(Return to www.davidgoodwin.com)

I'm not a natural story teller; my mind is too abstract to link things in ways that make sense to the general populace unless I really think about it. That said, I spend a lot of time really thinking since my appalling lack of physical co-ordination extends as far as me having to really think to make sure what I'm eating actually arrives in my mouth.

But as usual, I digress...

In late 2009, I started telling my story; something I never thought I'd do. To me it was always just more words in world overfilled with wordiness, looking back on the past when we are directed to the future, & not useful for much except dwelling on those former things. But through the testimony of others I've learned being open about a life less clean-cut than many who've known me would believe makes me a better witness to the grace that God has extended to me & the transformation He keeps working on me, & a more accurate reflection of Christ in me.

It's a story with no end, littered with weird tangents, odd details, foibles, & depravity. But it's also a story of love, grace & victory.

First : links to the guest posts I've done over the past year where I started to reveal what I'd kept hidden from everyone, including my wife.

20 Oct 2009 - JenniClayville.com - Stereotyped?
30 Oct 2009 - DirtyGirlsMinistries.com - My 25 : A Battle for Truth
8 Nov 2009 - Shaken Not Stirred - They're People Too
17 Jun 2010 - NicoleWick.com - LGBT & Christianity
4 Aug 2010 - JennyRain.com - Man Week @ the Rain

Second : a few things to remember while reading the timeline that follows:

- most importantly, the love & support of my wife Diane has been instrumental in me coming clean. Her love for me as I reveal my struggles with sexuality reveals more strength than she believes she's capable of, & despite the fear & confusion I've put her through, we're more in love now than ever.
- there is no blame on anything or anyone. My life is what it is, & it's all because of choices one way or another - the good, the bad, the ugly.
- most of what is here is directly relevant to the ugly rather than the good or bad, though sometimes stuff is here because I've had questions, while other things are merely the aforementioned foibles.
- sometimes the tone aims to capture how I felt at the time, always clothed in a cool, calm, collected exterior. Now that cool-ish exterior clothes a happier, healthier interior; life is good if not a whole lot scarier now I'm no longer living behind a façade.
- the posts linked above aren't replicated below, though I think the main themes are captured. 1974 : February 4 - exited the matrix of my mother almost two weeks late. I hear this wouldn't be allowed to happen today & I would have been forced out earlier. We're so impatient these days.

1975-1978 : my recollections of childhood are almost all happy, but evidence would suggest my brain is capable of doing a great job of blocking reality. I know I had a basically happy childhood, great parents, wonderful sisters, a fun neighbourhood...but I also know it wasn't as perfect as my memory suggests. For instance, I usually think of myself as having always been fat. But photos show it wasn't always the case; something changed around the age of four, & that something likely involved a growing awareness of the supernatural & not being able to express it adequately. On a more socially acceptable supernatural note, four was also the age I gave my heart to Jesus, & I will never underestimate the importance of that decision.

1979 : starting school I remember first being aware of being almost devoid of physical co-ordination & therefore aptitude for team sports, rainbows suddenly became very important to me, & photos show obesity setting in as my weight continued to provide a relatively accurate barometer of my state of mind.

1980-1984 : the remaining primary school years were totally innocent; though as noted before, my somewhat notorious elephant's memory may be in elephant-size block mode. As it is, the only hurtful recollection I have of these years was the pain of being the unco fat kid.

1985 : primary school was completed by being school captain, dux, fatter than I'd ever been, & excitement about going away to boarding school the following year.

1986 : boarding school in a big city. The atmosphere for learning cultivated by quality academic & music education, and a multi-cultural, co-educational mix of 1,000+ students was genuinely enjoyable for me, & photos show I lost a ginormous amount of weight that first year. This may have been partly due to the non-stop "dancing" (I use the term loosely) as I fell into a deep love of pop culture, especially music, especially gay artists. It was also the year I made an adult-ish decision to give my heart to Jesus, whether that was necessary or not.

1987 : late in the school year, I witnessed a rape. I walked in on a 14 year-old, rugby playing roommate of mine sodomizing 12 year-old twin boys who were perhaps half his size., & my elephant's memory put up one of its elephant-size blocks as I numbed myself with food. At least, this is what I assume happened as the tell-tale photos show a very different, ballooning body compared to the one that had shown up the previous year. But on the surface, everything continued as normal : choral & academic nerd alert, pop culture maven status, & no improvement to my non-existent physical abilities. Ho hum.

1988 : our school had an 8 week program during year 10 living on a farm where the only electricity was for a refrigerator & a light; we killed our meat, grew our vegetables, baked our bread, & emptied our bucket toilets. Every.single.day. My class was there early in the year, & for many students it was a traumatic experience. I loved it. Some of my earliest memories of intensely close encounters with God took place during solos; one or two-day wilderness hikes undertaken alone, putting into practice the orienteering & bush survival skills we'd learned. My love of hiking & wilderness continues to this day, & photos from the time show I once again had lost all that excess weight.

