Plot twist: I fell in love with women and preferred marriage

I recently had the opportunity to dialogue with Reginaldo dos Santos Gomes, who interviewed me for Vivendo em Comunhão.

Living in Communion is a Brazilian initiative devoted to fostering Christian conversations on a variety of issues including sexuality, friendship, and hospitality.

Reginaldo asked me to share how I came to terms with my sexuality and settled into vocational singleness.

Many people (including Reginaldo) are surprised to hear that I dated women while being transparent about my sexuality, enjoyed romantic intimacy with them, and preferred to get married.

While I’m not bisexual and was fairly out in college, I was in a Christian fraternity and had to take women to date events.

A handful of times, both my date and I were surprised by how much we enjoyed the date and decided to go on more.

Two different times I fell in love while we dated, and at one point we nearly got engaged (but later broke up for reasons unrelated to my sexuality).

That's all to say, by the end of college, I knew that if God wanted me to marry a woman, that could work.

I'd also studied what the Scriptures had to say about lifetime abstinent singleness for the sake of kingdom work with undivided attention. Both seemed like possibilities for me.

Eventually, the Holy Spirit made clear to me that I wasn't supposed to go take whichever vocation I wanted, but instead I was supposed to ask God whether He had a preference for which gift He wanted to give me.

So in 2014 I started discerning my calling. And I actually went into that process preferring marriage and hoping God would call me to that.

But by 2017, I felt strongly that God was calling me to vocational singleness in the context of committed community and started focusing building what would become the Nashville Family of Brothers.

Check out the rest of my interview with Reginaldo dos Santos Gomes of Vivendo em Comunhão at https://vivemcomunhao.medium.com/feitos-para-família-e-intimidade-673bc307b31e