Why Did God Make Me Wait So Long?

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Acts 3, Adam's sin, bearing our cross, Bible, birth defect, Christian theology, core gender identity, corruption, Counselor, cure, delay, fall of man, fear, gender incongruity, Glory of God, God, God's sovereignty, God's word, Holy Spirit, Jesus, John 9, Joni Eareckson Tada, medical science, mental health, permissive will of God, Satan, suffering, Transition, Transsexual

Many people have asked me why I waited so long to transition, especially when their assessment, based on my testimony and what they see, is that it has gone so well.  About a year ago, my client Rachel astutely asked me a similar question, but one closer to my heart.  Here’s her question, and my answer (with some recent editing) follows:

Why do you think God made you go through all this? Are you someone he created to remind people that we can become whatever we want to, if we are strong enough and patient enough?

You asked about God.  That’s my favorite subject!  I consider myself a Christian first (because that deals with eternity), a woman second and a transgendered person next.

Is what happened to me to remind people that they can become whatever they want?  Not as I see it.  In one sense, yes I am becoming a new identity as I learn and develop a new persona for the rest of the world.  But all people are in the process of becoming as they go through different stages of life, school, adolescence, work, family, aging, dying, just to name a few broad categories.

In the broader sense, however, my task was not to become something new.  The struggle I had to wage was to become myself … my real self, not the identity that the world handed me (for which no one is to blame, because they were using the only evidence they could have).  But yes, I was patient.  That kernel of Lois inside of me waited and refused to go away.  And maybe I was strong enough, or had the right personality or the right resources (especially the Lord in my life) to hang in there until the time was right.

Some don’t make it.  They commit suicide or kill themselves when they violently attack their genitals. Some develop mental health issues such as depression. anger and other problems which mask their repression of their true gender.

In my case, my ability to cope so well may have slowed my progress.  Had I gone into crisis earlier, I would have needed to deal with it earlier.  But I am so plain vanilla in the rest of my life, it is almost unreal.  When my counselor gave me her required intake, she asked me a laundry list of symptoms (eating disorders, problems sleeping, phobias, impulses to hurt myself and so on).  I responded “no” to all of them and my subsequent counseling backed it up.  My life is akin to the reporter’s alleged question: “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”

I believe God’s timing is perfect.  I will discuss in greater detail just what parts I believe God did and did not play in the process.  This leads in to the main part of your question.

I don’t believe that God made me go through all of this, whether by that you mean being born with a gender dichotomy between mind and body or you are talking about why I went through it for so many years.  (Or maybe you mean both of those.)

Why was I born this way?  What’s the bottom line answer to that question?

The physical mismatch with a person’s inner core gender identity is a birth defect.  Spiritual corruption or Satan is the ultimate cause of birth defects.  In the present age, God has allowed these things, within limits.  On a global scale, I believe it is to remind us that we should not set to much stock in this imperfect world.  The perfect place we should long for is heaven.

But in some special cases, God allows certain birth defects, crippling accidents or severe illnesses to occur for His honor and glory.  A large portion of the ninth chapter of John’s gospel deals with a man who was born blind.  As soon as the disciples notice him, they ask Jesus what was the cause of this man being born blind, his sin or his parent’s sin.  Jesus replies that neither of those was the cause.  Rather, it was so “the works of God should be made manifest in him.”  And then Jesus heals the man and the man testifies to the people that his healing came from Jesus.

By the way, this verse is one of the justifications that it is permissible to change the condition in which you were born for the purpose of healing.  But perhaps it was only Jesus who was permitted to do this?  Not so, for at the beginning of Acts 3, Peter and John heal a man who was born lame.  When he enters the temple walking and leaping and praising God, it provides Peter with the opportunity to preach the gospel of Christ in the temple.

