Rebranded & Redesigned Website – Jonah Ven

 

Hey, everyone! Thanks so much for reading this blog and following along with it over the past year or so. I’ve got some exciting news to share!

I’ve recently launched a BRAND NEW site that’s been redesigned and rebranded as Jonah Ven over at: http://www.jonah-ven.com!

All of my content from this site has been archived and ported over, so you won’t miss a thing. I’ve been working so hard over the last several weeks on this new platform, so head on over and check out my new site!

And please subscribe by email on the bottom of the page so you won’t miss any updates!

See you after the jump!

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just wanting to live

Sometimes you just reach a breaking point. It’s not that you don’t care anymore or even that it’s not important anymore, but sometimes you just grow weary of the constant tension, the constant sensation of being “always on.” Because why wouldn’t that be exhausting? That’s sort of how I feel right now when it comes to Christian LGBTQ things and LGBTQ things in general, the dialogues, the conversations, the controversies, the debates, the activism, all of it. I feel burned out if I’m being completely honest.

Being Gay at Bethel: Revisited

Here’s a piece I wrote back in the spring about some good changes and things I see happening back at my alma mater (that sounds weird to say…).

Bethel is one of my favorite places, and I’m thankful for the ways God is moving there, especially in the sense that LGBTQ students are starting to feel safer and that the atmosphere is shifting for the better. Hopefully, this is just the beginning.

Editor’s Note: The following article is a reflection on discussion prompted by the piece, “Being Gay at Bethel,” published May 2015 in the Clarion. Because the article was published in the last month of the year, the Bethel community had no opportunity to discuss and respond to the article, and many in our community left Bethel with more questions than answers regarding Bethel’s policies and attitudes towards the LGBTQ community. In publishing this article, we hope to inspire further conversation. In the first chapel of the year, biblical studies professor Juan Hernandez Jr. challenged the Bethel community to speak up for the poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed, imitating Christ in this way. At the Clarion, we strive to speak up on issues that matter most to the Bethel community. Venegas, a junior linguistics major at the time “Being Gay at Bethel” was published, has since graduated and now works at Cyber Village Academy as an office administrator.

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milestones and a spinning life compass

Disclaimer: These are some musings about how I feel in the days immediately following graduation and may or may not necessarily make sense or be cohesive in any way, shape, or form.

Milestones have a way of turning things upside down, pulling them inside out, and then shaking them up, or maybe that’s just how I tend to feel about things like that. I keep thinking to myself that I haven’t really done anything yet, that I haven’t accomplished anything yet, and then I remind myself that college graduation was still less than a week ago, not weeks or months ago like I already feel it was. And then I have people tell me that I still have a lot of time to get wherever I think I’m going to go with life. That’s something that I think I need people to keep telling me until I actually internalize it, because I’m not going to lie, I’ve already laid awake in bed at night contemplating what course my life is going to take and stressing out about how I’m going to get to point A or point B or point J, and I haven’t even gotten a week away from graduation yet.

mark yarhouse talked to my christian college on sexuality and this is how it went

Alright, here’s the full, unedited version of the article that was published in the Bethel Clarion earlier this week, detailing my stream of thought about the Mark Yarhouse sexuality event last week. The Clarion staff did a great job editing it, but it definitely read more like a newspaper article (as it should have) than some of my normal writing, so I wanted to stick the original version up on here. Take a read if you weren’t at the event or haven’t already.

I checked the time on my phone as I speed walked through the BC on my way to the Underground. It was already 8:01pm and I was late, having just come from helping lead an exam review session for CWC.  Mark Yarhouse, a psychologist and professor from Regent University, was giving a talk on sexuality and I was going to be there, though a bit reluctant at first. From what I had heard and read of him in the past, I wasn’t incredibly optimistic about the event, but the Underground was relatively full, so I slid into the second row from the front and took out my notebook just as it was beginning.

coming out: on feeling normal again one year later

It’s been just about a year since I’ve come out, and I think it’s only now that I’m starting to feel normal again, after two months of summer school in another state, four months living abroad in a different country and immersed in a different language, and a year out of church. Yeah, I’m only starting to feel normal again now.

And what does “normal” really mean anyway, especially in this context? I guess you could say that I’m not really normal in any sense of the word. I’m a gay person of color who goes to a Christian university, is younger than everyone in his graduating class, and also happens to be the child of first generation immigrants. So, I suppose normal isn’t really the best descriptor of me to begin with. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s taken a full year for me to start feeling like myself again, and feeling comfortable as myself again.

