We All Have a Story

Dannah Gresh: How many of you have noticed (as Laura comes on up and Rosaria’s going to join us by Zoom in just a moment) that the young people in our churches seem to put story in a higher place of authority than Scripture?

Now, this is how the enemy works, because the Bible tells us in Revelation that one of the greatest tools for warfare that we will have will be not only the blood of Jesus Christ, the blood of the Lamb, but the word of our testimony. So, Satan is distorting that right now in a terrible way.

What we want to do in the next few minutes is take time to hear the stories of two women, and these are stories that are mighty weapons of warfare for the good design of God. We’re going to talk with Rosaria Butterfield and Laura Perry. Rosaria, welcome! (applause)

Rosaria Butterfield: Thank you! Thank you for putting up with me on Zoom today. 

Dannah: We’re so happy to have you here today. 

You ladies already seem to know their stories, if the applause I heard is any indication. But we wanted to just take some time and revisit that for those of you who may not be familiar with their stories, and hear where they are today.

Rosaria, let’s begin with you. I can’t imagine the life you lived before you were the Rosaria that I know now! But you were an LGBT activist. I’m wondering, at what point in your life did you begin to feel yourself going down that road?

Rosaria: I think I’ve always been an activist at heart, if that makes sense to you. For me, truth has to be acted upon, and so once I have a notion, I’m moving forward with that! But, as Juli said, deception is real.

Deception means being taken captive by a force to do its bidding. When you have a deceived person who’s also an activist, that’s not a great thing.

So I was I guess what you would call a late bloomer. I dated men in college, and I found it to be really unsatisfying. In graduate school I had been in the LGBTQ community mostly as an ally and an activist, and then met my first lesbian lover at the age of twenty-eight. And, quite honestly, life just came together and made sense to me. And I thought, Aha! This is who I am. And so the Lord allowed me to walk on that path until I came to know Him at the age of thirty-six.

Dannah: And what a beautiful story that is! We’re going to hear that in just a moment. 

Laura, you have followed a little bit of a different path, and that is that your area of confusion was your gender. When was it that you started to feel confused about the fact that God created you to be female?

Laura Perry Smalts: It started really young. I can remember having those feelings at five years old. And for a long time I blamed a lot of other people for things that I believed. I believed a lot of lies as a child about who I was.

The Lord has shown me over time that it was my response to things that had happened to me, the sin in my own heart. I blamed my mother, because we didn’t have a very good relationship, and she was going through her own struggles and brokenness.

I was so jealous of the relationship she had with my brother. I harbored a lot of bitterness and anger towards her. As a very young child I was jealous of my brother and I wanting to be a boy. I started dressing like him. I started acting like him and I started playing with his toys. 

I was a little more tomboy, and I found it hard to relate to girls. But it’s like once I believed that lie and I had that filter on, everything in life sort of got put through that filter. And the enemy was so good with every little experience, where he would say, “See, she doesn’t love you!” or “See, you’re not like the other girls!”

And it just began to feed that over and over and I dwelled on it all the time!

Dannah: Yes, that’s the key word right there isn’t it: “dwelling”? When we begin to dwell on what we think is our truth, we go down that path further and further.

Laura: Right.

Dannah: But as most of you know, there was a turning point in both of their stories where God began to turn them back toward their good design. I hope this is an encouragement for some of you who are praying for loved ones. Rosaria, what was that turning point like in your life?

Rosaria: Well, the turning point was actually an argument. I was a professor at that point, a professor of Women’s Studies and English and Queer Theory at Syracuse University, and I had the green light for tenure.

So I started working on a book where, basically, I wanted to study why people like you hated people like me. I was just curious. And in the course of my research I met a pastor and his wife, Ken and Floy Smith. They were my neighbors, and they became my friends.

Quite frankly, at first I just thought Ken Smith was my unpaid research assistant for this book. He would say, “Read the Bible.” And I’d say, “Okay, what are we going to talk about?” I really genuinely wanted to understand this question.

Ken and Floy were amazing! I’ve written about this before. I think I probably had five-hundred meals at their house before the gospel really started to take root. They loved me. They poured into me. They gave me their time and their care.

