What does it mean to come out of the closet as a married father of young children? For me in 2006, it meant three days and nights in which I didn’t sleep or eat. It meant an ex-wife who screamed “faggot” in restaurants and on the driveway in front of our children: “faggot, faggot, faggot,” as though the sound itself were a knife and my ears, a chopping block.

It meant Dallas, Texas courtrooms in which I was told I was unfit to be a parent. It meant our family obstetrician-gynecologist, who I’d known for a decade and whose children I had taught in my middle school English classroom, submitting a deposition to the court saying that, in his professional opinion, I shouldn’t be allowed unmonitored access to my children. It meant, ultimately, my parents disowning and disinheriting me – a fact that hasn’t changed in the following 10 years.

When I went to a gay club for the first time I still felt I was walking into a real world version of Sodom and Gomorrah

Yet, in these last 10 years, the ground beneath us has shifted dramatically. While talking to a man yesterday who is now following the same path I did, I saw very little familiar terrain.

This week, Christian rock singer Trey Pearson came out in an open letter published in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio: “I have come to be able to admit to myself, and to my family, that I am gay.” Pearson’s band, Everyday Sunday, is one of the top selling acts in Christian music, touring in all 50 states and 20 countries around the globe. He is also, as I was, married to a woman with whom he shares children: a six-year-old daughter and two-year-old son.

I grew up on a Pentecostal compound in Oklahoma: my father is an ordained minister and his father was as well. My mother’s father, Oral Roberts, was one of the first televangelists. Trey Pearson’s religious inheritance, like mine, is completely enmeshed in the blood of Christ, in the Gospel, in traditions and testimony and sacraments which go back 2,000 years and longer. In that, our experience is the same; in almost everything else, it could not be more different.

Yesterday, Trey shared with me what in the church might be called his testimony:

Each time I am able to tell my story, I feel like I got more strength from it. There was something liberating from being able to tell the truth. Rob Bell emailed me this morning something that really moved me, he said ‘the truth is the safest place in the universe’ and I just thought – that’s it. I’m not here to have a debate about it – I like talking about it and I’m happy to – but my intent is just to tell my story, to tell the truth. I know that truth: part of our faith is that the truth will set you free. When I was able to get to the place where I could be so transparent and feel like I had nothing to hide it became the most freeing time of my life. People talk about the peace that passes all understanding: as a Christian, we talk about the peace and joy that god gives us and that’s absolutely a million percent what this is.

When I came out, the voice of the affirming Christian was a voice in the wilderness. It was, mostly, the voice of one man, Troy Perry, who, though he started the Metropolitan Community Church in 1969 and expanded the denomination into dozens of countries worldwide, was still regarded with suspicion by many gay leaders. In 2006, alignment with the church was not something many LGBT people even wanted, much less asked for. Ten years later, all that has changed: while the majority of evangelical Christians still do not support marriage equality, the number of Christian voices affirming gay lives has grown from a solo to a chorus: Trey’s friend Rob Bell; Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s son Jay; Presbyterian writer Matthew Vines; Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong; even former Pentecostal preacher Carlton Pearson, a protégé of Oral Roberts who married me and my husband: points of light in an increasingly-bright constellation of witnesses.

I told Trey that, when I went to a gay club in Dallas for the first time, even though I was not a practicing Christian, I still felt like I was walking into a real world version of Sodom and Gomorrah: my reptile brain, in overdrive. That fear at first was overwhelming and, even after being out of the closet for six years – when I finally had the great good luck to find a man, fall in love and get married – I ended up in therapy two months before the wedding: visions of the earth splitting open and demons reaching for me tormented me day and night. It’s taken 10 years of being out of the closet – and marriage equality giving me full legal rights to parent my children – to take away those fears.

Trey, in 2016, almost shrugs – his ex-wife has been very understanding and they are already sharing the children 50/50.

“I think I’ve progressed far enough in my faith to be able to accept who I am and be proud of who I am. I didn’t have too much insecurity about that. The fact that marriage has just been legalized recently is, it’s like I even feel the effects of it online. There are a lot of haters out there, but not nearly as much as there are loving and affirming people. It’s like all those loving people are just drowning out the hate.”

When I came out, if I thought about the Bible at all it was of the legalism of Leviticus, the apocalypses of Revelations, and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Talking to Trey yesterday – whose voice and idioms are more surfer/stoner than the Calvinism of his youth – I felt an instant affection for and kinship with a fellow traveler whose journey, 10 years later, seems light years away from mine. The story of Jonathan and David was an early inspiration to Trey; it’s also a fitting bookend to cold-blooded old times and a more hopeful, easier 2016: