Thoughts From This Week ~ Including UMC

Recently, I read a post that said something about not trying to be the person you were before, but focus on who you are after. It’s really had me thinking.

I think one of the hardest parts of moving forward after the sexual assault has been this before and after idea.  You see, it happened early on in my freshman year of college – so who I was “before” was mostly a high schooler.  But it’s not cool to be that person who’s graduated that focuses on their high school successes all the time.  And it makes sense, high school shouldn’t be the prime of your life, since many of us live well past 18. 

But who I was before is important.  I don’t need to 100% go back to who I was before. I am growing and learning, as anyone in their 20s should be. But the core of who I “was” should still be the core of who I am.  I loved art and music, was creative, tried new things more comfortably, and cared deeply about other people without much fear.  I loved dressing nicely and felt, for the most part, good in my own skin. I had more of a capacity to trust and be open. I wasn’t afraid of reaching out to other people. (Below photo: actually a few days before the whole thing happened.)

An odd, tricky aspect of my story is that I didn’t know for about 10 months that what had happened to me was sexual assault.  I never had sex ed. class or anything, so I didn’t really know about sexual assault. This was before #metoo started being a thing.  Since I hadn’t been raped, I never put together what happened to me was actually something, I just had an intuitive feeling that something was wrong. For 10 months, I felt off, confused, and uncomfortable. I began isolating myself from other people because he’d convinced me that I wasn’t worth people’s time.  I felt uncomfortable in my own skin. I felt removed from my own life.

It wasn’t until I was in a criminal justice class discussing definitions of different laws that I realized what had happened to me was sexual assault. #Metoo started to circulate a few months later, and I realized quickly that many women had similar things happen to them. I quickly had to figure out how to cope with it months later.  It seemed too late to be in a coping stage, but it was fresh in my understanding of my experience. I didn’t really take any time to deal with it, because I thought I missed the opportunity to deal with it. 

Who I am “after” is complicated.  I’m trying to get back to the important parts of the old me. After two years of isolation, it is tough to try to make friends. Though I am now comfortable being alone, I would like to have some friends again, but I know it’s not really cool to reach out to my high school friends from before it happened. I’m also trying to get back into shape, which is famously super fun, but I have been doing pretty well. (I miss ice cream and chocolate, but otherwise, it’s going pretty well.)

But the biggest thing about me “after” I think has been my growth in understanding. I have also learned a lot about the grace of God, and not having a place to judge others.

This week, the United Methodist Church voted on a plan for LGBTQ people to not be able to marry or be ordained in the UMC.  This Special Session of the General Conference has led to lots of discussions I have had and witnessed throughout the past month.

There are many things I could say about this.  In fact, there are so many things I could say that I don’t even know where I would begin.  I could go through the Wesleyan quadrilateral of Scripture, tradition, experience, and reason to explain why I firmly believe that LGBTQ people should be allowed to be pastors, marry, and I don’t believe homosexuality is a sin.  I could write for hours on this. I understand people have different ideas about this, that older generations were raised much differently about this, and the AIDS epidemic highly impacted people’s beliefs on LGBTQ people in earlier decades in America.

But I want to bring up something that came up in a conversation I had the other day. Someone I had a conversation with was telling me they didn’t understand LGBTQ relationships. I said something about if we really needed to understand, after all, should a person’s sexual orientation actually matter to us, unless we are wanting to have sex with them? As long as they are two consenting adults in the relationship and it works for them, who are we really to get in the way of that?  And the person I was talking to stopped for a minute, then mentioned they’d never thought of it that way before. 

Look, it is maybe a bit more complicated than that.  I believe what I believe based on more information than that.  But the fact of the matter is, if people are happy in their relationship, it really shouldn’t matter to us.  The biggest thing the sexual assault taught me was that if a relationship is consensual and not doing any harm, they are doing pretty well.  And nobody really has the right to stand in the way of that. 

I’m highly disappointed and frustrated with the UMC GC passing the traditional plan this week, despite it still needing to pass Judicial Council. It makes me sick.  But I know God’s love is more powerful than anything else, and we will never be separated from it.  So, this week was a bit crappy.  Perhaps next week will be better. Maybe I thought 10 months after was too late to try to heal, but here I am two years later, finally committing to better myself after this experience. Maybe the UMC has been trying to figure this out since 1972, and this week we still didn’t make progress.  But that doesn’t mean we will never make progress.  Eventually, people in the UMC will be able to be ordained, regardless of their sexual orientation.  I have not given up hope on this yet. 

- Han