As a hobbyist songwriter, I recently started working on a song I titled ‘Are we in love?’, which explored how being in love affects the decisions we make and the way we behave. But the word ‘love’ does not necessarily mean the romantic or sexual kind.

According to 1 John 4:16, which tells us “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them”, we could rephrase this question as “Are we in God?” This rephrasing leads us to ask: are we living according to God’s will when we make decisions, and in the way we communicate our opinions?

In view of the LGBTQ+ community celebrating Pride this month, Jackie Hill Perry’s testimony of having her sexual desires redirected through contact with the love of Jesus may help us answer these questions.

Having been abused at a young age, raised with a mostly absent father, and feeling same-sex attraction at the age of five, Jackie eloquently and empathetically tells the story of how she was raised going to church. She would hear the popular, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten son so that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life”, without understanding why it is that we can’t experience the beauty of God’s love without Jesus.

Jackie tells that churches didn’t do a good job of caring for her, and so she remained inquisitive about homosexuality and decided to indulge in high school. Some years later, at a moment of feeling conflicted with comparisons between LGBT lifestyle and what she heard about God growing up, she reached out to a prayerful cousin. Someone who she knew she could have a conversation with, not as a gay person who needed to change, but just as a person. And this cousin helped lead her to Jesus.

In interchanging the word love with the word God in Romans 1:26, we can derive that love: has boundaries, is patient, but doesn’t really force its correction upon communities satisfied with not hearing it.

Painful experiences can cause the desires of our flesh to seem more natural than our desires for the things of God; however, as Christians, we should acknowledge that we don’t get to identify the right or wrong use of anything ourselves, as we, as humans, aren’t the original creators of anything.

Yet the question remains, once decided and progressive in surrendering to God’s love and sovereignty, are Christians being loving to those who still struggle or have decided otherwise?

Maybe only Love knows…

– Femi D