I started to read the Bible on my own, and . . . I don’t know how else to explain this except for to say that it all the sudden dawned on me that (this is what Mary was talking about in her topic) I was not just a physical person. I was a spirit and a soul. I’d spent all this time thinking about ways of physical care. And I include in that getting a PhD, yada yada. And zero time thinking about my soul! 

It was at that moment that the Lord really entered into my world, and I realized that the Bible was starting to get to be bigger inside of me than I. 

Dannah: Wow.

Now, I was reading the Bible pretty heavily. I’m a heavy reader, as most English professors are. I ended up reading the Bible seven times through before I even started to budge on this. That gives the Holy Spirit a lot of time, even with a very hard-headed person’s life! (laughter)

I started to realize that if I wanted Jesus—and I did! (and that was shocking!)—I needed to repent of a sin that just felt like “me.” That was confusing, and I realized I needed to learn how to hate my sin without hating myself. And that was a very long spiritual journey, but that was the turning point: repentance unto life.

Dannah: I have two questions related to that. One is, you said you ate five-hundred times with them? 

Rosaria: I think so. 

Dannah: That’s a lot! Do hear the persistence it takes to minister and love someone through this. It takes time!

Going back to what Juli was talking about, when you were having dinner with this couple, was the gospel offensive? Did they offend you at times?

Rosaria: Well, I’ll tell you: yes and no. I’m old, right? I’m sixty years old. So I’m not of the generation that thinks we have to agree to have dinner together. And I even had a stick-um on my desk at the time that said I’d rather be wrong on an important point than right on a trivial one. 

So, we disagreed. In fact, one of the things that Ken Smith would say over and over and over again was, “I accept you without approving of you.” There is a difference between acceptance and approval. I think because Ken was fair with me . . .

He didn’t say, “I’m pretending you don’t exist,” or “You’re a blank slate, and you just need Jesus,” or “If you were just lobotomized, we’d all be friends.” He saw the common grace in my life, and he even let me exercise that.

I like to bake bread, and Floy gave me this awesome bread recipe I still use today. I’m a pastor’s wife, and I bake bread for communion every week, and I use this recipe. They let me bake bread for them once a week. They included me in those ways.

So, accepting me without approving of me was a very powerful way of allowing me to relate to them even as what they were saying was of course offensive. How could it not be?

Dannah: Yes, beautiful, I love it. They were your friends. They were friends to you. Laura, what was the turning point for you?

Laura: I thought I should back up just a second. I never even thought about me being trans (just for anyone that’s not familiar with my story). I had been in lots of sexual sin before that and was so broken. I was just giving myself away to every man. It was this intense jealousy of men.

There’s a lot more to that, but when I went down that road I was absolutely convinced . . . I ended up having two major surgeries. I had hormones. I had a beard. I had hair all over my body, a muscular voice. 

So, I was really committed to that lifestyle, and I really didn’t understand the things that had led me to believe in that. All I knew was that I felt like a man. I’d felt like a boy my whole life. But the Lord began to draw me, and really it was just the prayers of my parents and God’s grace. 

Despite all the sexual sin, I didn’t want anything to do with God. I wanted to be the opposite of a Christian, whatever that was. I wanted absolutely nothing to do with God, but He kept pursuing me anyway.

He kept revealing Himself in dreams and other things, like through the radio. I heard so many different things on the radio. God was over the years just drawing my heart. 

My mom had asked me to make a website for her Bible study. I had no interest in the Bible study, but I had this brilliant idea that I thought I would summarize the lessons for the website. She didn’t even ask me to do that. She didn’t figure out some kind of plan on how to fix me.

It was hilarious. She had tried to fix me for forty years, and then all of the sudden when she really surrendered me into the Lord’s hands and said, “I can’t fix this!” God ended up using her through His plan. 

But as I began to read the lessons, the Word of God just began to penetrate my heart. My life’s verse is Psalm 107:20, that says, “He sent his word and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions” (KJV). It was really the Word of God that just began to change me.

At one point I was really repentant and really poured out my life to the Lord, and I got radically saved . . . and I was going to be a man of God! I was so excited!

But, genuinely, the Lord met me where I was. I had the mindset that I had to fix myself in order to be good enough for God, and I was so stunned when the Holy Spirit came into me and I really, really was changed. I was just on fire for Jesus.

The Lord began to convict me more and more and more. And the more I learned about the Word . . . I was so hungry for the Word! I was memorizing it, and I was listening to it for hours and hours a day. God was pouring His Word into me. But the funny thing about the Word is, the Holy Spirit uses that to convict, and He began to just change my heart over time.

