[Originally posted on my private Facebook page.]

I’ve never really thought much about National Coming Out Day. But it’s worth at least a brief word. Really, the day represents a significant event in the lives of many people—the loosing of the shackles of shame, fear, and sadness that come with believing that you are, at the core, unfit for society and unfit for love because the vocabulary you were given has no words for you, the books you read and the sermons you heard never mentioned you, and, if they did, they relayed nothing resembling good news.

The closet is overwhelming. Several times a year, still, I see a headline state that a teenager has taken their own life because they have been bullied over their orientation or because the isolation they experienced was thicker than any sense of hope. Headlines also continue to reveal violence committed against gay, lesbian, and transgender people, a violence that can make coming out of the closet nearly as frightening as staying in it.

I’ve been out for around three years, and during that time, I’ve been blessed to live mainly in communities that don’t have qualms about my sexuality, so I need to occasionally remind myself of what life in the closet was like—the depression, the self-hatred, the panic attacks. But even throughout that process, I usually had a sense of God’s presence. Not everyone has that.

So, friends, ask yourself: Are you known for your love? Do you speak graciously of people when they are not around? Are the spaces you inhabit—your home, work place, church, and schools—are they spaces in which sexual minorities feel safe? If you think the answers to these questions are “yes” and yet no LGBTQ people are a part of your life in any meaningful way, ask the questions again. It is possible that you and the communities of which you are a part have helped keep someone locked in the closet—in that space of shame, fear, and sadness—without being aware of it.

This is a warm invitation to all of us to look again at how we live, how we speak to one another, how we talk about God, and how we think about those people we don’t understand. This is an invitation to love with open arms and open hearts, to smash what needs to be smashed, and to build what needs to be built.