When I "chose" to be straight...

One of my facebook friends recently put up a picture with a caption that said something like this:

"So being gay is a choice?  Well, then, tell me about when you chose to be straight..."

It wasn't hard for me to come up with my answer, although I know the poser was completely rhetorical.  Anyone whose mind is closed on the subject is likely to dismiss my answer out of hand anyway, but if anyone really cares to see a potentially unpopular view of the issue, read on.

First off, I never deliberately chose to be a sinner.  I was born that way.  From conception on, my entire natural bent has always been "me first."  I have never been naturally inclined to consider others except as their actions influenced my own life, my comforts, my own self-image, my pleasures and control.  As much as I thought of God at all, he was just one of those objects of influence, and the question of what he could give me, or what I had to do to get it, was my major concern.

While I had no real say over that sinful orientation, it is also undeniably true that I continually chose to sin. 

I sinned by doing things I knew were wrong, things I knew I would never want anyone to do to me, or condone people doing to others that I cared about (as much as I was able to care.)  I sinned by thinking less of people than they deserved from me, and out of the overflow of my callous heart my mouth often spoke. 

I sinned by not doing things that I knew were only basic human decency.  I did not recognize as I should have all the kindnesses done to me.  I did not take so many of the opportunities presented to listen to and learn from those who loved me about things that would have been good for me to know.  I did the least I could get away with to forge the kind of relationships and circumstances that I wanted and still feel halfway good about myself.  Worst of all, I managed to convince myself that this was the best that I could do, and better than most people were doing, anyway.

As a child, I started to make imaginary pictures of a God who thought that I was great just the way I was, whose love primarily meant that he would give me whatever I wanted regardless of how I acted.  God was a figment of my imagination designed to make my life good.  I had no real concept of how my heart looked to him, as selfish and self-absorbed as I tended to be.  Every good gift he gave was accepted as my due, and often carelessly wasted.  Every struggle was used to excuse my flaws, rather than to purge them and improve my character.

And when the idea of a God that might have some right to dictate what was "Good" and what was "Evil" became inconvenient, I tucked him away in the corner of my mind and covered that choice over with a blanket of rationalizations.

This was the very core of my being.  My heart was desperately wicked, and I barely had a hint of how corrupt I was.  I hadn't consciously chosen to be that way.  Nor was there any way, humanly speaking, that I could change it.

But something happened to me that woke me up to what I was.  God got my attention in a way that I could not ignore or brush aside, and made it plain beyond all doubt that I myself was responsible for the choices I made, even if I didn't choose to acknowledge responsibility.  When God was through with me, I could no longer choose anything but to turn my back on the crooked path that I had been stumbling on so long, towards the One who made me for something much better than I could have imagined.  And ultimately, what really counted then was his choice, not mine.

To be continued...