Sometimes God does not heal the body.  Sometimes the infirmity is not from birth but from an accident.  Here is a link to a short video where one of my woman heroes gives a summary of her life story and how God has enabled her to bear her cross.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVXJ8GyLgt0

After you watch Joni Eareckson Tada tell her life story, you might want to go to Joni’s website to see even more about just how much this woman has accomplished in God’s strength.

http://www.joniandfriends.org

I know that I could not carry the cross that Joni was required to bear.  According to her testimony, she has to turn to God when she wakes in the morning and throughout the day to carry it herself.  Then again, she might not have been able to bear my cross.

Getting back to your question: was it God who made me wait a long time before transitioning? The short answer is “no”, but it isn’t a totally satisfactory answer.  In Christian theology, a distinction is made between the sovereign will of God and the permissive will of God, as far as it relates to us as individuals or as a nation.  The distinction is that God sometimes allows us to do things that conflict with His sovereign will.  God has His reasons for making these allowances, including giving us an amount of free will.  God knows that He can redeem our going off course without interfering with His perfect eternal plan for the world, and that He will find a way to transform the situation we have created for His greater honor and glory.

For example, it was the sovereign will of God for the children of Israel to possess the Holy Land.  It was the permissive will of God that moved Him to anoint a king for them, even though He had warned them against becoming like the other nations and having a king.

So I believe that for the most part, it was the permissive will of God that caused me to wait so long to transition.  The reason I believe this is because, as I look back at my life, many of the reasons for the delays are not godly ones.  But God still was at work for His purposes during the delay, using me in many years of effective Christian service and to touch many lives in a positive way.

First of all, I do not believe it was God’s sovereign will for me to be born transsexual. I believe that in most cases, God wants people born whole and healthy.  In my case, that would have meant having a body that matched my mind, a female body.  But when sin and corruption came into the world, the Bible teaches that it allows Satan some power in the world.  As I stated earlier, I believe that generally speaking, it is Satan that causes birth defects.

For the most part, it was my hesitancy, my failure to act, that caused the delays.  And the main reason behind most of that hesitancy was fear.  But fear is not from God.  “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” (2^nd Timothy 1:7)

There was fear of what my parents would do, fear of how my peers would react, fear of punishment, fear of rejection, fear of ridicule.  Based on things I would read or hear, there was fear that God did not approve, while in reality, I didn’t know for myself what God thought of it.  (We should act out of desire to be obedient to God rather than fear of being disobedient.)

Then, as I got older, there was fear of losing income, jobs, or career.  There was fear of getting caught up in an unhealthy lifestyle, fear of AIDS, fear of the violence that was so prevalent against MTF transsexuals and still continues at a disproportionate rate today.  And the other fears of losing friends and family and displeasing God continued.

It is an oversimplification as other factors were involved, but I sometimes tell people that I transitioned because I became more fearful of not doing it than doing it.

Yes, every wagging finger of disapproval, every nasty joke, every report of a transwoman suffering violence or dying of AIDS, every thundering pronouncement from a pulpit or theologian’s pen that transsexualism is one of the vilest sins, every report of a failed attempt to transition: all these came from outside of me.  But the way I reacted to them was my choice.  Others my age knew and heard all these things and transitioned anyway.

To be fair to myself, many of my generation also tried to “cure” themselves before finally admitting the need to transition.  And many of those who transitioned against all the odds did so because they were more desperate than I was.  For them, it was either transition, severe self-mutilation or suicide.

The only part of the delay that was in accord with God’s sovereign will was that after I was saved, I needed to know what God’s word said about the matter.  And this is the one area where God clearly contributed to my delay.  For in the past two years, God has opened my eyes to a number of verses that speak to the issue.  It is reasonable to say that I was not able to see these verses because the topic is treated in an obscure manner in Scripture; that I needed more familiarity with the Bible, more maturity, more life experience and even more motivation to look more diligently.

It also took time for medical science in the areas of behavior and mental health to catch up to the truth of what being transsexual really involves.  It took time to come to the understanding that this is nature, not nurture.  We are born this way.  We don’t have a choice in the matter.  Until I learned these things, I couldn’t properly apply Scripture to the situation.

Even so, God could have revealed these verses and their interpretation related to gender at any time.  It is written in the Bible that the Holy Spirit teaches us all things.