When I left that lifestyle, I honestly thought I would be miserable the rest of my life. I had no expectation for transformation. I honestly just thought I would be really, really miserable. But I was going to do that. I knew I had to do that to obey Christ. And it’s like, “Okay, I know this will be okay in heaven one day,” but until then, I just had no hope.

Dannah: So there was a delay. You were positionally sanctified before Christ, having surrendered to Him, receiving His salvation, but you weren’t quite convinced yet that your gender identity needed to be a part of that or could be a part of that. There was a delay in those two things.

Laura: Yes.

Dannah: Ladies, which of us comes to know Christ and is fully sanctified the next day?

Laura: Right, or ever in this life?

Dannah: Right, or ever! I’m still working on this. Anybody?! Rosaria, was there any kind of delay for you after you received Christ?

Rosaria: Oh, my goodness! Oh, absolutely, absolutely! I think it’s the challenge of progressive sanctification, which was what Laura was just referencing, and saying we’re never going to be completely sanctified in this life.

Part of it is you just keep trying to take the trash of your life and saying, “God, could you maybe baptize this, could you maybe sprinkle something over this, and can I keep this?” Because dying to yourself, it’s really miserable! At this point I had this amazing church family that just walked me through it.

Laura talked about Psalm 107, but for me it was Psalm 113. We’re psalm-singers, so we’re singing Psalm 113 in worship, and I am fuming mad! The Lord used that to not only appreciate the promise of what it means that He will take the barren woman and make her a keeper of the home in joy—not only appreciate that—but then to allow me to actually embody that, to live that out. That was astounding! 

But, yeah, absolutely, there was a war inside me. And as best as I can explain it, it was a war between my sexual identity and my union with Christ.

Sexual identity is a twentieth-century term. Nineteenth century produced the idea of sexual orientation, the twentieth century produced the idea of sexual identity, and the twenty-first century produced gender identity. And these are all false categories of personhood. 

False as they may be, my biography was tied up in them. And at the same time, union with Christ is eternal, unbreakable, and irreplaceable. So for years there was this war. I’ve come to appreciate that this is called “being a Christian.”

Because every woman listening to me knows this war. I mean, this is it. So Laura and I have a particular context for this war, but you all have a story.

Dannah: Yes, that’s right! It’s Romans 7—the battle between the flesh and the spirit, right? 

Well, let’s go back to that psalm. Did the Lord make you a mother? What does your life look like today, Rosaria?

Rosaria: Isn’t this crazy!? I mean, look at how amazing the Lord is! I don’t have pictures of what I looked like years ago. I praise God this was before the internet, so I’m a little bit good to go on this.

Yes, it is amazing. I am married to a wonderful godly man who is also my pastor. We have four children by adoption. The Lord chose not to open my womb, but He did grant us four children by adoption.

But beyond the physical things (I love this!) my children have given me a kind of weight, because they kind of hold you in one place. They hold you at home, which is, for example, why I am here in my study talking to you and not in Indianapolis. My husband gave me a covering.

I remember when I first was engaged to Kent. I had people saying, “What!? You’re going to leave a tenured position at a tier one research university to become a church planter’s wife?! Are you crazy?! Do you need a PhD to change diapers? Are you whacky? What’s wrong with you!?”

And I guess I did need a PhD to change diapers and to be a . . . I don’t know, but the Lord truly did return all of the years that the locusts have eaten (see Joel 2:25). Every now and then I look back on the time that I got married to Kent, I had people say, “Well, you know your intellectual life is over. You’re probably never going to write another book. You’re never going to teach another class.”

And that’s just categorically not true—it’s not true at all! The Lord magnified the work that He called me to do. But my children and my husband are the joy of my life!

Dannah: It’s beautiful! When you say you love it, I can’t help but think that you said you bake your communion bread. I’m thinking, how many of you bake communion bread?! 

Like, she is loving entering into the work of being a homemaker, a wife and a mother, with joy! I have to ask you to share the really short version, how did you meet your husband?

Rosaria: Oh, ladies! Okay, I’ll give you the really short version. When I was in the Syracuse church, there was another man who entered through the door of the church. He also came out of a community of profound sexual brokenness, including the gay community. 

