An Open Letter · To Whoever Arrived
A number of things had to happen before you read this sentence.
If you ever, once in your life, believed things happen for a reason, read this now, because I don’t know how or why you arrived, but I know I was compelled to write this for someone I knew was coming…
You are loved by the God who made you, and that love existed long before you ever opened this page. Nothing on this page is going to undo that. Nothing in your past can undo it either.
The Christians who turned their backs were wrong to. The ones who whispered, who pulled their children aside, who left the room when you walked in — they were not acting like Jesus, who was famous in His own day for eating dinner with exactly the people the religious crowd refused to sit with. If that is the Christianity you have met, you have not yet met the real one.
And if you have felt like a fraud in those pews — like you don’t belong there, like you never have — hear this carefully: Jesus had no patience for the gatekeepers who locked people out of God’s house. None. He saved His sharpest words for them, not for the ones they had shut outside. If you have walked away from organized religion because organized religion walked away from you, that does not put you far from Him. It may, strangely, put you closer.
And if you were ever told — in so many words, or in the way you were treated — that you had it coming, that you got what was owed, that the harm done to you was somehow justice: that was a lie. Of all the lies, this one may be the cruelest, because it asks you to agree with the people who hurt you. You did not deserve any of it. The cross of Jesus Christ is God’s verdict on what you are worth to Him, and the verdict was extravagant.
Faith is not a building you have to earn your way into. It is a Person who already knows your name and is not surprised by anything in your search history, your phone, or your past. You do not have to fit anywhere on earth to belong to Him.
You are welcome here. Welcome to read every word on this page. Welcome to write back. Welcome to stay or to go. Nothing on this page is going to shame you, and nothing is going to pretend.
You’re going to hell.
Your desires are an abomination.
God hates what you are.
Christians reject you.
Christians judge you.
Christians don’t want you near their kids, their church, or their table.
You feel like a fraud when you walk in.
You don’t fit. You never have.
You’ve walked away from organized religion — because it walked away from you first.
You deserved to be hurt.
You’re not welcome here either.
The Most Important Thing on This Page
You did not choose the heart you were born with. None of us did. Every one of us came into the world with desires and pulls already written into us — longings we never picked off a shelf, leanings we never voted on. Whatever yours happen to be, you did not select them.
If you have ever stood in front of a mirror and thought, I never asked for this — how can I be judged for the heart I was given? — hear this carefully: that grief is honest, and it is universal. Every Christian who has been honest with himself has stood at that same mirror and thought the same thing. It is one of the oldest cries of the human heart, and the Bible names it plainly.
“Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”
— Psalm 51:5
That is King David. Not a stranger trying to win an argument with you — the most celebrated king in the Hebrew Scriptures, confessing he came into this world already shaped this way. So did you. So did I. So did every person who has ever taken a breath. The judgment of God does not fall on the heart you inherited; it falls on whether you receive the rescue He is offering to every one of us. The cross is not a verdict against you for being born. It is a hand reaching toward you precisely because you were.
Every human heart is the same. Heterosexual lust and homosexual lust, greed and gluttony, gossip and contempt, pride and self-righteousness — in our churches some get quietly tolerated and some get shouted at, but in the eyes of God they sit on the same page. There is not a category of sin God cares about more than another, and there is not a kind of person He writes off because of it.
“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”
— Romans 3:23
Not “some.” Not “those people.” All. That includes the people who said cruel things to you. That includes me. The cross is offered to every one of us on the same terms; grace is not graded on a curve. You are standing exactly where every human being who has ever met God has stood — at the foot of the cross, with no high ground, hearing Christ say come. We are equal — equally fallen, equally loved, equally invited, equally welcome. Anyone who told you otherwise was speaking for themselves, not for God.
Before this page says one more thing, it has to say this: people speaking in Jesus’ name have done you, or people like you, real harm. I will not pretend otherwise, and I will not soften the words.
For decades, churches in this country preached contempt where they should have preached truth in love. They told parents to throw out their children. They cut people off from their own families and called it holiness. They blessed the silence of the AIDS years when love would have run toward the dying. They licensed and funded what they called “conversion therapy” — practices we now know were not therapy at all, but coercion and cruelty wrapped in a Bible verse. They drove people into hiding, into shame, and some into despair from which they never returned. These are not exaggerations. These are facts, and the church owns them.
I cannot speak for every pastor or every congregation, and I will not pretend the whole church has reformed — some pulpits still preach the old contempt, and you may have heard one of them last Sunday. But I can speak for myself, and I can speak for the corner of the church that has stopped, has looked at this history honestly, and has repented of it. We were wrong. We were wrong in what we said, wrong in what we did, and wrong in what we failed to do. I am sorry. I am sorry in the most plain and unqualified sense of the word — not “sorry you were offended,” not “sorry if any of you misunderstood,” but sorry for what was done.
If you have heard apologies like this before and stopped believing them, I understand that. I will not press you to believe this one. I will only ask you to read the rest of this page knowing that I know.
Because words are cheap and you have heard plenty of them, here are the specific things this page will not do, and the specific things I will not do if you ever write back to me:
The Bible never speaks about disordered desire the way the protest signs do. It speaks like a father — sometimes grieved, sometimes stern, sometimes laughing — but never like a mob. The mob is a human invention. The father is the one Jesus came to show us.
Here is one passage that has been used to wound, but read carefully it does the opposite. Paul is writing to a church in Corinth — a city that, by every honest account, looked a lot like the internet on a Friday night. He lists every kind of sin you can imagine, including same-sex acts. And then, without warning, he writes this:
“Such were some of you.” Past tense. He is not writing about outsiders — he is writing to people inside the church, people who walked in carrying every one of those sins and walked deeper into the love of God anyway. Whatever the sin was, the gospel made it past tense. That is the news the protest signs never quote.
I am not asking you to do anything with that verse. I am only asking you to notice that the same Bible the protest signs claim to be quoting from is the one that says such were some of you — and meant it tenderly.
You do not have to write back. You can close this page now and I will never know you were here. That is fine. The seed is planted either way.
But if you want to write — about anything, including anger at this page, including grief, including the thing you have never told anyone — there is a form at the link below. It goes to one person. One pastor reads it. There is no list, no follow-up, no algorithm, no “outreach team.” You decide whether you ever hear back.
And if you would rather just see what this publication believes in plain words, that page is here too. No pressure. No closing pitch.
Or if you simply want to read — to wander through what this voice has written about other things, with no obligation — the articles are open. You are welcome here.
Write to one pastor What I believe Read the articles
With more care than this page can hold, Pastor Lyvers