For a long while after coming out, I felt like I was trapped between two repelling magnetic poles. The church didn’t want me because I was an anomaly, unnatural, choosing sin, in need of healing, or whatever other spiritualized phrase they chose to describe me, and I certainly didn’t fit into the LGBT community because of my faith that many saw as being in direct opposition to identifying as LGBT. Even many of my closest friends weren’t immediately sure how to respond to me, which isn’t a bad thing. I know firsthand how complicated and difficult to navigate intersectional issues like this can be, but that didn’t keep it from being any less isolating or any less discouraging as I started out on that road. It felt like I didn’t quite fit into any of the spaces that I was accustomed to occupying, and I felt a little lost.

coming out: one year later preview & good friday reflections

Notes: Before I get into this post, I just want to take a moment to thank everyone who’s been reading this blog and keeping up to date on my outward thought process. For many of you, that’s involved sitting with me as I rifle through thoughts and ideas over tea and food on multiple occasions, and I’m especially thankful for that. For others, that’s encompassed your kind and encouraging words that create safe spaces as I continue to write and think out loud in a public space on what it really means to be on this journey and on this path that has all the twists and turns you could imagine. And for yet others, that means challenging me and having open discussions on where we’re coming from, the perspectives that we hold, and why we hold them. So thank you.

And for anyone who’s just met me recently or who’s new to the blog, I hope that you find this as a safe place, a safe place as an LGBT Christian, as a Christian in general who has a heart for this, as a Christian who might not know a lot about this sphere, as anyone. I hope that everyone who comes here finds this as a safe place where dialogue is open, where learning is sought after, and where ignorance is not always willful or inherently bad. So, (in a bit of self-promotion here) for you guys (and anyone else who hasn’t yet), feel free to subscribe to the blog so you can get emails that link to new posts when they go up, and also feel free to engage and talk with me about anything that you might be thinking, whether that’s questions about what I’ve written or what I believe on this, curiosities on things in general, or just to talk. I’m open to that and I love it.

All of that being said, I want to talk about two things in this post: a couple things that I’ve seen and realized thinking over everything that’s happened since last year when I started writing this blog and also some of the things that I’ve been reflecting on, specifically regarding LGBT Christians, as it’s Holy Week this week and Good Friday today.

the ring by spring dilemma: lgbt edition

Note: I was originally going to post this later in the week, but after hearing a guest speaker in one of my classes this morning, I decided that it was worth posting today, even if it’s a little later in the afternoon. Talking about some aspects of Bethel specific culture, she noted that having all of these expectations regarding relationships in college often sets up students for disappointment when things don’t work out the way that they’ve romanticized them to be, something which I find to be especially true for Christian LGBT students who experience many of the same things in a college setting.

So, yeah, that’s just a little bit of the backstory behind this post. And again, as with any post I write, I’m not trying to attack anyone or anything necessarily. I just like to reflect on cultural elements and the impacts that they have that are often much larger and much farther reaching than many realize. Cool. Here we go.

If you go to, have ever been to, or perhaps even just heard of a Christian college, you’ve probably heard of the term “ring by spring.” For the uninformed, what this rhyming little cliché is talking about is the stereotypical understanding or assumption or expectation or whatever that by the spring semester of your senior year of college, you will or, perhaps more importantly should be engaged to the person you’re going to spend the rest of your life with. Yeah, essentially what “ring by spring” is saying is that you should probably be getting married the summer after you graduate from college, otherwise you don’t really have your life together, and you’re probably also not a good Christian, because otherwise God would’ve brought someone along by now. I hope that everyone can see the problem with this.

do it for you

*deep breath in *deep breath out

If you read my last post (and honestly, probably even if you didn’t), you’ll know that I’m insanely busy this semester, that is until May 21^st, graduation day. It’s been maddening up until this point, having taken 21 credits until today (when I finished the last of my online classes, PTL), and as a result, I’m finding that I’ve dropped a lot of things from my life, simply out of sheer busy-ness. Today, I’m trying to reclaim some of those things, and one of them is being consistent with this whole blog game again, because doing this is something that fills me and something that I do for myself.

bethel is my church for now

In the past month (since I wrote my last blog post; yeah, it’s been sort of a long time), I’ve gotten the chance to catch up with a lot of friends and talk with them about Spain and about life and just talk in general. Something that’s come up frequently has been what my current church situation is like since I originally started my church fast back in June of last year. And to be honest, I’m still not completely sure how to answer that question, but I think that I’m calling Bethel my church for the time being. That might sound a little strange (or maybe it doesn’t *shrugs*), but let me explain.