Soon after I got back from camp, I remember lengthy discussions between the school principal & my parents about me taking part in an exchange program to spend a year in Canada. Apparently it would be valuable due to my advanced academic & emotional maturity countered by my young age; I was 18-24 months younger than most students in my year. I now wonder whether it was also related to my witnessing the rape & removing me from the situation. But I have no idea whether my parents knew; I don't recall talking about it at any stage, though I assume school would have told them. Elephant-sized blocks. In any case, I never went to Canada, my weight crept up again, & while most of my friends were girls, boys were more interesting to me...

1989-1990 : my final two years of high school were when I first had girlfriends, though I'd rather have had boyfriends. A few more traumatic events shaped life during those years, all centring on deaths real & imagined, & it all contributed to the general state of blah I remember feeling as I completed high school at age 16.

1991 : I took a year off from study & worked in my father's accountancy practice. This confirmed two things : (1) accounting - in real life, as I had found at school - was something that came naturally to a few, but not the vast majority of the population. (2) there was no way I was going to study a double degree with law tagged on as I'd originally planned. Ugh.

Living back with my parents in day-to-day life for the first time since I was 11 was also challenging as I observed as an adult some of the behaviours which would eventually lead to their divorce 18 years later. My weight soared again, my sexual identity struggles were still being swept under the nearest rug, church was (con)strict(ing), my years in the city made it hard for me to relate to small-town life again, & I spent most of the year looking forward to being at university.

1992-1994 : the college years. You'd think this would've been the time I'd have embarked on the stereotypical expedition into "self-discovery" via all the taboos, huh? Not me. I lived alone in my first year, so I had ample opportunity to dive in, but maintaining my good Christian boy façade won out. Life was university, world tours with contemporary classical choirs, rehearsals, concerts, church, home group & generally not very stereotypically studenty except for frequent drug-free raving (being sober made witnessing the drug effects on others far more entertaining). By '94 I was sharing an awesome house with both my sisters & a couple of friends, & the swimming pool meant our place was often party central. But still I kept myself in check, maintaining an illusion that usually felt easier than any alternative.

1995-1996 : started work with one of the world's leading accounting firms, having been snapped up in their recruitment process before I'd even started my final year of university. Within two days of starting, I knew I didn't want to be there, but I stuck it out for six months. During that time, I celebrated my 21st birthday, had my first (homo)sexual experience, & seriously contemplated suicide numerous times with a less-than-serious attempt at it once - all the while maintaining my "life is great" mask as I attended church & home group each week. I was going to write "as I worshipped" each week, but in reality there was little worship happening. Not of God anyway.

In June I was offered a cool job in a cool city, & hundreds of miles from my old life, I dived headfirst into all the fringe benefits my music industry job offered : rock concerts & after parties several times a week, virtually any & every vice you could name, & lots of clubbing. There seemed to be a new club opening every week, many of them gay bars. So even as I found myself a new conservative, evangelical church & home group, I had my double-life down pat, enabled by stellar organisational skills & my first mobile phone. And all this time, my weight - usually a fairly accurate barometer of my mental health - stayed fairly stable within the right range.

1997-1998 : by the end of '96 I'd decided to move back to my home town. Yes, you read that right. Sure, my father was offering to double my salary to work in his practice, but it really was my decision. Or at least what had become a rare moment where I was actually in tune enough with the Holy Spirit to go with His promptings. Thus ensued a miserable period for my flesh & a revolution for my spirit as I started wrestling with God; sometimes alone, sometimes with unwitting counsel, never being completely upfront with any one person. None of me wanted to change, but all of Him in me wanted & needed me to. The double life continued as I jumped into church life, community choirs, continued being a nice guy, & my mental health barometer suddenly kicked in to accurately reflect my roller-coaster emotional existence with an ever-changing waistline.

1999 : late in the year, after almost 3 years of fighting, a victory was won in my sexual identity struggle between who satan had convinced me I was & who God kept graciously reminding me I really am. When I stopped condemning myself, when I accepted I may never have a life partner, when I loved me just as I was, when I truly chose God just as He chose me, when I surrendered and stopped blocking Him out, God's transformative power was finally able to take hold & really start working in me.

And what I struggle with most about that is how to effectively put the enormity of what took place into words, because it's bigger than something science can explain, bigger than your average miracle, and beyond my own understanding - let alone anyone elses...

...

...in other news, I lost a ton of weight (ok, maybe not a literal ton, but lots). The weight loss wasn't totally linked to my improved mental state, but I have no doubt the healthier mind aided success in leading a healthier lifestyle. However, during all this and likely unsurprisingly, I managed to create a new source of struggle as I quickly made lots, then quickly lost even bigger lots, in the dot.com bubble. The impact of that loss has been long-lasting and painful, but I'm pretty sure if it hadn't happened, I'd be a much poorer steward of what God has entrusted to me.

