; that’s why His word for our lives often doesn’t align with what feels good, or even right.

So in opposition to fleshly desire, for this to work I had to choose to go in a direction contrary to my feelings. Never an easy thing to convince yourself to do, and just part of the reason why Godly-transformation is a life-long journey.

It’s that ongoing battle between the flesh and the spirit.

I fought a doozy of a battle with the lies I had believed about my sexuality that year. Sexuality is a place where flesh and spirit are so tightly intertwined that I got attacked on all fronts when I chose to realign myself with God’s word.

It left me exhausted, yet victorious.

But more importantly, after the exhaustion passed, I was still victorious. For I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.

What this victory didn’t do was stop me getting caught up in the dot.com bubble that also started growing that year. But that story of poor judgement is for another time and place altogether.

So I wonder how Crystal’s doing…? You might want to check the video again to remind yourself.