Guy picked up his prescription at work. Very nice, like a smooth passion just to help people was burning inside of him.
He gave me his card and I sent him an email. This is the email.
------------------------------------------
This is ****, the individual you spoke with at CVS pharmacy today.
"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes." - Gene Roddenberry, author of Startrek.
I've struggled with my spirituality for a long time. What I'm writing below will require an open mind. I saw a kindness in you that I don't see in a lot of pastors down south, so I'm entrusting this information to you just like you'd entrust your information to me at the pharmacy.
The way I was born I was born as a transsexual. For whatever reason, ever since I can remember I have been driven and have desired to be female. I've already gone that path once, but my conservative south baptist parents forced me off of hormones at 15 after I'd been living full time and successfully as a female.
That really started the hatred of this religion in me.Ever since I've been just living as a guy. I've gone through drugs and self mutilation. I've been through men and women in my sex life and found that I'm really not sexually attracted to anyone or anything, I just find the entire act displeasing to me mentally.
Eventually I straightened my life out. I moved out at 15 but dropped out of highschool at 16, went straight into college and started full time work. At 17 I got my GED. I got into sports and start competing in weight lifting at a national level, I was everything my parents could have ever wanted me to be but I had done it on my own. I realized this just wasn't me.
For a year I wanted back on hormones but quit when I was considering joining the marines to serve the country, seeing as even though it seems as if my country hates me, I still love my country. That didn't work out, they stopped me from shipping because they thought I was
gay.So I've been laying off the weight lifting that I so love, and I've been pursuing my college and living day to day life... just trying to take the steps to live fulltime as a woman and do what it takes to get the final surgery.
It's nice to be mentally stable and sober and all that jazz, but it doesn't mean much if you can't like who you see in the mirror every day, so that's my goal to change right now.
The biggest obstacle I think I faced from when I turned 15 was religion. I've always felt a strong calling to Christianity. Perhaps it's just being raised in the south that did it to me, or it's a legitimate religion, I don't know. I know that two other religions equally as credible discount Christianity, saying that the documents have been flawed and adulterated and the principles have been changed. That still doesn't stop this feeling, this heart stopping desperation in my heart that something is wrong with my life when I'm not giving into this feeling.
And yet, while my heart seems to cling so strongly to this set of beliefs, my mind is disgusted by it. I don't understand how a God could make the universe, make humanity, and send us to hell for it. We're born with a brain that will is as complex and diverse as anything we've ever studied, and yet amazingly simple. It's a computer, given a stimulus it will produce a response. The operation leading to that response is based off of the hardwiring of the brain(nature) and previous experience(nurture). Both of which are results of a Creationist theory. As such it can be deduced that every single decision I make has been predetermined before I was even born, by the person who made me, and the person who made the universe: God.And that he would send me to hell because he doesn't like how he made me, he doesn't like me doing what I was born to do, is just something I can't accept.
For years I've struggled with this. I've tried to accept the Hebrews/Isalmic theory that the Bible has been alterred. I've seen enough evidence to convince me, but enough evidence to the contrary to reverse that conviction. That and saying, "I'm a Christian" but only accepting the parts of the religion which I see fit isn't any form of commitment at all, it's just self-procclomation; it's an ego boost and I can't stand doing something half-assed like that.
Since I couldn't get around that the teachings of the Bible were a little legit and a little distorted, then I had to accept they were either true or not true. If I accept that the Bible is the word of God then I find myself inclined to hate God with every particle of my being and wish he'd have never created anything if he's only to make it suffer because he doesn't like his own creation. If I accept that it's false, then I'm back at square one, trying to figure out what to do with this empty hole in my heart.
So I said, "screw this." And I focused on living life and being happy to wake up each day and just breathe. I'm happy to be alive, and I try to tell myself that if I was created by some sentient divine being, that the best way I could make Him happy is to reach for the potential I was born with and make Him proud of the person I'm becoming.
It took away the hatred and confusion and frustration that was building up in me for years as I went back and forth between trying to be a christian and finding that I couldn't sit right with what being a Christian was. But even still, that doesn't completely satiate the thirst of my soul, if I've even got a soul. That's honestly the best way I can describe my situation, both the present and the past.
If I have some major misunderstanding, then let me know. I figure that I've been through enough churches and enough heartache, pain, and straight up depression over this to have thought it out pretty clearly. But it's been years since I've gone into a church, or even looked at one without half glaring at it and half hoping to walk into it.
Hopefully at 19, after two years of working full time and full time college and sports I might be strong enough to battle this out again, either with myself or with God, and come to some kind of finality. I don't know what sort of church you run. I don't know how accepting it is. And I don't know if it has what I'm looking for in there. So I hope you'll give me your counsel and your advice. Thanks for taking the time to read this if you've gotten this far.
