As I shared my life story and Christian testimony with people over the years, some suggested I write a memoir. Yet one aspect of my story remained untold because that facet was a secret known only to God—a secret I intended to take with me to the grave. No one would ever know.
These suggestions, however, never really left me, and although I had little idea and know-how to transcribe this into reality, with God’s help I began writing during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 virus season. Because it is not just mine, but our story—my journey with God, I felt compelled to reveal my secret and thus it became part of, but not the subject of this book.
I was born and reared in Netherlands. My family were devoted members of a typical Dutch ultra- or hyper-Calvinist church in which the teaching of predestination stood paramount. In this theology, only the ‘elect few’ obtained salvation because they were predestined for heaven. The rest were sadly predestined for hell. At least, in its simplest form, that is how I understood my church’s teaching as I was growing up.
After a Damascus Road experience in my late teens, I unreservedly dedicated my life to God, regardless of what I was ‘predestined’ for. My commitment to Him was unconditional, just as God’s love and commitment to me is unconditional.
Shortly after this important and life-changing event I left Netherlands. My next forty years were a remarkable journey of faith, learning and revelation, as I travelled to the other side of the world with Him as Lord of my life.
I first travelled to New Zealand, where I lived and worked for seven years. There, God took me on an amazing Emmaus walk to expound the truth of His Word more fully in a new and living way. In the following years, I lived and worked in several Asia-Pacific regions, including seventeen years with Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) in Papua New Guinea and Arnhemland, Northern Australia.
From an early age I realised I was gay. I did my utmost to suppress my feelings and disregard my true orientation. As student of Scripture, I could find no support for acting on my same-sex attraction (SSA) in the entire written Word. In my early thirties, I decided to get married, firmly believing that despite our secret, God would enable me to honour this marriage. My wife and I were blessed with two sons.
When we left the mission field and settled into a suburban lifestyle in Australia, a setting I knew would be challenging for me, I confronted my true orientation. Believing I had moved beyond my same-sex attraction, I struggled with the fact that I was pretending and acting as someone I wasn’t. Personality and character are closely interwoven within one’s true orientation, and I could no longer pretend. I needed to be myself—the person God created me to be—imperfect in myself but made perfect in Christ.
This later-in-life confrontation, together with other matters took me to London on an extended vacation. In search of a solution, I sought professional counselling. Despite intense reflection and introspection and waiting to hear from God, the only counsel I received was God wanted me to be released from the cage in which I was trapped. How to achieve this, however, remained a challenging and complicated issue.
In spite of the heartache and separation that followed, our family remained connected in Christ because we are bound together with cords that are ‘not quickly broken’ (Ecclesiastes 4:12).
At the completion of our journey, I realised God had sustained and preserved me through it all. I can identify with the words written in Deuteronomy 8:4, ‘Your garments did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell (blister) these forty years’.
The purpose of this book is not to promote a particular denomination, teaching, or doctrine. I am not a gay activist, nor do I support gay activism. But my purpose is to testify about God’s amazing love, faithfulness and provision. His promise that if we truly ‘Seek, we shall find’ stands unshakeable. I simply endeavour to share our journey as it happened in God’s timing, by His grace, and in the light of His Word. In the process, I just did the best I could and knew at the time because that is all God requires of us.