So did God cause the delay and if so, why?  Based on what I have written, I will let you sort it out for yourself.  For me, I have learned to trust God’s timing and purpose and I don’t need to know every reason why.  Considering the nature of God, I am satisfied that while I will have understanding in some things, other things are too lofty for me.  Maybe I will find out in heaven, if it still matters by then and is important for me to know.

Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil. It shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones. – Proverbs 3:5-8

God bless,

Lois

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• Joni Eareckson Tada

God doesn’t make mistakes

Tags

Acts 3, birth defect, Christ, Christian, Congenital disorder, God, healing, Holy Spirit, inerrancy of God, Jason Mraz, Jesus, John 9, Transsexual

The song, “I’m Yours”, by Jason Mraz, is catchy and cute.  But in the middle of the song, one line stood out like a sore thumb.  It was so out of place, it was obvious that Mraz didn’t know the meaning of the key word in the phrase.  While trying to convince his audience to look inside and be more loving, he makes this claim:

“It’s your god-forsaken right to be loved loved loved loved loved.”

Taking this lyric as written, it means that we have a right to love or be loved because God has abandoned it.  An excellent example of the meaning of “forsaken” is one of the statements made by Jesus on the cross, as recorded in both Matthew and Mark: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

This is an amazing statement.  When Jesus took upon Himself the sins of the world to pay the price for our sins, His heavenly Father had to separate Himself from His only begotten Son.

While I leave you to ponder that statement (volumes could be and have been written on the subject), let’s return for a moment to Jason Mraz.  To his credit, he realized his error after the song was recorded.  No, he didn’t stage a massive recall and pull back all the copies that were already sold.  But on his website, he has stated that he has changed the key phrase to “god intended right”.

Mraz merely demonstrated what is true for all of us.  In our human nature, we are all prone to error.  Yes, that forces me to admit that there will be errors in what I post, though I study and pray so that my endeavor will be free from them.  Indeed, I edit what I write before posting, even multiple times.

But God is not an “oops God”.  How could error possibly enter into the plans and actions of an all-knowing and all-powerful God?

God doesn’t make mistakes.  The interesting thing is that when it comes to the debate on how God views transsexuals, both sides have used this argument to bolster their position.

Those who consider it a sin focus on the physical: for example, if God made a person with male genitalia, then that person must be a man, period, end of story.  For those who claim that it is not sin, the focus is on the mental: for example, if God gave me a female brain, then that is who I am, regardless of the physical body with which I was born.  In previous posts, I have argued as to why the latter position is the correct one.  Therefore, it is the position I hold.

But in this post, I will go beyond what I have previously written on the subject.  If we are out and about in the world on a regular basis, we see obvious examples of people born with bodies that have a defective part and we may know such people personally.  Reading the news on the Internet, it won’t be long before we come upon a story with the same topic.  So this is a fact without controversy.  The question is, what does the Bible say about correcting such imperfections when medical science has a way to do so?

I have been blessed by a number of Christians who I have told about my transition.  One of those blessings has been the thought-provoking questions they have asked and the interesting discussions that we have had.

A Christian client who showed her support to me early on had no problem with me changing my name and my external style and expression of myself.  To her, these actions were not sinful.  But she demurred when it came to me changing my body in any way.  Her reason was that God does not make mistakes.

Of course, I disagreed.  But at that moment, I did not argue the point.  No scripture verse came immediately to mind to use.

As is common for me, the verses were laid on my heart after a short interval had passed.  (Or perhaps they were there when I was talking to my client, but I didn’t see them right away.  I need to pray about this.  In other situations, like coming up with puns, my associations come quickly.)

What came to mind was the account of a man who was born blind as recorded in the ninth chapter of John’s Gospel.  When Jesus and His disciples come upon this man, his disciples asked Jesus about him: “And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” (verse 2)

Sometimes you can learn as much from what is not there as from what is there.  Notice that they did not ask why God made him this way.

