About Jim

God Has No Plan B

In the summer of my junior year of college, I was moving to an on-campus apartment for the first time. A few weeks before the move, I had the opportunity to change my assignment from a random apartment to another that I thought I would enjoy more. While the school performed maintenance on our permanent assignments, we were placed for a couple weeks in other housing. Two of my roommates for those two weeks would also be with me in my permanent apartment, but one, Alex, was to be a couple buildings away.

I quickly developed a strong attraction to Alex. He was everything I wanted to be... masculine, attractive, athletic and confident. Everyone seemed to be drawn to his charisma, and relationships with other people, both men and women, seemed so easy for him. He told me that he walked away from playing baseball and what he was sure was leading to a professional career.

Now when most guys claim that they’re athletically skilled at a professional level, you discount it as hubris or wishful thinking, but not Alex. In spite of having every reason to be arrogant, he was probably the most humble man I had ever met up to that time. And his reason for walking away from baseball only supported that view. He wanted no part of the idolatry that he knew would be placed on him if he were to become a professional athlete.

In those two weeks that we were roommates, Alex began sharing his Christian faith. I said many hateful and blasphemous things to him, and he always stayed calm and was never harsh with me. We spent a lot of time together talking about God and other things, and when we all moved to our permanent assignments, Alex and I continued to hang out and develop a friendship.

Well, for him it was a friendship. For me, it became a very strong infatuation, maybe even an obsession. Alex was on my mind constantly, and all I wanted to do was spend more time with him. I spent a lot of time with him at his apartment, along with his three roommates. As it turns out, they were all Christians, too.

They invited me to join a twice-a-week Bible study they were starting, and since it meant spending more time with Alex, I readily agreed. We started reading in Matthew, and each Bible study night, we went around the room, taking turns reading a few verses, and then we all talked about what those verses meant to us. Having zero Biblical knowledge, I didn’t have much to say, but I listened.

On one occasion I complained about smearing the ink in my Gideon’s New Testament, which was the only Bible I owned. A meeting or two later, Alex and his roommates presented me with an NIV gift Bible with my name engraved on the front. I was unexpectedly very moved by this, and it felt like one of the most thoughtful and caring gifts that anyone had ever given me.

A few weeks later, following one of our meetings, one of Alex’s roommates asked me if I had made any decisions about what we had been reading. I clearly remember my response, since at the time it struck me as an odd thing to say. “No, not yet. I don’t really believe all these things we’re reading, but I know that one day I will.”

One night, after our Bible study, I was lying in bed thinking about what I had read over the last few months, and what I had learned about God and His Word from Alex and his roommates. I started talking to God and asked Him to help me to believe, and in the course of our conversation, I did believe. That night, I confessed my need for Jesus and received Him as my Savior.

In the following weeks, as I reflected on the experience, I was reminded of my decision to change my apartment assignment, and I started to feel that the names of Alex’s roommates were strangely familiar to me. Soon I realized that their names were on the apartment that I had been originally assigned to, and Alex was my replacement in that unit.

God had planned it all. Whether from living in that apartment myself, or from hanging out with them often, God had determined to surround me with Christians from whom I could receive the truth. He knew I would change apartments, but placing Alex with me temporarily was not a fallback plan to draw me into that apartment full of Christians. It was integral to His plan, and my attraction to Alex was a significant part of it. I never would have attended a Bible study were it not for my determination to spend as much time as possible with Alex.

I began to understand that God had allowed these homosexual attractions to develop in me because He knew He was going to use my attraction to Alex to draw me into His Kingdom.