2000 : my dad decided to retire & his practice was split between a few people, including me. I didn't want to take it all on myself, & while I didn't really know why, I just knew my life wasn't going to be tied to my home town much longer. This was also the year the renewed, victorious-yet-broken me went through the single most exponential spiritual growth period of my life. If I was graphing it, I'd make it a vertical line. I started to understand myself better which included healthy spiritual warfare, was an active part of communities & lives being changed (not least mine) & I devoured the Bible a few times. I also lost another ton of weight, taking me to close to average.

2001 : the year I met Diane. Since conquering my battle with same-sex attraction a couple of years previously, there'd been a few dates with women, & I'll admit more than a couple of those had been experiments in how well the transformation had stuck (should I feel guilty about that? 'cause I don't...), but there'd been no-one who made the maddening cliche that singles everywhere hate ring true : "when you know, you know".

I can't overstate just how much Diane means to me and how much respect I have for her. I wish I could better describe how much wisdom she breathes into me, how much love she lavishes on me, how much joy she brings me, how much strength she gives me, but my words are inadequate vehicles for expressing my feelings. If you're interested, the story of how we met has been told using a series of five vlogs & a few text posts. They're lots of fun and representative of our love. But here I need to recap the big mistake I made in our relationship : even though we communicated far more, & more effectively, than many couples in the lead up to our marriage in 2002, I chose not to tell Diane anything about my past double-life. And in so doing, I continued to lead a double-life. Oh the irony. It wasn't a conscious decision, it just didn't come up, but that's so not right. It was almost like I rewound all the growth from the previous year with that one decision.

2002 : busy with wedding planning across the globe, running my accountancy practice & preparing to be in Northern Ireland for a couple of months made this a truly hectic, ecstatically happy year, despite the financial strains of a global wedding.

2003 : a discussion somehow moved into me telling Diane about a peripheral aspect of my past life; a fetish. They're rarely talked about openly in the Church are they? I think that might change soon, but until then...I'll continue not talking about them. What that confession did was open up the door for some further discussion about my past, but it also saw matters of trust becoming an issue between us, the "if he's not told me that what else is there?" niggles.

In this midst of starting to deal with this shocking revelation came the sudden cancer diagnosis & subsequent passing of Diane's dad, all within a 6 week period late in the year. We wrapped up the year in Northern Ireland with Diane's family, and dealing with the bus I'd thrown Diane under no longer had any place on our priority list.

2004 : our 30th birthdays were clouded by the reasons for our recent journey back to Northern Ireland, the additional financial strain it caused, & the grieving process. In the midst of it all, we made some major changes; moved to Sydney, jumped into new jobs, friendships, community, church family. But we still didn't speak about my junk much at all, even though being in the place where most of the duplicity had taken place provided ample opportunity.

It's easy to look at those few lines & think since we made major life changes during a time of grieving, all this must have been a mistake. I'll never know if it was; but I know it seemed like the right thing to do, & we don't regret those big decisions we made that year.

2005-2008 : life looked good, felt good, was good; we set goals, dreamed, planned, bought our first home, fell more in love with each other, with God, with life. Maybe we loved life a little too much, as there was a growing feeling we weren't exactly placed where God wanted us, but comfort made it easy to live with a case of the Jonahs. Then just as I became (semi-voluntarily) unemployed, the global financial crisis hit, & while its effects in Australia were minor compared to most of the world, it caused enough panic that management consulting and senior-level recruitment evaporated & we found ourselves in a very uncomfortable place financially. At the same time, our theology & worldviews came under attack, big time. It was war. Yet still my past stayed largely shrouded; it didn't seem like it was affecting us, I had no idea what to be doing with it anyway, and as had become usual, continuing on the path of least resistance seemed easier.

2009 : this period of intensive life change really ramped up. Our lives had changed dramatically over the period from October 08 to May 09 & supported by some key friendships & accountability partners in Australia, along with a new community built around us through social media relationships, we finally gave in to God's gentle shoulder-tapping & made plans to emigrate to Northern Ireland, despite having no real idea why. We just knew that's where God was directing us.

Wrapped up in that was the realisation that my past finally needed to make its way out of the closet (I may be sorry for that bad pun) and over the subsequent year that's been happening both publically and privately. Facing up to the life I led, and effectively continued to lead by not being open about it with Diane, has been painful for both of us and will no doubt continue to be challenging as we move into the uncharted waters of life as an open book.

2010 was a year where we've moved half way round the world from Australia to Northern Ireland; spent an unforgettable & life-changing two months in the USA; met some amazing people here in Northern Ireland with a passion to see God's grace reign where legalism has ruled; determined to wait patiently to see what further life-change is in store; & and have revealed a redemption story that I once kept hidden for all to see.

But what now as 2011 rapidly unfolds before us?

Whatever happens, I want to be a faithful representation of God : His love, His grace, His transformative power, everything He has laid out in His word for me to be. Without love - without Him - this life story is nothing more than word noise in a world filled with resounding gongs & clanging cymbals. And that's no good to anyone for anything, least of all communicating a life transformed by His amazing grace.

If you have any questions, or just want to talk about what you've read here, you can email me here. And know that no matter what, you are loved.