And they correctly tie his birth defect to sin.  Where they fall short is in their limitation of the choices given to Jesus.  Given those two choices, you or I might have used logic and seized upon the obvious choice.  It had to be the parents’ sins.  After all, how could this man’s future sins affect how he would be born?

Jesus does not allow Himself to get boxed in by the limited choices.  He replies that the cause was not the particular sins of either the man or his parents.  Rather it was so “the works of God should be made manifest in him.”

The works of God referred to by Jesus were not his birth condition.  Instead, this particular work was the miraculous healing that Jesus performed on the man.  God did not create him blind.  He allowed it so that it would be one of many confirmations of Jesus’ ministry and the power of God in Him, as well as the man giving testimony to these things.

If the disciples correctly tied his birth defect to sin, but it was not the sin of him or his parents, then whose sin was it?  It was the sin that came into the world with man’s disobedience to God that allowed Satan a foothold in the world by which he could corrupt God’s perfect design of the human body.  So we must be careful not to think that God caused this man to suffer for many years for His own purposes.  Rather, God made use of the suffering we brought upon ourselves by giving into the temptation of sin.  This man was not singled out.  He was representative of birth defects that would occur many times before he was born and many times after.

Of course, I was happy that I had been given a passage of Scripture that applied to the discussion I was having with my client.  But then I received a check in my spirit.  What if correcting a birth defect is only something that God is allowed to do and that on earth, only the Son of God could do?  It didn’t take long before another passage of Scripture was laid on my heart.

In Acts 3, after the ascension of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit had filled His disciples, Peter and John, come upon a man who had been born lame.  What was translated as lame was actually two words in the original Greek.  The phrase is “huparcho cholos”.  Cholos is the word that is directly associated with the crippling defect that prevents or greatly hinders walking.  It literally means to be missing a foot or to be otherwise maimed.  The meaning of huparcho is to be, to begin or to come forth as.  In other words, he was lame from the beginning of his being.

God wants us to make sure that we know this man was born this way, because later on in the same sentence, we are told that he was lame “from his mother’s womb.”  Four very different Greek words comprise that latter phrase, none being huparcho.

We are then told that this man was carried daily to the gate of the temple called Beautiful.  Unable to even stand let alone work, he would beg for whatever charity the people coming to the temple might give so that he could survive.

Peter and John arrive at the time of public prayer.  Apparently this was an active time, because Peter and John had to get his attention away from the others passing by.  The man expects a tangible gift.  They have nothing tangible to give, but they have something far greater.

Here is how it is described in Acts 3:6-10: “Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.  And he took him by the right hand, and lifted him up: and immediately his feet and ankle bones received strength.  And he leaping up stood, and walked, and entered with them into the temple, walking, and leaping, and praising God.  And all the people saw him walking and praising God: And they knew that it was he which sat for alms at the Beautiful gate of the temple: and they were filled with wonder and amazement at that which had happened unto him.”

Once again as a testimony to those who knew this man (and for all who would read and receive these words), he who from birth was unable to stand was now able to do more than just walk.  He was able to leap for joy as he praised God.  Wouldn’t you if it happened to you?

I did not transition to be happy.  I did it to be authentic.  But is it any wonder that the people who know me well give testimony that I am so much happier now?  Is it any wonder that in worship I am so much more joyful as I praise God for everything that He has done for me, things far beyond opening my eyes to the knowledge that the Bible does not condemn me for transition?

The next time I met with my client, she told me that she had come to the conclusion that even if God makes us a certain way, it doesn’t necessarily mean it cannot be changed.  I still took the time to share with her the scripture passages that confirm that position.  (As we talked outside for quite some time, I also learned that nude pantyhose doesn’t make an effective sunscreen.  But that is a different topic.)

One final point that needs to be made: just because I refer to being born transsexual or blind or lame as examples of birth defects, does not mean that it is something to be ashamed of or that it wasn’t supposed to be that way.  I believe that God allowed me to be born transsexual for a purpose.  It is a purpose that I pray I can fulfill.

Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen. – Ephesians 3:20-21

God bless,

Lois