What wounded me did not take my strength. I still trust God, love deeply, and live openly as the man He has always known.
What wounded me did not take my strength. I still trust God, love deeply, and live openly as the man He has always known.
When I speak of listening for the Voice of God within, I mean more than listening for what He may be saying to me. I am also listening for His voice in the people I meet.
I believe God speaks within every person, even when they haven’t yet learned to recognize Him. Sometimes something in another person’s words, silence, expression, or presence draws my attention. I understand that quiet awareness as the Spirit of God showing me that this person may need something I can give.
It may be nothing more than a smile or a warm greeting. It may mean slowing down long enough to listen or allowing a conversation to go where it needs to go. I don’t always know why the moment matters. I only need to remain open and respond.
This doesn’t mean that every passing thought is God’s voice. It means living prayerfully aware—close enough to hear His direction within me and present enough to recognize where He may want to use me.
On October 18, 1996, I wrote a five-page letter to my parents after attending the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Washington, D.C. I told them I was gay. I also wrote about the intuitive gifts I had spent years questioning and how accepting them had drawn me closer to God.
I did not understand then how much of my future I was naming. I was beginning to see that God was not asking me to become someone else. He was asking me to stop hiding the man He had already created.
Near the end, I wrote:
“I have not changed. You just know more about me than you knew before.”
That sentence still holds true.
Called into Being follows my continuing movement from wrestling with the call to living it. These are personal reflections on what it means to become the person God has been forming all along.
Whispers of Joy offers Scripture-centered reflections for ordinary days. Each reflection creates a quiet place to notice how near God already is.
For many years, I edited Mike out of the version of my life I shared publicly. I knew how quickly a room could change when people learned the person I loved was a man, so I learned to tell my story carefully.
But Mike was never a secret to God. Loving him did not separate me from God, and losing him in 2004 did not erase the life we shared. Our relationship changed me. He belongs in the story of who I became.
His name now lives beside mine in MiKyl Creative Ventures. MiKyl carries part of Michael's name and part of mine. To others, it may be the name of a company. To me, it acknowledges that love does not stop shaping a life simply because someone is gone.
I am no longer willing to tell my story as though Mike were absent from it. I loved him then, and I love him now, and he belongs here.
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There have been moments throughout my life when something arrived before I had any ordinary way of knowing it. Sometimes it came as an image or a word. At other times, I simply knew.
For years, I questioned those experiences, even when what I received proved meaningful to someone else. My greatest conflict was not the gift itself. It was the fear that naming it would place me outside the faith that had held me since I was sixteen.
But this way of knowing never pulled me away from God. It made me pay closer attention to people. I began to recognize when pain lived beneath the words someone chose or when something unresolved was asking to be heard.
I no longer believe I must deny the way God made me in order to remain faithful to Him. I receive this knowing as one way His Spirit works through me. I don't need everyone to understand it. My responsibility is to listen carefully and offer only what I believe may help.
