Queer Sabbath

Sunday, July 12, 2026

Kelly Crouch

LGBTQIA+ Person of Faith

LOVEboldly Board Member Alum

Quote

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

    you discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down

    and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue,

    O Lord, you know it completely.

~Psalm 139:1-4

Devotion

I learned the truth about my Transness during the first winter of lockdown. The solitude of the pandemic gave me the time and space to look inward. I realized that I cared a lot about what people thought of me. I had been dressing to impress others without asking myself how I would like to show up in the world.

Fully embracing my femininity for the first time brought me so much joy. It also came with growing pains. Learning to inhabit my body in a new way was overwhelming. There was so much to learn about clothing and makeup. There were so many decisions to make, from choosing a name to considering hormones. On one occasion I nearly burst into tears in a Sephora trying to make sense of the sea of beauty products.

I resolved to take the pressure off my transition by adopting a weekend ritual I called my “Queer sabbath.” Every Saturday I committed to only doing joyful activities that affirmed my Queerness while abstaining from work. There was no rush to figure everything out—I simply gave myself permission to pursue beauty for the sake of beauty and joy for the sake of joy.

I spent my Saturdays connecting with my Queer chosen family, watching makeup tutorials, and experimenting with different clothing styles. My sabbaths created a sacred space where I had nothing to prove to myself or others. I could simply be.

Lockdown eventually lifted and forced me to leave my cocoon. Suddenly I had to reenter society and worry about how people perceived me. Somehow things seemed easier in isolation. I wanted so badly for people to see me the way I saw myself. But how does one even begin to explain the things that we know in our heart of hearts?

I was meeting regularly with a spiritual director during this time. We were working together to remove blockages to my relationship with God. In my case, the relationship was obscured by theology that viewed my Queerness as unholy. Over time I was able to open up myself to a God that delighted in me for who I am, in all of my Queerness.

I began to experience God in parts of my soul that were aching to be understood. During the pandemic I discovered a place within myself that only I understood but couldn’t fully articulate to someone, even if I wanted to. But as I became more open to the presence of Spirit in these hidden parts of me, I became less dependent on outward recognition. Regardless of where I was in my transition, I held the peace of knowing that I was seen for who I am and who I am becoming.

It is said that coming out is a lifelong process. The good news is that God knows and loves us before we’re even out of the closet. When I find myself overwhelmed or misunderstood, my sabbath practice reminds me that I am fully known and fully loved. 

Reflection

1. What gets in the way of letting God love your Queerness?

2. What are the parts of you that ache to be known?

3. How can you experience your Queerness through rest rather than labor?

Action

Create a Queer sabbath ritual for yourself. Write down the things you will do to rest and find joy in your Queerness. Reflect on your experience of Spirit when you slow down and allow your authentic self to be made visible.

George Washington's Favorite Bible Verse

Monday, July 6, 2026

Happy Monday, my friends! I have a distinct memory of a series of books with orange covers and black-and-white images telling the stories of great and famous Americans. Called The Childhoods of Famous Americans, the books, which had a decidedly Christian bent and extolled values like hard work, resilience, and faith, were meant to present these Americans as children with relatable experiences and struggles. In most cases these stories were highly sanitized and included accounts that were at best apocryphal if not completely fictitious. If not the same series, I imagine many of you also grew up with these hagiographies of the United States’ founding fathers — white, male, straight, nearly all of them — and perhaps a few founding mothers and one or two righteous people of color who through hard work managed to be the first in their field. And that’s how we like to remember heroes, particularly around the Fourth of July, lest our hotdogs and potato salad be interrupted by the truth of history.

Yet, now, the birthday party is over. The fireworks have faded, the flags are still out, and we are two-and-a-half centuries into this American experiment. How are we doing?

George Washington had a favorite Bible verse, or something close to one. Historians have counted nearly fifty times he wrote out Micah 4:4 across four decades of letters: “…they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid." Washington loved the image of a person laying down a sword and going home to a patch of ground, safe and free of the noise of empire. It is a beautiful vision that Washington following his service as the nation’s first president.

However, it’s also worth noting that the over three hundred people Washington enslaved at Mount Vernon could never sit under a vine of their own. They built the estate, tilled its fields, and served in its house and they were literally bound to the land and to Washington, their enslaver. The founding generation loved Micah’s verse. They loved it for themselves. They took the fruit of the vision and left the roots in the ground.

