Using his parents’ love as an example, Mike Hawkins, of the Christian AIDS Network, said individuals need love and personal acceptance to break away from a homosexual lifestyle.
Hawkins’ father, Marlin, is controller for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma. His mother, Patsy, works part-time for the BGCO. They are members of Council Road Baptist Church, Bethany.
“My parents told me they could not accept my lifestyle, but they would never stop loving me,” said Hawkins, a former homosexual who has AIDS said in an address at Oklahoma Baptist University, Shawnee. “A lot of people quoted 1 Corinthians 6:9 to me, trying to get me back on the right path, but that only made me want to stay (a homosexual) because it sounded like rejection. But they never read verse 11 to me.
“Verse 11 says I can be washed,” Hawkins said. “It says I can be free.”
Hawkins said he came to a point in his life where he believed he was born homosexual. As a pre-school child, his only playmates were girls and by the time he had started school, he could not relate to the games other boys were playing.
By the time his junior high and high school years had rolled around, he had already been labeled “queer.” He said he wanted friendships with other boys, but every time he attempted to have one, he was ridiculed.
“I desperately wanted to have male friends,” Hawkins said. “I wanted that so badly. I later mistook that as a homosexual longing. It wasn’t so much a choice, but a trap I fell into that Satan had set.”
Hawkins used the illustration of a washing machine that was sure it was a television until it looked at the instruction manual and found out differently.
“We have an instruction manual from our Creator, too. It’s the Bible. I was not born that way … so how do I get out of it?” asked Hawkins. “I couldn’t do it. But then I realized I wasn’t supposed to do it. I was supposed to release my life to God. I work with people who are struggling to get out of that lifestyle. God can change your heart and your life when you can’t do it yourself. I stand before you today 100 percent homosexual-free by the grace of God.”
Hawkins said it was the love of his parents that first inspired him to make a change.
“No matter how much I hurt them or deliberately made them cry, they were there for me,” Hawkins said. “They told me they could not accept my lifestyle because of what God’s Word says, but they would never stop loving me.”
In December 1991, Hawkins was hospitalized with an AIDS-related disease. He and his parents, who had kept his homosexuality a secret, decided they would need the support of their friends.
“As we began to tell people, instead of the rejection we had expected, and instead of people running away from us, people came running to us,” Hawkins recounted. “The church was incredibly supportive. All those years we carried the burden alone, but when we needed Christians to be Christian, they were.
“And no one asked how this happened,” he said. “When people you know have AIDS, don’t ask them how they got it. That question sends the signal, ‘depending on how you got the disease determines how I will respond to you.’”
Hawkins said he has occasionally had trouble dealing with the fact that he has AIDS.
“I would say to God, ‘Why me? You knew beforehand that I was going to come out of this; why did you let me get this disease?’” Hawkins said. “But Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:7, that when I am weak, then I am strong. For me, AIDS doesn’t stand for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. It stands for Adventure In Divine Submission.”
________
Fink is a newswriter at Oklahoma Baptist University. Copyright (c) 1995 Baptist Press