I think that if I was given the option of only watching television once a year, the single thing I would choose to watch would be Treehouse of Horror, the Simpsons Halloween special. That show has been my favorite since I was in the fourth grade. I’ve been with it through up and down, funny and unfunny, and for my money the show is at its best every year at Halloween.

One of my favorite lines in the entire run of the series comes during an episode of Treehouse that parodies the Salem Witch Trials. Predictably, Marge Simpson is accused of witchcraft, and for a trial is taken to the edge of a high cliff, from which she will be pushed. Chief Wiggum figures that if she isn’t a witch, she’ll fall to an honorable Christian death; if she is, she will use her evil powers to save herself, at which point she is ordered to report back “for torture and beheading.”

Ever the voice of reason, Lisa Simpson rushes in and asks, “Doesn’t the Bible say, ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged?’”

“The Bible says a lot of things,” Wiggum replies. “Shove her.”

I don’t get confronted about my “sinful lifestyle” as often as you’d expect, especially given the fact that I live in Oklahoma. Mostly this is because I avoid any situation wherein I’d be forced to interact with someone who wants to debate this issue with me. The whole experience is so awful and Kafkaesque, like suddenly finding oneself on the surface of Venus, all poisonous air, unbearable pressure, and all that heat. I mean - who needs it? “Meh, the Bible says a lot of things.”

I got an e-mail from an old friend the other day. I’d let him read some of the stuff I’ve been writing of late, and he responded back that he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to put together these odd-fitting puzzle pieces - believing something so deep that it goes to the core of who you are and why you’re in the world, but finding that most of the people who share that belief also seem to think that you have to change something that you don’t think you can, or to live your life without companionship.

“Sometimes I think the only way to have true peace is to turn away from being gay,” my friend wrote. “But could I be happy? I don’t know.”

For me, the path toward something resembling peace necessarily had to involve turning away from trying to be straight, or, more to the point, turning away from my intense idolatry of being good at things. Conquering homosexuality was, for me, like a final in Jesus Class, the one thing I saw standing between me and something like a diploma: if I could get on top of this one major struggle in my life it would signify that I was Okay.

Let me be as clear as I know how to be:

I.Am Not.Okay.

And I LOVE being good at things.

I may have accidentally, a long time ago, confused the accolades I got from my parents and teachers with - and I’m just saying it’s possible that I did this - love. At six years old or so I might have unintentionally started to think that being good at things would mean that I wouldn’t have any problems whatsoever, and, conversely, that the way to avoid having problems was to avoid doing things I was bad at.

Well, you can see the problem.

When you grow up being great at things, and then convert to Christianity, wherein our failure is presumed, is Step One, then you end up kind of flailing about. And boy, did I flail. But the other great thing about Christianity - about life in general really, and I learned this early on as well - is that it’s not always so important to be good at something as it is to look like you’re good at something.

This is what the Pharisees did. They managed to look great at believing, at following God’s Law, and, they presumed, God. Then Jesus had to come along and just kick the living shit out of all of that, by telling them that God didn’t care if they were following the law if their hearts were all mucked-up inside, if they treated other people, especially the poor, like dirt to be wiped off their shoes.

It was kind of the same way with me. I got pretty good at being a Christian. I sort of considered myself Jesus’ press agent on the small southeastern campus where I earned a bachelor’s degree in - what else - religion and philosophy. I wrote about Jesus in the campus newspaper, I talked about Jesus with whomever would listen, and I carried a Bible around with me. Everywhere.

I figured out my opinions and beliefs on every issue, and by some miracle it seemed that God had already come to those same conclusions. Hallelujah! I led small groups and youth groups and prayer groups. I was a missionary for two months in another country. I really thought I was doing pretty great.

Oh, except, you know. I liked boys.

And like a good little soldier, I went to war with those desires: I prayed them away. I asked others to pray them away. I read books, I went to a counselor, I gave myself the blood pressure of a 55-year-old man, and, at the age of twenty, I completely, entirely burned out.

The great thing about prayer, the really, really wonderful thing about prayer is that it only really works when you stop thinking you know what to pray for. So, fatigued with my struggle, having beaten myself into a state of total, utter submission - oh, and not that nice sounding kind of submission; this was the kind of submission that you get when you’ve held on to something for so long that it has dragged you all over Kingdom Come - I just prayed, “I don’t know. Help. Help. Help. Please Help.”

And nothing happened. Or, that is to say, nothing happened on my timeline, which is to say, nothing happened right that minute. No windows opened in my soul, no light descended from Heaven, no angel knocked on my door; there wasn’t even a perfect song on the radio or a verse from the Bible, randomly opened to an arbitrarily-chosen page.

But what did happen is what always happens when we really, truly surrender: there was just a tiny little bit more air, more room to breathe. I felt like I should tell a prayer group that I was a part of what I was going through. And so I did, and two of the guys in the group told me that they struggled with the same thing, that they lived in this same hot, cramped space that I did, and I could see that they were suffering the same way I was.

Then, out of the blue, two other men I knew confessed to me that they were dealing with homosexual attraction, neither one of them knowing that I was dealing with it as well. They just needed someone to talk to, and something guided them to me.

I started writing copiously. My journal filled up. A legal pad I carried with me filled up as well. Then I left the pad somewhere and a guy from my fellowship group found it, came by, and said he’d read it, accidentally, and that he was struggling with homosexuality, and could we go for a walk?

I saw all this suffering around me, my own confusion mirrored back at me, these guys trapped in this same ugly old soup. What I saw in their eyes broke my heart - I saw Sisyphus, pushing the rock up the hill only to have it tumble back down again. I saw pointlessness.

After awhile I got it. I got that being good at being a Christian is an illusion. I got that I could spend my whole life trapped in this cycle, or that I could safely step out; not only that I could step out, but that I should, that this was where I was being led. The mirrors, the other people I’d met who were wrestling with this shadow, pointed the way out for me.

Now of course it went terribly; of course I screwed it all up and if I could do it all again I’d so it so much differently. Who wouldn’t? But I know in the deepest, truest part of me that God wanted me away from that cycle of beating myself up, being good, falling, feeling, beating myself up again, always wishing the feelings away. I got that I was meant to feel, and fail, and fall, and learn how safe I am all the while.

And you know what? I’d say, about ten percent of the time, I still get it. The Bible says a lot of things. One thing it says is that with God, we’re always safe. So we can flail and fail and fall and feel and dance and love and be, safely.