On Feb. 14, 1999, I started to go to the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church—and not for research. Even though I felt like a freak in that church, I was drawn to keep going back.

After a subsequent meeting with Pastor Ken Smith, I came home and my lesbian partner told me that I was changing and she was concerned. What did I need? Some time away from my work? Maybe we needed to take that long vacation. T is a psychologist, and you can’t hide a lot from a psychologist.

A transgendered friend’s words were still weighing heavily upon my heart. Who is this Jesus that He heals some but not others? Is it right to pray for healing when, from the Bible’s perspective, I was to repent from my sin? Does God hear prayers that are not construed in the terms He lays out in the Bible? If Jesus is the living word, can we pray “through” Him if we do not follow Him as our Savior and Lord? These questions weighed hard on me.

That night I prayed and asked God if the gospel message was for someone like me, too. I viscerally felt the living presence of God as I prayed. Jesus seemed present and alive. I knew that I was not alone in my room.

I prayed that if Jesus was truly a real and risen God, that He would change my heart. And if He was real and if I was His, I prayed that He would give me the strength of mind to follow Him and the character to become a godly woman. I prayed for the strength of character to repent for a sin that at that time didn’t feel like sin at all—it felt like life, plain and simple. I prayed that if my life was actually His life, that He would take it back and make it what He wanted it to be. I asked Him to take it all: my sexuality, my profession, my community, my tastes, my books, and my tomorrows.

Two incommensurable worldviews clashed: the reality of my lived experience and the truth of the Word of God. In continental philosophy, we talk about the difference between the true and the real. Had my life become real, but not true? The Bible told me to repent, but I didn’t feel like repenting. Do you have to feel like repenting in order to repent? Was I a sinner, or was I, in my drag-queen friend’s words, sick? How do you repent for a sin that doesn’t feel like a sin? How could the thing that I had studied and become be sinful? How could I be tenured in a field that is sin? How could I and everyone that I knew and loved be in sin? In this crucible of confusion, I learned something important. I learned the first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin. How much greater? About the size of a mustard seed. Repentance requires that we draw near to Jesus, no matter what. And sometimes we all have to crawl there on our hands and knees. Repentance is an intimate affair. And for many of us, intimacy with anything is a terrifying prospect.

When Christ gave me the strength to follow Him, I didn’t stop feeling like a lesbian. I’ve discovered that the Lord doesn’t change my feelings until I obey Him. During one sermon, Ken pointed to John 7:17 and called this “the hermeneutics of obedience.” Jesus says, “If anyone is willing to do God’s will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from myself.” Ah ha! Here it was! Obedience comes before understanding. I wanted to understand. But did I actually will to do His will? God promised to reveal this understanding to me if I “willed to do His will.” The Bible doesn’t just say do His will, but “will to do His will.” Wanting to understand is a theoretical statement; willing to do His will takes action.

I knew I didn’t have that! I prayed that the Lord would give me that wholehearted will. I learned that the Lord wants all of our loyalties under submission to Him. He wants us to identify ourselves, to call ourselves by name, in His name for us. In my case, my feelings of lesbianism were familiar, comfortable, and recognizable, and I was reluctant to give them up. I clung to Matthew 16:24, remembering that every believer had to at some point in life take the step that I was taking: giving up the right to myself, taking up his cross (i.e., the historicity of the resurrection, not masochism endured to please others), and following Jesus. The Lord made it clear to me that I had to make some serious life changes.

I started to obey God in my heart one step at a time. I broke up with my girlfriend. My heart really wasn’t in the breakup, but I hoped that God would regard my obedience even in its double-mindedness. I started to go to the RP church fully, in my heart, for the whole purpose of worshiping God. I stopped caring if I looked like a freak there. I started to receive the friendship that the church members offered to me. I learned that we must obey in faith before we feel better or different. At this time, though, obeying in faith, to me, felt like throwing myself off a cliff. Faith that endures is heroic, not sentimental.

Then came the night terrors. Night after night, dreams so vivid and real that I could taste and feel them. Dreams so commanding that when I finally awoke, I felt filthy and delirious.

