He did not send you here to fail. He sent you here to be a success in all the ways that matter to Him: in love, in mercy, in the quiet daily work of becoming more like His Son. That has always been the mission. Not straightness. Not conformity. Not silence. Becoming.
”And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.”
Humility is one of the most misunderstood virtues in Latter-day Saint culture. It has been conflated with self-abasement, with smallness, with the quiet acceptance of being told you are less than. For gay Latter-day Saint men, “humility” has often meant learning to swallow your truth and call it obedience. It has meant accepting the institution’s assessment of your brokenness as a sacred duty. It has meant bowing not to God but to a system that claimed to speak for Him.
True humility is nothing like that. True humility is the recognition that you are not God—that your understanding is limited, your perspective is partial, and your ability to heal yourself is insufficient. But humility is not the recognition that you are worthless. It is the recognition that you are finite in a universe governed by an infinite and loving God. And from that finitude, you ask for help. Not help to become straight. Help to become whole.
Ether teaches that God gives us weakness so that we may be humble, and that His grace is sufficient. Notice what this verse does not say. It does not say that your orientation is a weakness. It says that weakness itself—human finitude, human limitation, the inability to do everything on your own—is a gift designed to drive you toward God. The “weak things” that God makes strong are not the parts of you that the institution dislikes. They are the places where you have been broken by the world—the fractured self-worth, the stunted capacity for self-love, the spiritual exhaustion of decades of trying to be someone you are not.
Humbly asking God to remove the effects of shame means approaching Him not with the groveling self-flagellation that the institution sometimes demands, but with the honest vulnerability of a child who has been hurt and is ready to be held. It means saying: Father, I cannot fix what they did to me. I have tried. I have prayed. I have fasted. I have performed. I have obeyed. And the shame is still here, like a stone in my chest. I need You to remove it, because I cannot do it myself.
And here is the tender secret of this step: God has been waiting for you to ask. Not because He needed your permission, but because He honors your agency. He will not force healing on you. He will not rip the shame from your chest without your consent. But the moment you ask—the moment you humbly, honestly, vulnerably ask—the process begins. It may not happen all at once. Grace often works slowly, like light creeping across a dark room. But it works. It has always worked. And it will work for you.
Humility also means releasing the need to be fixed by anyone other than God. It means releasing the bishop’s authority to determine your worth. It means releasing the therapist’s authority to pathologize your identity. It means releasing the culture’s authority to define your manhood. You are accountable to God and to your own conscience—and those two things, operating in harmony, are sufficient for any challenge you will face.
What does humility look like when it is separated from self-abasement? Write about the difference between being humble before God and being humiliated by an institution.
Write a prayer asking God to remove the specific effects of shame you identified in the previous chapter. Be humble, be honest, and be specific.
What “weak things” in your life might God be preparing to make strong—not by eliminating them, but by transforming them?
I humbly ask God to remove the shame I was given and replace it with the self-love Christ commands. My humility is not self-hatred. It is the doorway through which grace enters.
Much of Latter-day Saint Atonement theology is transactional: you sin, you repent, Christ pays the debt, the ledger is cleared. This model has value for addressing genuine moral failures. But for a gay Latter-day Saint man who has spent his life trying to earn worthiness through performance, the transactional Atonement becomes a treadmill—always performing, never arriving, because the “sin” you are repenting of is not something you did but something you are.
Alma 34 describes a different Atonement. “Mercy overpowereth justice,” Amulek teaches. Not mercy negotiates with justice. Not mercy meets justice halfway. Mercy overpowers it. This is not a transaction. It is an overthrow. The Atonement is not a courtroom. It is a rescue.
The liberation model says: Christ already paid. Not for your orientation—that is not a debt. For your pain. For the shame imposed on you. For the years lost to performance. For the grief of the closet. The Atonement covers all of it. And it does not require you to become someone else in order to access it. Grace is not a reward for sufficient obedience. Grace is the power that makes becoming possible—and the “becoming” God has in mind for you is not heterosexuality. It is wholeness.