By Jan Shannon
If you think God, the God who created you, only loves you when you behave ‘right’, your God is shallow.
If the God you worship says he loves the soul but hates the body, your God is shallow.
If your God is more concerned with what goes on in the bedroom than in the heart, your God is very, very shallow.
Think about it. People, God-created people, are made up of body, mind and soul. If God stops loving us when our bodies are not perfect, then God is a hypocrite. Bodies are not perfect, ever. What would perfect look like?
Babies are born every day with what we call birth defects; missing limbs, foreshortened colons, genetic anomalies in 100 different varieties. Are these children imperfect? Is it not just their physical bodies that are affected?
What about the mind? Babies are born with chemical imbalances caused by parental drug use, parental health issues, and sometimes for no known reason. Are these children imperfect?
As for the soul, this is perfect. This is where the true person resides. Does God place the soul in jeopardy based on the actions of the body or the mind?
Transgender people find themselves, their physical body, at odds with their mind. Their mind says they are one gender but their body displays the other. Some people are born with no determinable gender. Are these people imperfect? Are they not created by God? Is your God so shallow that He would judge their soul based on their body?
Many uneducated, uninformed people say that transgender people are “wrong in the head.” Is the God that created them so shallow that He would judge them based on their mind?
Think about it. God has created all things, and God has declared all things good. This God is NOT shallow. This creative God loves us beyond our body’s predisposition to decay, beyond our mind’s predilection to selfishness, beyond our soul’s ability to understand God.
God loves us unconditionally. This is where we humans get it so terribly wrong. WE want God to love conditionally, and WE want to set up those conditions. We want US on God’s good side and THEM on God’s bad side, because keeping THEM over THERE makes us look oh so much better. Sad.
If your child was born unable to move, speak, or communicate in any way, if they were never able to feed themselves or run and play like other children, would God love them any less? No. God loves them as much as every other person on earth. Then why do some people judge transgender people as wrong or broken or sinful? It makes no difference to God what gender we are, or how we dress, or how we talk, or where we worship, or if. God just loves us. Deeply.
If only everyone felt this way
K, thanks for your comment. I too wish everyone showed love to everyone, especially an oppressed and hurting community like trans folks. Thanks for stopping by!
Bravo! Magnifique! Sounds like Affinity to me Jan.
Thanks, Brien! What’s “Affinity?”
Checkout my Bio it kind of explains Affinity.
Keep the articles coming Jan, I always enjoy reading your perspectives on things.
Well done Jan!
Thank you, Dustin. I don’t think I said it very well, but my heart is hurting by the treatment of the trans community, and this was my small attempt to express that.
I’m not sure but I think the God you are referring to is the one perfectly revealed in Jesus. If not, then you can disregard my concern. I really don’t care to discuss the content of your post but the common misunderstanding I think it is based on. I think the misunderstanding has to do with the idea of ongoing divine “creation” as opposed to divinely created “procreation”. The latter I believe is easier to reconcile with our present reality and also the biblical story.
Steve, I really appreciate your comment. I see you are a missionary, wow! I have only been on some short-term mission trips, though I always dreamed about going on a longer one.
As to your comment, I am not sure exactly what you mean. I do believe that Jesus revealed God to us perfectly, and that God created humankind “good.” Perhaps you could rephrase your comment or at least simplify it for me? Unless I am reading you wrong, we are saying the same thing, right? God created humanity, and everything God created He declared good.
Thanks again for caring enough to comment. Open dialog is what Spokane FaVS is all about!
I was surprised to hear back from you so soon. I thought all of the Spokanites would be sleeping.? Let me try to explain a little. I was raised up in the church in the 80s and 90s. The typical argument for homosexuality being a choice was that… God won’t create people to sin. God, being just, can’t create people to be homosexual and then damn them for being the way he created. Logically for Christians, they would have to say that the lifestyle is a choice. So, that view of constant creation, ( God personally creating everyone perfectly) comes out of the view of “divine Omni causality” which then forces Christians to reject all scientific views saying otherwise. What I am saying is that after the “6th day of creation” God stopped being creator of life and started being the sustainer of life. He built in humanity everything needed to “procreate”. So that separates God’s perfection from every procreated human since Adam and the fall. We all have then been under the influence of sins destructive, corruptive power from the womb. Not until the coming of the 2nd Adam was the power of sin broken. But, for now it is still able to corrupt us and procreation in this world… Now for the hopefully not inflammatory conclusion… Is it possible that transgendered people are that way not because God caused it but because of the corrupting, destructive power of sin on humanity?
Steve, I apologize for taking so long to respond. As a full-time student, and part-time pastor, my time is often scattered…but I’m here now.
I see where you are going, and the danger I see in saying that trans folks are “broken” is that it might give some people ammo to attack them and try to set them “right.” If you are saying that ALL of us are broken, then I agree, but I would add that being trans is not more broken, just the same kind of broken that all of us are; inherently turned away from God. I know many trans folks; some are running from God and some are running toward God, just like the rest of humanity.
Until I met a trans person, I had only theoretical knowledge to apply to their situation, but now that I know so many, I see then as just like the rest of humanity, running toward or running away from God, in probably the same percentages as non-trans folks. However, being their pastor means that I take especial care when I use words like broken, perfect, and whole. As I mentioned in my article, a child born missing a limb might not be ‘perfect’ in the sense of normative, but is whole and perfect in God’s eyes. Mightn’t we say the same about trans folks?
Thanks for this insightful discussion. 🙂