My journey out of lesbianism was messy and difficult. I spent a lot of time in prayer—and still do. I leaned heavily on the counsel of the women of the Syracuse church, including Floy Smith, Vivian Rice, Becky Smith, Robyn Zorn, Corrine Thompson, Marty Wright, and Kathy Donath. I asked them vulnerable and real questions, and they answered me and loved me anyway. The journey out of lesbianism had many dimensions; and, the Lord was gracious in leading me a small step, then burning the bridge I crossed to keep me safely closer to Him. From the first night, there was no going back.

Slowly but steadily, my feelings did start to change—feelings about myself as a woman and feelings about what sexuality really is and what it really isn’t. I—like most everyone who identified as gay or lesbian—felt very comfortable, very at home in my body, in my lesbianism. One doesn’t repent for a sin of identity in one session. Sins of identity have multiple dimensions, and throughout this journey, I have come to my pastor and his wife, friends in the Lord, and always to the Lord Himself with different facets of my sin. I don’t mean different incidents or examples of the same sin, but different facets of sin—how pride, for example, informed my decision making, or how my unwillingness to forgive others had landlocked my heart in bitterness. I have walked this journey with help. There is no other way to do it. I still walk this journey with help.

The teaching, the prayers, and the friendships the Lord has given to me through the body of Christ have blessed me richly. I’m grateful that the Lord brought me to a church that was as strong on teaching as it is on compassion. Did I find the perfect church? No. I almost left when things got hard, and they got hard fast. The time that I brought my drag-queen friend to church pushed a lot of folks out of their comfort zone.

A lesbian student of mine attempted suicide and came to recover first at the pastor’s home and then at my home, and the Christian community and the lesbian community had to spend a lot of time together. I was really nervous. My lesbian friends had to learn that not all Christians are bigots. My Christian friends had to learn that Christians have a lot to learn from gay and lesbian folks about mercy work. At first, I missed the power in this fruitful exchange, and instead felt deeply uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to bridge the two groups.

Sharing one Friday night at the home of Ron and Robyn Zorn, Ron reminded me that bridges get walked on and that is a normal part of being a bridge. Ah ha! And then I relaxed, remembering that this is the Lord’s work, not mine. Bridges, though, do get walked on. If the Lord calls us to be a bridge, we have to learn to bear in His strength the weight. And it hurts. And it’s good. And the Lord equips. As He promises in Scripture, He gives us the strength we need to stand steadfast and trust in Him. The Syracuse church no doubt grew in compassion because of the urgency of need that I brought, and my lesbian community grew in knowledge of what life in Christ can look like.

God sent me to a Reformed and Presbyterian conservative church to repent, heal, learn and thrive. The pastor there did not farm me out to a parachurch ministry “specializing” in “gay people.” He and the session knew that the church is competent to counsel (to quote the title of one of Jay Adams’ useful books). I needed (and need) faithful shepherding, not the glitz and glamor that has captured the soul of modern evangelical culture. I had to lean, and lean hard, on the full weight of Scripture, on the fullness of the Word of God. I’m grateful that when I heard the Lord’s call on my life, and I wanted to hedge my bets, keep my girlfriend and add a little God to my life, I had a pastor and friends in the Lord who asked nothing less of me than that I die to myself. Biblical orthodoxy can offer real compassion, because, in our struggle against sin, we cannot undermine God’s power to change lives.

Healing comes through God’s work, and God deals differently with us when we deal differently with Him. When we repent, He hears. Do I believe that I’m healed? Yes. My life shows the signs. My life went from black-and-white to color. At first I didn’t recognize myself in the world. Today, I don’t recognize myself in the pictures from my life as a lesbian.

Dr. Maureen Vanterpool, a colleague from Geneva College, told me recently that my being a lesbian was a case of mistaken identity. This became an intriguing and important paradigm for me. And even though I’m no longer a lesbian, I’m still a sinner. I’m redeemed, but still fallen. And sin is sin. I believe that the Lord is more grieved by the sins of my current life than by my past life as a lesbian. How did the Lord heal me? The way that He always heals: The Word of God got to be bigger inside me than I. My natural inclination was to resist, so, like a reflex, I did this. God’s people surrounded me. Not to manipulate. Not to badger. But to love and to listen and to watch and to pray. And eventually, instead of resisting, I surrendered. Shortly after becoming a Christian, I counseled a woman who was in a closeted lesbian relationship and a member of a Bible-believing church. No one in her church knew. Therefore, no one in her church was praying for her. Therefore, she sought and received no counsel. There was no “bearing one with the other” for her. No confession. No repentance. No healing. No joy in Christ. Just isolation. And shame. And pretense.