And unfortunately the church said, “Wow! Two horrible sexual sinners! Must be a match made in heaven!” Which it’s not, just a news flash. So anyway, we got engaged, and he introduced me to Kent. (laughter) I’m just telling you the truth, this is just the truth!

And then about a month before I was supposed to marry the other guy, the other guy said, “Look, Rosaria, I don’t think I’m really a Christian. We can’t get married.” Then, a couple of years later Kent Butterfield entered my life again. 

I’ve come to learn as a Christian, that what humbles you won’t hurt you! So, I came to this relationship a terrible sexual sinner, a whore, quite frankly, and my husband came as a pure and godly man.

 

I could spend some time being embarrassed about that, or I could see that as a fine example of Christ and the Church, and so I choose the latter. (applause) 

Dannah: Today, Rosaria is radically making her home the place where the gospel is shared, just the way she received the gospel in a home. She has a wonderful book called The Gospel Comes with a House Key. I would say that is the Lord bringing Psalm 113 to life in your life, Rosaria. It’s beautiful, and I’ve loved watching it unfold!

Laura, bring us up to date on how the Lord has really just blessed and used your life since you came back. You are a very feminine woman! You have a soft beauty about you.

Laura: Which is such an amazing miracle!

Dannah: Tell us where you are right now.

Laura: Yes, it’s been such an amazing miracle! There have been times that I’ve been asked to speak in venues where people just want me to leave Jesus out of the story. I’m like, “I have no story without Jesus!” I did not figure out how to fix myself.

Like I said, I had no expectation. I had no hope of transformation. I really thought I was going to be absolutely miserable the rest of my life. But I was on fire for Jesus, and I was getting involved in the church, and I was memorizing a ton of Scripture.

Romans 12:1–2 says that we are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. And I think the Lord just began to renew my mind. The more that I obeyed Him and trusted Him . . . “Okay, I am a woman,” and I was just like, “I’m okay in this identity.”

Then the Lord began to bring healing as I began to reconcile with my mom, as I began to forgive those who had hurt me. I began to forgive the girls that had mistreated me when I was young, the men that had really abused and used me. I began to let go of all the bitterness, all the resentment, and I began to really trust the Lord.

I remember, I was in this women’s discipleship group, and I always pictured myself as, “I’m this former trans person and then these are all girls.” I always felt like I was on the outside of them, just like I did as a kid when I knew I wasn’t a boy, but I wasn’t quite “one of the girls.” 

But then I looked around the room one day, about six months into it, and I went, “But they don’t see me as any different! I’m one of the girls, like, I belong in the club!” That was astounding to me! We ended up doing the True Woman 101: Divine Design book, which I did not want to do. I was not happy about that!

But I’m already six months into this discipleship group and I’m like], “Well, I might as well do it.” But the Lord brought incredible healing through that series and then in other women’s discipleship that I was in. And God really used that to prepare me!

I began to desire a husband, and I just thought, What man is ever going to want me?! With not only my trans past, just identifying that way, but everything I’d done to my body. I still had to shave every day, I didn’t have breasts at the time. (I just recently got implant surgery.)

I didn’t have any kind of expectation. Plus all my sexual past, I thought, What good Christian man is going to want me after all I’ve done!? But the Lord was really preparing my heart, but He did have to do something first.

I had never been secure in being single. All my life I had had to have somebody to make me feel secure, and the Lord took me through a season of really surrendering that and laying that down. And for the first time in my life, I was comfortable being single. I thought, This is great! I don’t need to be married. I like being single! You know, I don’t think I want to be married.”

And then, God brought an incredible man into my life last year! We were just married four months ago and hopefully some of y’all will meet him. His name, actually, is funny. My last name was Perry. His first name is Perry. (laughter)

So God brought me a man named Perry. I think the world of him, so I am so excited for him to join me! 

Dannah: We celebrate with you, Laura. (applause) And you today now are in full-time ministry helping people navigate this issue of gender and confusion, bringing clarity. 

Laura: Yes.

Dannah: Laura’s going to be coming and speaking at the Christian high school that my husband founded a few years ago. You go and you speak to schools and churches. And, just in thinking through and praying through how you ladies were going to share your stories today, a Scripture came to mind that I want to read and have you both reflect on.

