Brett's final thoughts on the journey of Blue Babies Pink...
Mar 02, 2017•22 min
NOTE: This is the finale of Blue Babies Pink. If you haven't read the previous 43 episodes, please do that before listening to Episode 44. Also, after listening to this one, be sure to check out the Epilogue for the final wrap-up.
Mar 02, 2017•21 min
"I sprinted down that path, through the trees, all the way out to the boat dock—heaving, shaking, and sobbing as I ran. I felt like I might choke, fighting for breath. My face poured wet salt onto the summer grass below..."
Mar 02, 2017•15 min
"I began to think a lot then about the role of a spouse, of a companion. I'd never been in anything close to a meaningful relationship, and I'd slammed the door on love years before, so I was clueless about it all."
Mar 02, 2017•12 min
"My whole life, I'd been taught that God's design for the world was men and women getting married and making babies. This formed family units which were the building blocks of society. So it made sense that the institution of marriage would lead to great human flourishing."
Mar 02, 2017•13 min
Brett appears on a Christian TV show and disaster strikes...
Mar 02, 2017•12 min
"March 14 was the day I thought God cursed my testicles..."
Mar 02, 2017•9 min
"And while death is inevitable, we still have to live. We still have to do our best to use our lives well. This is one of the great paradoxes of life: That our time on earth is both utterly precious and completely insignificant."
Mar 02, 2017•15 min
"Every wedding was a little funeral for me. I held a little sad ceremony in my heart...a ceremony for one..."
Mar 02, 2017•11 min
Trip(s) to the ER...
Mar 02, 2017•10 min
"For the first time I began to wonder if this—all of this—was about more than sexuality. I began to wonder that maybe I'd been focused on the wrong thing all along. I began to wonder if this was more about the junk I'd been ignoring, than the one glaring thing that had consumed me for so long. And maybe—just maybe—if I could find some peace there, I could find peace everywhere..."
Mar 02, 2017•11 min
Thoughts on singleness and paying people to touch you...
Mar 02, 2017•12 min
"When I understood that, I realized most of my stresses in life came from this subterranean sense of self-hate that I carried around with me each day. Being unaware of the self-hatred inside of you is like walking through life with a backpack full of dead skunks. The stink is coming from you, but you're convinced it's everyone else's problem."
Mar 02, 2017•12 min
"And I believed that, if God wanted to love me—to hug me—He'd do it through my community. His people would surround me. They'd carry me. They'd love and encourage me on hard days. They'd push me forward when I couldn't walk anymore. God uses community to sustain us when we can't sustain ourselves. I learned that then."
Mar 02, 2017•10 min
Brett devises a two-part plan to survive as a gay Christian...
Mar 02, 2017•9 min
"And so sometime around 30, I slammed the door. I slammed the door on love..."
Mar 02, 2017•12 min
Brett has the hardest coming out conversation of his life + a lesson on how to respond when your child comes out to you...
Mar 02, 2017•24 min
"Jesus was so kind to me that day. He was so kind to send me a friend like Kelly. He was so kind to prepare that moment and those biscuits and that gravy. It's easy to get caught up in the ways God has let us down. And then, His grace comes crashing down—kamikaze-style—right into our lives when we least expect it. It is a glorious explosion."
Mar 02, 2017•17 min
Brett travels to Europe with a friend + an unforgettable night in London's oldest pub (NOTE: This episode is highly visual, and audio listeners are highly encouraged to visit the Episode 27 link on bluebabiespink.com to see the photos.)
Mar 02, 2017•17 min
Can God make a gay person straight?
Mar 02, 2017•13 min
"I would have done anything to just not be alone, to have at least 1% of hope that I wouldn't feel like this forever. And people who have felt hopeless before know that 1% of hope is a whole lot of hope. That's all I needed, but the Bible was clear. I had to figure out life without it."
Mar 02, 2017•11 min
Brett practices for a lifetime of loneliness—at an isolated cabin in the mountains and at a football stadium surrounded by 100k people...
Mar 02, 2017•18 min
"And still other failures feel like brands seared deep into the soft flesh of our souls. After the initial pain, they scab over, then scar over. And looking at it each day, we get used to it. It begins to look more like a birthmark than a brand. And we may even forget that it was put on us. We may forget life before it. We may forget that failed moments aren't supposed to stay with us forever. After all, it was just a moment. And moments never last."
Mar 02, 2017•11 min
"Closets are dark, and when the gay child—or in my case, young professional—decides to stuff his soul in there, it has a warping effect. It forces you deeper inside yourself. You become a mapless soul in a haunted maze, and you lose your bearings on who you really are. You begin to furiously reshuffle your inner life to present to the world the parts they want to see..."
Feb 03, 2017•11 min
Brett hears a friend say something about gay people he will never forget...
Feb 03, 2017•13 min
"Deep inside every workaholic man is a little boy who never felt big enough, strong enough, worthy enough. And that little boy can be very loud. He reminds the man of his lacking, of his lessness. Work is very noisy in the soul, so the workaholic uses that noise to drown out the little boy. Obsessive work can't deliver peace, but that's not the point. The point is that it's louder than the pain. This was me..."
Feb 03, 2017•9 min
"A lot of my friends got married in their mid-20s. And I began to notice a trend: When friends would get married, you wouldn't hear from them much anymore. This was new to me, because, before that, friends had always been portable. I could collect friends in elementary school and take them with me to middle school. I could collect a few more in middle and take them with me to high school. And then a lot of those stuck with me through college. Life before 22 was just moving from one single enclav...
Feb 03, 2017•12 min
"Yet while I was praying against it, I was simultaneously denying that same-sex attraction was a thing in my life. Back then, I denied that same-sex attraction was an intrinsic part of me. If anything, it was a clinger, a hanger-on, an invader, a tumor, a trespasser, a most unwelcome guest. It's like the 1986 movie Aliens, where Sigourney Weaver fights off a horde of alien invaders inside her spaceship. Same-sex attraction was like one of those aliens—not part of the ship—just freeloading, wreak...
Feb 03, 2017•12 min
"I think I was like a lot of people in that I WANTED it to be a choice. If gay is a choice, I thought, then it makes the Christian theology of it so much simpler. Religion is hard, because it requires faith. It's mysterious and, at times, inscrutable. Faith is the bridge that gets us through the uncertainty, but it's tough to hang with faith sometimes. Because of this, people of faith love the parts of it that are certain and agreed upon by everyone. I know I do..."
Feb 03, 2017•7 min
"But those who have kept pet secrets know they are hard to keep caged. They thrash and bite and wiggle around inside of you. They aren't well behaved, and they have a life of their own. All that inner chaos had become too much for me. I couldn't keep hiding it, but I needed someone who I could trust 100 percent. I needed ironclad, lockdown, never-tell-a-soul, government-grade confidentiality. I'm talking Area 51 style secrecy. People with big secrets know there's a giant difference between someo...
Feb 03, 2017•15 min
