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In April 2019 het André Bekker nege getuienisse van voorheen homoseksuele mense van Suid-Afrika op Facebook geplaas. Hier is die sewende een.
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Jean Roux’s Testimony
Introduction
I’m telling my story to share with you the redemptive power of God, and that His salvation is for everyone, even same-sex attracted people like me. His arm is not too short to save: today I have been happily married to a wonderful God-fearing woman, and we have just had our first child, a baby boy.
Testimony
Both my parents were married before and both had a daughter in their first marriage. My father’s first wife moved to overseas with his daughter when she was still a toddler and they have been living abroad ever since. My mother’s daughter was still very young when my parents married. My parents had two sons (my brother and me) from their marriage to each other.
I was born into a broken and dysfunctional home environment. My parents were both very broken people and very unhappy in their marriage. I think my parents also carried a lot of hurt from their first marriages and struggled to process this inside their current marriage. Looking back at our family history, I could see some of the patterns carried through the family line: my father’s father raised his family in a very abusive and manipulative manner. My mother’s mother favoured her 3 sons over my mom and my grandfather favoured my mom, although he died from cancer after she she left school.
And so in our family: my dad favoured my brother and my mom favoured me. I later found out that my dad resented my mom and so he rejected me (the child she loved) to get back at her. Because of the severe rejection I experienced from my dad, I remember spending a lot of time with my mom growing up. I remember my dad often being very jealous of my relationship with my mom. I remember him telling me how he despised me and wished he had a different son or tell me how stupid I am and call me names. There was a lot of abuse while growing up. He would often beat us out of anger. I remembering living in so much fear: physical beatings, verbal, emotional and lots of psychological manipulation (just like my grandfather did with my dad).
So I constantly lived in fear. Going to school, it was the same as at home. Teachers and kids would pick on me and beat me up – e.g. geography teacher took my head and banged it on his desk in front of the entire class when I was 10, just because I inserted a page in the wrong place in my file. What made this worse is that my mom would go to school and defend me against the other kids – this does not do well for a boy’s social standing at school!
Because of the hurt I experienced from the relationship with my dad, I ended up rejecting him in order to protect myself – and continued to grow closer to my mother. The mother-son relationship I had with my mom was very unhealthy: my mom used me to make her feel better about her unhappy marriage (like a surrogate husband). I became obsessed with my mom, often having nightmares that she would die or daydreaming of the two of us going away and living on our own without my dad.
I realized years later (with the help of counsellors) that my relationship with my mother was classified as incestuous – e.g. she would have my take baths with her until the age of 12, and it wouldn’t have stopped if my dad did not intervene.
And so growing up, I had a very distorted image of family and what healthy love was from my parents. At times, I think my parents tried to love me, but I didn’t know how to receive it in a healthy way – e.g. my dad would come to me after a beating and say how much he loved me (without apologizing for the abuse).
And then something happened to me as a young boy – a family member sexually abused me. I didn’t know about this until God revealed it to me years later. I had blocked it out of my mind because of how traumatic it was. I think, because of the relationship with my dad, and my desperation to receive love from a male father figure, I was an easy target for a sexual predator. It turned out that my whole family was sexually abused: mom, dad, sister and brother. I’m not sure how many times it happened, but I don’t think I actually want to know that.
I remember being very young and experiencing an attraction to boys, and that I liked them more than I liked girls. This continued and grew stronger as I got older. I had a maths tutor in school (because I kept on failing), who was also a psychologist. My parents ended up sending me to her for therapy. She was the first person I told that I was attracted to boys. She told me that it was fine and that I should accept it. I remember feeling so relieved after that.
I hated school and I hated being at home. And so I decided to rebel instead of throwing myself into school and sport. I had no sense of self-worth. No love for myself. My dad, who was the one who was supposed to affirm me as a man, only hurt me and rejected me. So I didn’t really care what happened to me. I started drinking and smoking at the age of 14.
I smoked marijuana and kept alcohol in my school locker sometimes to drink between classes. At one point I met two girls outside of school who introduced me to playing with a Ouija board. I played this quite often and had a keen interest in the occult. I would often pray to the devil to kill my father and asked him to place curses on him. I started stealing things. Stealing thousands of rands from my father; stealing their cars over weekends to go out and party (until I got caught, and severely beaten for that). I stole from people’s houses and even from shops. I didn’t care. I just craved destruction. I also started messing around with boys in school. When I left school, the partying got worse . I started using drugs: first it was party drugs like ecstasy, MDMA and LSD. Later it progressed into more serious drugs like Cocaine, Ketamine and a drug called Cat (which is also called Tik).
In my first year after school, I also went into my first relationship with a guy. I had a number of boyfriends, but the relationships didn’t last very long. I was always very unsatisfied with the situation. No matter how hard I tried not to do so, I always ended up doing the same things my father did: verbal, emotional abuse, sometimes it became physical. I would manipulate the other guy and was never satisfied. I also didn’t want to stay faithful to them. This carried on for years: drugs, partying, relationships. I still lived at home during this time and the situation at home got worse.
There were times when I had to phone the police to come help out with my dad because of the violence. I had grown up in JHB but decided to move down to Cape Town to get away from my family. The night I made my decision was the night when my dad again threatened to kill me – I decided that this would be the last time. And so I moved down to Cape Town.
