In every sermon and Sunday School lesson about Genesis 3, Eve was always the antagonist of the story. She was the one who disobeyed God, who communicated with the serpent, and who convinced Adam to eat the forbidden fruit. She’s the reason shame befell the human race and the reason God kicked them both out of the garden.

But what if Eve wasn’t the bad guy, so to speak?

What happens if we come back to this text with fresh eyes and a different hermeneutic?

Purity culture trauma left me with a pretty severe case of vaginismus — I could barely insert small tampons, I couldn’t handle a gynecological exam, and I definitely couldn’t have penetrative sex.

I walk daily in a world where
this picture
this swimsuit
this body
will cast doubt on the truth of my experiences

This blog post is a copy of a Facebook post I made, which was based on a Twitter thread.

Find the unrolled Twitter thread here, the original Twitter thread here, & the Facebook post here.

The concept of setting boundaries is still relatively new to me. I didn’t know until recently that it is acceptable & normal to put boundaries on relationships. I thought that expending emotional energy on every person who entered my life was just the way it had to be. So this past week, I exercised my new understanding of this topic to lay down some pretty intense boundaries with someone who definitely deserved all the snark that came along with it.

I recently received a message from someone I knew in college; I’ll call her Bekah. We played sports together, but were never very close. I wasn’t very close to many people, actually, because it’s hard to get close to people at a conservative Baptist college when you are secretly deconstructing your entire belief system.

Anyway, I haven’t spoken to Bekah in almost 3 years, but she just couldn’t help herself. She sent me a message about the fact that I came out as bisexual, & I felt compelled to respond. Jared helped me write the message (& he also made me take out all the big bad swears *pouty face*). Below is the text of our messages.

“I never became more queer. I can’t become less queer. But my awareness of myself – my falling-in-love, non-discriminatory silly starry-eyed self that falls in love with people whose funny, gentle, kind, fierce souls shine out through their eyes whether they’re men or women – that queerness is a thing that I have discovered over time. And that queerness, and my growing understanding and acceptance of it, is who I am.

Being queer doesn’t make my life any less a testament to the glory of God or the work of God’s spirit in my life or make me less wholly, entirely Jesus Christ’s.

The more queer I am, the more Christian I am.” [1]