A ViewPoint by Atlas Meyers
I was taught that the rainbow didn’t belong to queer people. That it was something sacred, hijacked by people who were turning everything upside down. God wasn’t with them. They were twisting what was already called good, dragging it through the mud, and turning it into something unholy.
And yet, every Sunday, I’d sit in church and stare at the stained glass, watching the light pour in and morph into colors too beautiful to be accidental. I’d listen to the sermon about grace and love and wonder why it all felt like I was trying to squeeze into a sweater two sizes too small. It didn’t feel right. It pinched. It left me gasping for air.
Why was God big enough to fill that space with light but too small to let me live out the words written in red? Why would the Creator of all things—so full of complexity and variation—who formed the stars and shaped the oceans and somehow managed to keep galaxies from colliding—confine me to a role that felt too small?
I struggled with that for years. I read all the books. I asked all the questions—too many questions, the kind that make people shift uncomfortably in their seats and practice their skills in changing the subject. I stayed up late grasping for answers that always slipped through my fingers. I spent countless nights crying on my knees, feeling like a fraud in a faith that had no room for me, wondering who was broken, the church or me.
It was like I was trying to follow a map that everyone swore led to the same place, but mine kept leading me down streets I didn’t recognize—sidewalks that didn’t exist on anyone else’s map. I wanted to believe I was right, but when most of the world around me was telling me I was wrong, it was a losing battle. Maybe I should have just given up and worn a “pray the gay away” t-shirt like a badge of righteousness, but that didn’t feel like “God’s plan,” whatever that meant.
But I thought about how easy life would be if fitting into the mold of a “good Christian” only required praying away the parts of me that were too messy, too complicated. I thought about how much simpler life would be if I could surrender to the words of condemnation, somehow convince myself that I could change, become someone else, or just ignore the tension between my queerness and my faith. Maybe I wouldn’t be as happy, but at least I’d be accepted. I wouldn’t have to keep swimming upstream, against a tide of judgment, fear, and silence. I wouldn’t be the eternal square peg in a religious round hole.
But there was always this whisper, faint at first, then growing louder: “If I fit in, I’ll stop being me.” And that terrified me more than anything else.
Then one day, a pastor told me something that changed everything. He told me that I was searching with more sincerity and humility than most people. He said that what God wanted from me wasn’t for me to have all the answers, but instead to keep seeking, asking, and wrestling.
I didn’t know how to process that. I didn’t know what to do with this idea that maybe the questioning—the struggle—was just as holy as finding the answer I’d been chasing for so long.
I sat with it for a long time. It didn’t fit neatly in my theology; it didn’t soothe my fear or stop the constant ache in my chest. It was like being handed a new puzzle piece, but one from a different box. I sat with it for a long time, turning it over in my hands, trying to make it fit into this big confusing mess of a puzzle that my faith had become.
And then, one day, I saw a rainbow. Not on a flag or a bumper sticker. Just hanging there in the sky, casual as anything, leading to the grocery store down the street. I wasn’t struck by a lightning bolt of revelation. I didn’t pause and dramatically close my eyes in awe, as if I’d discovered the meaning of life in a single arc of color. I just saw it. The colors bleeding into each other, not fighting for space, not needing permission. It was beautiful.
And I wondered if maybe, just maybe, how I wanted to look or who I wanted to love wasn’t such a big problem in God’s beautiful world.
Seeing the rainbow didn’t answer all my questions or make my struggles vanish; instead it was a quiet reassurance—like someone finally letting me exhale, like the universe telling me, “Yes, there’s room for you here.”
I used to look for God in the windows of cathedrals, in all the perfect colors and clear lines. But maybe God won’t be trapped in glass. Maybe God is the colors, the cracks, the things that don’t fit into the perfect outline. Maybe God is the uncontainable spectrum of creation itself.
And maybe the rainbow wasn’t a symbol of something good that had been twisted, like I’d been told. Maybe it was just God’s way of saying, “here, in this messy, imperfect world, there is room for all the colors, one for each and every one of you, just as you are.”
© 2025 by Atlas Meyers and Christian Feminism Today.
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