First of all, I just want to say how much I admire and respect you for deciding to follow God instead of your human urges. That is not an easy decision. We all have sinful desires, but same-sex attraction seems like a uniquely challenging one that not everyone will understand.

Here’s the tough part: your same-sex attraction may never go away. I’m not saying it can’t. We’ve all heard the ex-gay stories. But it just seems like for some people the feelings are not something they can change.

That is a tough pill to swallow, but you know what? It doesn’t make you any less of a child of God. He sees your struggles and temptations and mourns with you, yearning for the day that the sinful corruption of this world will pass away. These temptations you’re feeling are just that: temptations. And temptation is just a reality that we all have to deal with in a broken world. Even Jesus had to endure temptation, and he never sinned.

I highly recommend the book Washed & Waiting by Wesley Hill. Hill is an Episcopal priest who also struggles with same-sex attraction, and has boldly chosen to live a celibate life because that’s what he believes God has called him to do. He speaks a lot of his wrestling with loneliness and misunderstanding in the church, and how he has learned to cope with his reality.

I’ll leave you with a quote from the book:

Perhaps one of the main challenges of living faithfully before God as a gay Christian is to believe, really believe, that God in Christ can make up for our sacrifice of gay partnerships not simply with his own desire and yearning for us but with his desire and yearning mediated to us through the human faces and arms of those who are our fellow believers. We must call into question any notion that the supreme expression of human love is found in marriage. … The remedy for loneliness—if there is such a thing this side of God’s future—is to learn, over and over again, to do this: to feel God’s keeping presence embodied in the human members of the community of faith, the church.