This post is excerpted with permission from A Better Love: 18 Stories of Meeting Jesus in the Tension of Faith and Sexuality, a collection of stories published by the UK-based ministry Living Out. To read more stories like Ashleigh’s, you can purchase the ebook here.
It is an interesting quirk of my heart that it seems to want to be given away.
I want to pour myself out for and forget myself in someone else. To be so united with someone else that we become one. I’m looking for someone worthy of all of me—someone who is worth giving everything to.
In my life there have been two places—two relationships—where I’ve tried to satisfy that desire. The first was in a sexual relationship with another human being—due to the inclination of my attractions, another woman. The second is in the relationship I now have with Jesus.
Spoiler: one is way better than the other.
I didn’t always know Jesus. Growing up in church, I was always aware that there was a God, and that he loved me—I never really doubted that. But that was always a fairly abstract concept, not something that impacted my day-to-day life. I failed to grasp that the faith I was being raised in wasn’t just a set of ideas to agree with, but an invitation into the kind of intimate relationship I longed for.
Still, I wasn’t starved of intimacy. I had a family that wasn’t perfect, but still gave me a deep confidence that I was loved, wanted and valued. I had good friends. And when I was sixteen, one of those friendships became something else. I suddenly found myself romantically and sexually involved with one of my female friends.
The fact that she was a “she” didn’t really surprise me. My sexual orientation wasn’t something I’d spent that long considering—but still, it wasn’t a revelation to find myself attracted to her. No, the surprise was that I had finally found someone who seemed worthy of all of me.
Quickly and delightedly, I gave this girl my heart. I sought to satisfy the desires that clamoured so loudly—the desire to be given away, to lose myself in someone else—all in her.
And I did. For about two weeks.
That’s about how long it took for me to acknowledge the God I had always believed in. I knew that his Word, the Bible, said some things about our same-sex relationship that weren’t particularly approving. So, what was I to do with these clear, absolute statements from a God who was my rightful ruler, my judge, my only way to salvation? How was I to obey these impossible commands to stop loving this woman who I was glad to own me, body and soul?
But there was something deeper behind this dissatisfaction and dissonance. My girl had my heart, but she couldn’t fill it. I was like a bottomless pit, always wanting something more, something that I couldn’t articulate and that she couldn’t give. I was after an intimacy that we couldn’t achieve, no matter how much of our skin or souls we bared to one another.
It took me a long time, longer than the three tumultuous years that our relationship lasted, to understand the problem. Augustine best captured what I was feeling: “You have made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”
My heart longed to be given away, but I had given it to the wrong person. It was made to lose itself in someone infinite, but I was trying to satisfy it in someone who had very human limits.
As I said, I didn’t grasp this straight away. Not during that three-year cycle of break up, get back together, break up again. Not when we finally broke up for good, largely because she realised before I did that I had developed feelings for another woman. Not even when I was considering what to do about these new feelings, whether I would pursue another relationship that I knew my God did not want for me.
At first, my obedience was a grudging one—a teeth-clenched, weepy submission to a command I did not like or understand. A surrender to someone who I was learning to trust, even when it made no sense to my restless heart.
But something began to change as I daily sought him, surrendered these desires to him, read his Word and spoke to him about all the other areas of my life. I started to see who this God, this Jesus, really was. The endless depths of his beauty were what my restless heart had been craving all along. He was the one that I had been looking for, the one my heart was made to be given away to. He was the one who was worthy of my whole self.
I started to see that all of my longings, my desires and my passions were only the faintest shadow of his love for me. He was the one with whom I could share the depth of intimacy that I had been craving—the one who knows me so completely, and who has united himself to me so utterly that nothing could ever undo it.
When we choose any love in life, we are by default giving up others. By choosing Jesus, I was giving up on being loved in a particular way by another woman. But it was—and more than ten years on, still is—so worth it. Jesus is worth any cost. Jesus is worth giving up any other love, because Jesus is the one that my heart was made for, and he alone can satisfy all its longings.