That pattern did not end with the founders.

Two hundred fifty years in, the United States remains the largest arms dealer on the planet, selling more weapons to more nations than every other country combined. Micah’s swords never quite beaten into plowshares. We have built the largest prison and detention system in the world, one in which Black Americans, who make up roughly 14% of the population, account for 42% of the incarcerated. We have built a healthcare system in which people fear the ambulance bill before they fear the heart attack, a housing market in which whole generations have been priced out of ownership, and a school system in which children practice hiding from gunfire because we have decided, again and again, that access to weapons matters more than the safety of those children. Our nation is one in which the word “freedom” is deployed quickly to protect the powerful and extended slowly, if at all, to the people beneath them.

None of this is a story about individual meanness. It is a story about what a nation builds when it decides, across 250 years, that some people’s safety, some people’s lives, matter more than others. Micah would name that clearly: not a series of unfortunate policy choices. Idolatry.

And yet. Micah was not writing a eulogy. He was writing a summons. The vision of everyone sitting unafraid was never meant to describe what already existed. It was meant to describe what a people could still choose to build. That thread, quieter and harder to kill, runs through abolitionists and suffragists, through the Black church and the Queer liberation movement, through every community that has refused to let the gap between the vision and the reality be the last word.

America has never fully been the vine-and-fig-tree nation its own founders quoted into being. But the question Micah puts to us is not whether we've arrived. It’s whether we are still walking toward it and in whose name we are walking.

In whose name are you walking? Toward what kind of “days to come” are you building?

Let us pray: God of every people and every nation, you have never belonged to any flag or any empire, and your vision of peace has never been for sale. Forgive us for the ways we have bent your words to serve our comfort while leaving others without the safety those words promised. Give us the courage to tell the truth about the distance between the vision and the reality, to refuse the false gods of peace through might and exclusion even when they are dressed up as patriotism, and to keep walking, however imperfectly, toward the day when no one, no one at all, shall be made afraid. We ask this in the name of Jesus, in whom there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither enslaved nor free. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +

The Day After

Sunday, July 5, 2026

The Rev. Dr. Ben Huelskamp

LGBTQIA+ Person of Faith

Executive Director, LOVEboldly

Quote

“For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

~Galatians 5:1 (NRSVUE)

Devotion

The fireworks are over. The cookouts are done. The flags are coming down. It’s the day after Independence Day, and everything feels a little quieter, a little more ordinary.

I've always had complicated feelings about the Fourth of July. All that talk about freedom and liberty, while knowing that freedom in America has never been equally distributed. Some of us—many of us—are still fighting for the independence others take for granted: the freedom to marry, to adopt children, to use public restrooms, to exist in our bodies without legislatures debating our rights.

Paul’s letter to the Galatians talks about a different kind of freedom, the kind Christ offers. He’s writing to people who are being told they need to follow certain religious laws to truly belong, that they need to add requirements and conditions to the grace they’ve already received. Paul pushes back hard: you’re already free. Don’t let anyone put chains back on you.

That resonates deeply for those of us who’ve been told we need to change, fix ourselves, become someone else to be acceptable to God or to the church. We’ve already been set free to be exactly who we are, to love who we love, to live in our truth. The freedom Christ offers isn’t something we earn by conforming. It's something we claim by refusing to shrink.

The day after a holiday is when the real work begins. The celebration is over, and we’re back to the daily practice of living into the freedom we claim to believe in. For some of us, that means continuing to show up authentically even when it’s costly. For others, it means creating space where people who’ve never known freedom can finally breathe.

Freedom isn’t a parade. It’s a practice. And it’s one we’re called to again and again, every ordinary day after the party ends.

Reflection

1.    What does true freedom look like for you, not just legal rights, but the freedom to be fully yourself?

2.    Where in your life are you still carrying “yokes of slavery:” expectations, shame, or fear that keep you from living freely?

3.    How can you practice freedom in small, daily ways rather than waiting for dramatic moments of liberation?

Action

Identify one small way you’ve been conforming or hiding to make others comfortable. This week, practice freedom by being authentic in that area, even if it’s just with one person, even if it feels small. Freedom grows through practice, not proclamation.