But first I want to say this: Juli’s already kind of taken us there to remind us that the ground is level at the foot of the cross. There are no worst sins. All of them separate us from God. And yet, sexual sin, Paul says, is a sin like no other because it is a sin against our own bodies. It hurts us and wounds us in a way that other sins don’t.

I’ve known that, and some of you have known that in your life. My story doesn’t look like Laura’s, it doesn’t look like Rosaria’s, but when I was fifteen years old I proved that I’m capable of having sex with a man that I’m not married to.

As a teenage girl walking through that brokenness . . . And Rosaria, I got tears in my eyes a moment ago when you used the word “whore,” because that’s the word that the Enemy used to beat me up for so many years. It’s such an ancient word, isn’t it? It’s not even in our vocabulary.

And yet the Enemy will take our sin and bloody our hearts. The reason he does that is so that we cannot have our testimonies unleashed—the way that yours have been unleashed to rescue hearts. 

So I want to read this to you. What a promise! If your heart is feeling a little convicted and bloody today, listen to this:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we [have] ourselves [been] comforted by God. (2 Cor. 1:3–4 ESV)

Do you see that verse coming to life in their lives? The affliction Satan used to wound their hearts now is the comfort they’re applying today to our hearts, and they’re applying to so many lives! I want you to hear that if you are out there feeling like, “I don’t know what kind of testimony I can have for the Lord.” This is the promise. 

The Lord needs to heal your heart, but as He does, He’s going to use you to pour comfort out on the hearts of others. Thank you for doing that for us today, ladies. I want to ask you a question: What is their first step? If they are feeling convicted in their own hearts?

I’m not going to assume you’re all here for your grandchildren and your children. I know better. I’ve been around a few conferences to know that some of you are wondering, What’s my first step today? What do I do? Rosaria, how would you advise them if they’re feeling some conviction right now?

Rosaria: Well, my prayer and my hope is that you are in this room and you are able to identify some people who would be good people to talk with. I will tell you that the panel that you’ve seen here right now, those would be good people: Mary and Juli and Dannah and Laura. I’m not there with you, but I would hope I would be, too.

Because the first step in all of this is really seeing sin for sin and repenting of it, which means that you’re turning from it. You acknowledge it, and then you’re leaving it right there at the foot of the cross.

And you are acknowledging that Jesus, if He is indeed Your Lord and Savior, that your sin is so bad a self-help program wouldn’t work. As Laura just said, “I have no story without Jesus!” We have no hope without Jesus.

But, the point is, we do have Jesus! This means we have the hope that we are new creatures in Christ. And when you are a new creature in Christ, here's the deal: you’re not lobotomized. I wasn’t lobotomized, you’re not lobotomized. I’m sixty, so I am sort of forgetting some things that I should have remembered.

But my biography will always have homosexuality in it, and a whole host of other brokenness and sexual sin. But in Christ, my nature never will! And part of what it means to be a new creature in Christ is, we look to the New Jerusalem. We are preparing for that!

And so, yes, we have a biography. It's not great. I wouldn’t choose it for myself. But, it’s also not real, because what’s real is my new nature. And that’s true for you, too.

Dannah: Talk to someone! Christianity is not a solo sport, my friends. It is something that we work out. He has given us Christ for our forgiveness, but He’s given us each other for the work of healing. 

Laura, in addition to that, what would your advice be for someone that’s feeling maybe a little confused about gender?

Laura: Talking to someone is great and having some accountability, but also the Word of God. Everybody I know that truly walks in freedom has really not only believed God’s Word and put it into practice, but has really filled themselves with the Word of God. The Word of God truly transforms.

Believing God that He is able to do more than what we are. I hear so many people that get stuck in that identity, even if they say, “I’m going to deny it for Christ,” but they don’t believe God for His power. I mean, the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead lives in you! And do we believe that He can transform or not?

There’s a passage that I love, Ephesians 3:20–21:

Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or [imagine], according to the power that’s at work within us. To him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations. (NKJV)

And that power of Christ, it’s an inworking of the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t happen overnight, but the Lord heals and transforms. There’s one other passage that came to mind about living in the light. 

If we live in darkness and we hide our sin and we don’t tell anybody, we’re not going to walk in freedom, but if we’ve got some accountability and really, really being in the Word of God. (see John 1)

Dannah: It’s alive and active. It really is alive and active!