Someone had sold her the pack of lies that said that God can heal your lying tongue or your broken heart, even cure your cancer if He chooses, but He can’t transform your sexuality. I told her that my heart breaks for her isolation and shame and asked her why she didn’t share with anyone in her church her struggle. She said: “Rosaria, if people in my church really believed that gay people could be transformed by Christ, they wouldn’t talk about us or pray about us in the hateful way that they do.”

Christian reader, is this what people say about you when they hear you talk and pray? Do your prayers rise no higher than your prejudice? I think that churches would be places of greater intimacy and growth in Christ if people stopped lying about what we need, what we fear, where we fail, and how we sin. I think that many of us have a hard time believing the God we believe in when the going gets tough. And I suspect that instead of seeking counsel and direction from those stronger in the Lord, we retreat into our isolation and shame and let the sin wash over us, defeating us again. Or maybe we muscle through on our pride. Do we really believe that the Word of God is a double-edged sword, cutting between the spirit and the soul? Or do we use the Word of God as a cue card to commandeer only our external behavior?

Although grateful for it, I did not perceive conversion to be “a blessing.” It was a train wreck. After we profess faith in Christ, the next morning the alarm still rings and we have to swing our feet out of bed and do something. And while we cannot lose our salvation, if we are not growing in spiritual maturity, we can lose everything else. What I faced at work following my conversion was the rubbish of my sin, forgiven by God, but still there to be cleared away. This required a newer and even more intense understanding and application of Scripture.

When I became a Christian, I had to change everything—my life, my friends, my writing, my teaching, my advising, my clothes, my speech, my thoughts. I was tenured to a field that I could no longer work in. I was the faculty advisor to all of the gay and lesbian and feminist groups on campus. I was writing a book I no longer believed in.

I was scheduled in a few months to give the incoming address to all of Syracuse University’s graduate students. What in the world would I say to them? The lecture I had written and planned to deliver—on Queer Theory—I threw in the trash. Thousands of new students would hear my first, fledgling attempts to speak about Christian hermeneutics at a postmodern university. I was flooded with doubt about my new life in Christ. Was I willing to suffer like Christ? Was I willing to be considered stupid by those who didn’t know Jesus?

The world’s eyes register what a life in Christ takes away, but how do I communicate all that it gives? Do I really believe, in Charles Bridges’ words, “The very chains of Christ are glorious” (Prov. 33)? Peter, after being beaten for preaching the gospel, rejoiced that he was “counted worthy to suffer shame for [Christ’s] name” (Acts 5:41). I pondered this. To the world, this is masochism. To the Christian, this is freedom. Did I really believe this? Do I really believe this today?

I wondered: If my life was the only evidence that Christ was alive, would anyone be convinced?

What about my home, my habitus? A habitus is a way of life that forms habits of the head, habits of the heart, and habits of the mind. My habitus had heretofore been a bastion of leftist political activivism. What does a Christian habitus look like, especially one run by a single ex-lesbian with a now defunct Ph.D.?

What about my drag-queen friend, who had prayed for the Lord’s healing? What exactly did that mean? What exactly is repentance? If it is a way of life for a Christian, I needed to understand it fully, comprehensively, deeply, and well. What of my responsibilities to my gay friends? Were their secrets still safe with me?

What does joy in Christ mean when faced with duties that you don’t want? As I am sure it is clear by these concerns, I did not, in any way, want to “share the hope that lies within me.” I wanted to go back to bed and draw the covers over my head.

Conversion put me in a complicated and comprehensive chaos. I sometimes wonder, when I hear other Christians pray for the salvation of the lost, if they realize that this comprehensive chaos is the desired end of such prayers. Often, people asked me to describe the lessons I learned from this experience. I can’t. It was too traumatic. Sometimes in crisis, we don’t really learn lessons. Sometimes the result is simpler and more profound: Sometimes our character is simply transformed.

Rosaria and her husband, Kent, live in North Carolina with three of their four children, where Kent serves as pastor of the Durham RPC. This article is excerpted from the book The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, to be released by Crown & Covenant Publications July 1.