The last three years of my life have included a facet I never expected (or wanted, if God had felt like asking). It was terrifying then excruciating, daunting, mystifying, galvanizing, still terrifying, and has slowly and subtly given way to becoming one of the most significant parts of my life. I don’t anticipate that changing. It’s a charged, polarizing, emotional topic for most people, including everyone that I love and care about, in one way or another.

Many of you might know what this is about, but many of you don’t and I want to share this with all of you directly and honestly. However it sits with you, know that I love you. I respect your thoughts and journey and point of view. And I’m always here to chat.

In December of 2020, I realized I had fallen in love with my best friend, JT. I had met her through some pretty weird and seemingly supernatural circumstances in Belfast, Northern Ireland and we had become very close friends. I realized on that December day that I felt a different love for her than friendship, without knowing how that had happened. It was a blindsiding realization and prompted a long, hard, incredibly scary journey. These last years have included countless hours talking with God, studying, soul-searching, and engaging with literally hundreds of people that stand on all sides of the theological questions surrounding same-sex relationships and marriage in the Church. This road has forced us both to learn how to trust and listen for God more than we ever needed to before. It has been a formative one and certainly isn’t finished for either of us.

As of November 2021, JT and I are dating. We want to do the rest of our lives together and are interested in formal partnership/ marriage in the future. We are asking God to guide us and our relationship. We don’t know how this journey will turn out, and we want to invite those in our families and communities into the story with us.

There’s a very long version of the saga that has been the last three years. We are happy to tell you that story if you’d like to hear. For now, I just wanted you to know about a piece of my life that has become a central one and invite you into it if you’d like. I want to be able to engage humbly with each and all of you regardless of whether we have the same convictions on this topic at the end of the day. We see it as a story bigger than us and we want to be open-handed with it. And we care about how the Church interacts with this topic and the many complex stories it touches.

Thank you for reading, for caring, for wrestling, for supporting or not — we love each of you.

Until next,

-LS