The Powerful Testimonies of Rosaria and Walt
By: American Decency Staff
"Unbelievers don't struggle with same-sex attaction."
Rosaria Butterfield says her love for women didn't come with a struggle at all; she just preferred everything about women – from their conversation to their curves – and she had peace and purpose in her lesbian life.
Now a national speaker and the wife of a pastor, the former lesbian university professor explains that it wasn't until she met Jesus that her sexual sin became something to be struggled over.
"Conversion brought with it a train wreck of contradictory feelings, ranging from liberty to shame. Conversion also left me confused. While it was clear that God forbade sex outside of biblical marriage, it was not clear to me what I should do with the complex matrix of desires and attractions, sensibilities and senses of self that churned within and still defined me."
Like all who have a confrontation with Christ, Butterfield realized that there was no going back. Now that she knew how much better than her sex life the Gospel was, she knew she had to leave the lesbian lifestyle.
"Today, I now stand in a long line of godly women — the Mary Magdalene line. The gospel came with grace, but demanded irreconcilable war. Somewhere on this bloody battlefield, God gave me an uncanny desire to become a godly woman, covered by God, hedged in by his word and his will. This desire bled into another one: to become, if the Lord willed, the godly wife of a godly husband."
As our culture struggles over these issues like homosexuality and gender identity, the perspectives of those who have experienced what it's like to wrestle with these issues and come out on the other side are invaluable.
Another touching and amazing testimony belongs to Walt Heyer.
When he was a child, Walt's grandmother would dress him in girl's clothes and, in his words, "withheld affirmations of me as a boy, but she lavished delighted praise upon me when I was dressed as a girl.'
The confusing emotions garnered from his grandmother's treatment followed him throughout his life until Walt finally underwent gender reassignment surgery at the recommendation of a psychologist.
Walt says that the relief of "being a woman in everyone's eyes" was short-lived.
"Hidden deep underneath the make-up and female clothing was the little boy carrying the hurts from traumatic childhood events, and he was making himself known. Being a female turned out to be only a cover-up, not healing."
Walt Heyer soon became so depressed, he became an alcoholic and consider suicide.
Even so, as a woman, Heyer went to church and accepted Christ in the midst of his struggle.
"Because the real truth that Christ is alive is the fact that you see a transformed life. And so what happened in my life is that when I finally… got down on my knees and was working through these things many years after I had accepted Christ – probably 10 to 15 years after I accepted Christ – I finally felt that I was broken enough as a man that I got on my knees and prayed."
Walt "detransitioned" to his birth gender and now runs a website counseling those considering sex reassignment surgery.
When Walt found a church that would accept him as he was, the pastor told him, "Our job is to love you and it's God's job to transform you."
As we hear more and more about homosexuality and gay marriage and sex changes, it is testimonies like Rosaria Butterfield's and Walt Heyer's that remind us that the answer is not in nailing down the right legislation or cleaning up the airwaves.
Those may be important short-term goals as we try to protect our culture from the affects of sin, but the only ultimate solution is, and always has been, Jesus Christ. As he revives hearts, the culture will be revived as well. Are you praying for revival and seeking to be used by Christ?