In Cape Town, the partying and gay lifestyle got much worse. I would use cocktails of drugs: Cocaine, Liquid Ecstasy, etc. Some nights I would take so many drugs that I would pass out and end up sleep walking – while I was in the club. Sometimes I would wake up in different locations, finding that I had burned myself with cigarettes (all this while sleepwalking). On one occasion I woke up not knowing where I was and realising I didn’t have any clothes on – guys would take advantage of me while I was passed out. I just didn’t care what happened to me. I didn’t believe that I had any worth. I grew up being told that I wasn’t worth anything, and I believed that lie.
It was at this stage in my life that I reached a tipping point: I was either going to get worse and end up dead or I could get some help.
I had a friend who partied with me. He would know all the places to go: the clubs, the dealers, even where to get cheap haircuts and free HIV testing. I thought I had to go for an HIV test because of what happened that one night when I was passed out – I was raped by a guy, and I was too high on drugs to know what was happening to me. This friend of mine took me to a church in Cape Town city with a testing facility that provided free HIV testing.
I went for the test and it fortunately came out negative. I then found out there was a ministry related to the church and the testing facility that counselled people who were caught up in sexually broken lives – I then went for counselling for the next year. The counselling helped me and I calmed down from my hectic lifestyle.
During this time my counsellor kept telling me about this church called My church Gen. I had gone into another relationship with a guy during this time and didn’t want to go to the church, but after a year I decided to go. I knew something was missing in my life and I was feeling very lonely (even while I was in this relationship).
I went to the church and I gave my life to Jesus. I found God and I found family – but most of all, I found peace. It was shortly after I joined my church that I broke off my relationship with the guy. And so the process began of God restoring my broken and messed up life. As you can image I was a mess when I joined the church.
The enemy wanted to destroy me and he used a broken self-image to do this. It was a common theme throughout my life: I battled with a major identity crisis of not knowing who I was and that I had any value. This has been the main area where God has been healing me throughout the past 8 years.
Obviously coming to know Jesus doesn’t mean that my humanity is taken away. I still battled with strong same-sex feelings, and I couldn’t be friends with guys because I was so scared of them. I learned through the years that my homosexuality developed as a result of (1) the sexual abuse and (2) the fact that I had rejected any form of maleness or manhood because my father (who was my primary example of manhood) hurt me and rejected me. I also couldn’t relate to people or hold friendships because I was so messed up. But my friends stuck with me. I hurt them many times (even telling them I don’t want to be friends with them!), but still they loved me.
I think many times it was my friends and leaders who, in faith, saw what God was doing in and eventually through my life. There were significant milestones of God’s power and healing throughout the years. Most of the healing and restoring happened in my time alone with the Lord. There would be times that I would end up crying on the floor for hours as God was healing brokenness and sin in my life. Most of the time I didn’t know what it was that He was doing, but I knew that He was doing something.
I also received many prophetic words over the years – words about having a family one day and that God would restore that which was lost. I never thought it possible that I could actually get to the point of marriage and being a husband and father. My whole life (even while I was living in sin), I desired this, but never thought it possible because I was gay.
The first word I received about my wife was from a couple in my home group. I had felt God speak to me in my QT and give me Psalm 128:
Blessed is everyone who fears the LORD,
who walks in his ways!
You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands;
you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you.
Your wife will be like a fruitful vine
within your house;
your children will be like olive shoots
around your table.
Behold, thus shall the man be blessed
who fears the LORD.
The LORD bless you from Zion!
May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem
all the days of your life!
May you see your children’s children!
Peace be upon Israel!
I felt Him say that He had a wife and kids planned for me. I asked Him to confirm this word. That evening I went to this couples house for dinner and they told me they had been praying for me and felt God say He wanted to give me a wife and kids as part of my inheritance.
It turned out that my wife was who He had planned for me all along. My wife also received a number of prophetic words about her husband – one of them being that the person would be incredibly broken, but that He would use the relationship between her and this man (and their eventual marriage) to bring healing and restoration into his life.
Conclusion
Even though the devil has a plan for my lie, God intervened and saved me from a life of utter destruction. I don’t believe homosexuality is what He planned for man. Just by merely looking at the destructive elements that go along with it, I can make this conclusion – never mind the scriptures. I even knew gay guys who believed they were saved, and had a relationship with the Lord, and who tried really hard to live out their homosexuality in a “godly” manner by having a monogamous relationship and, eventually getting married, but still ending up committing suicide because they were so disillusioned with the gay lifestyle and what it delivered (vs. what it promised).
I believe true restoration is possible, but you need to allow Him to restore your life. This will cost you everything – the word says we must become less so that He can increase in us (John 3:30).
Some key points I learned through these past years of overcoming sin in my life:
- You have to be intentional – eternal perspective
- You have to be accountable – two are better than one, and walking in the light brings freedom from shame and condemnation (1 John 1)
- You have to get up when you fall – we all sin and no sin is unique, but choose to run to God and not from Him when you sin; also open up and confess your sin to your leaders/ accountability partners (James 5:16)
- You have to have time with God – the word says that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God; don’t skip your times with the Father, press in to Him daily and get from Him what you need to keep fighting
- You need a deep revelation of the Cross – “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23)