“Jessie Talked to God” by Maggie Felisberto

Charismatic evangelicalism is an addictive movement, and like any addiction, it can be almost impossible to escape. When my family began attending a Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, my parents did not know just how fringe my beliefs would become. Thanks to the radicalized religious education I would receive in middle school and high school through the church’s highly successful youth program, evangelical Christian summer camp, competitive Bible quizzing, and an extremely deep-seeded insecurity in myself, I latched on to the message that God would love me if I repented of my sins and lived my life only for Him. Being a born-again Christian became my primary identity, and my primary purpose converting others to salvation in Christ.

I was thirteen years old the first time I had ever heard that there were no known Christians in Libya and felt the call to missions, fourteen when I spent a week in northern Mexico playing humanitarian by helping build an addition to a church partnered with the program, and fifteen when I entered into a month-long journey from Pennsylvania to a string of small Amazonian villages northeast of Iquitos, Peru, where I joined a team of like-minded teens with one thing on our minds: the salvation of the lost.

Jessie’s journey began in Milwaukee and brought her into my sphere for the first time during the three-day meet and greet for the team in Georgia. We learned wordless performance pieces to communicate the gospel message, embodying the crucifixion to song in the universal language of movement and dance. We practiced sharing our testimonies and learned basic Spanish phrases. We did group shadow puppets in the dusk before being separated, boys with boys and girls with girls. The women agreed to a no-makeup pact for the duration of the trip, which wouldn’t affect me, since I didn’t even own any makeup yet and had barely begun to shave my legs or wear a bra. I was the youngest member of the team.

One person on this trip fascinated me more than any of the others: Jessie. She had warm, sugary blond hair and lightly honeyed skin, clear eyes and a soft smile. She had also received direct guidance from God, something which I so desperately craved. I was a vessel of the Most High, and I longed to hear His voice. I latched onto her, determined to make her my new best friend. Jessie was my sister in Christ, and Jessie was who I relied on for emotional support throughout the trip. Together we shared stories, evangelized, painted buildings, and played with indigenous children as if we had been put on this earth for this specific purpose: to glorify God alongside each other. It rained every day, despite being the dry season, and we danced in it.

Despite being just two years older than me, Jessie spoke with authority on the Gospel and on the power of the grace of God in a way that I’d only seen adult leaders in the church and visiting missionaries from overseas perform before. She had a natural talent for public speaking and evangelism, and her strength of conviction never wavered.

At the end of our month in the headwaters of the Amazon, I had witnessed miracles, experienced them even, and felt powerful and confident in myself. Part of that was the deep knowledge that God loved me, and I could trust that knowledge because Jessie had told me so. In a moment of insecurity and fear, I told her I wished I had a cross necklace like hers that I could hold onto when I felt overwhelmed. Instead of saying that was silly, which I partially expected, she unclasped the chain from her neck and placed it on my own. “There,” she said, “now there’s no need to be afraid.”

—

At the start of my sophomore year of undergrad, I transferred from a secular university to Nyack College, the premiere Christian liberal arts college in the state of New York. The school promised all of the racial and ethnic diversity of other New York schools with a wide array of exclusively Christian denominations represented in the student body. I had felt my faith tested beyond my capabilities the year before, so I was desperate for a strong faith-based community to rely on going forward. When a stranger approached me during the first week of classes and told me that God had plans for my future that would lead so many people to Him, including the lost members of my own family, I felt my sense of purpose burn. Nyack is a Christian and Missionary Alliance school, the same denomination that I grew up in, and every semester began with a week of themed sermons and chapel events called Deeper Life. The speaker that year was an ex-gay advocate who’d written a famous worship song. Before his conversion, the preacher had been miserable living a life of sin that glorified his own desires, but by repenting of his homosexuality, he was now able to live entirely for Christ. Each night that week, the ex-gay preacher spoke about the redemptive power of the Cross, the love he felt for his wife, and the children he was raising to be good men of God.

People think that the irreconcilable divide between evangelicals and the LGBTQ+ community comes down to the question of whether or not gay intercourse is a sin, but that is really only the starting point. Evangelical culture is predicated on the belief that you in yourself are never enough, therefore you must place your identity in Christ. Who you are, what you like, what you do with your time are all secondary to who God is and what God has done for you. Your identity is subsumed into the identity of Christian as your foremost trait. You find your joy through God, knowing that without Him, you are nothing. You evangelize to your friends and family knowing that without God, they are destined to damnation.

LGBTQ+ culture is the exact opposite. Queerness is a journey of self-acceptance, not self-negation. Detractors mock us with phrases like “I identify as an attack helicopter” or calling us “the alphabet mafia” because the culture of queerness is about valuing who you are, what you like, and what you do with your time. It is this aspect of queerness, more so than any question of the sin of homosexuality, that flies in the face of evangelicalism. If you don’t believe you are inherently worthless, then you will never believe that choosing God will create your worth.

However if, like the ex-gay preacher, you do believe that you are unclean and unworthy except through the blood of Christ shed on the cross, it’s easy enough to be convinced that everybody is unclean and unworthy. If you have a shred of empathy and you’re involved in a religion like that, it becomes eternal life or death for everyone you know with the highest stakes in the most important race in the universe. Your compassion becomes the movement’s greatest weapon as you try desperately to ensure that you and your loved ones are destined for heaven.

—

Jessie came to see me in my high school’s production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat during her senior year of high school (my sophomore) and spent a week with me and my family. She was living with her ‘spiritual dad’ Marty instead of her parents, the black sheep of her family for following Christ.

My friend Patrick and I took Jessie out to the edge of town along the railroad tracks to the bottom of a place called the Cliffs. The Cliffs weren’t all that high, maybe fifty feet above the tracks, and they were a popular hangout spot for a dozen or more social groups. Decades of graffiti covered the rocks at the top of the cliff wall. Patrick pointed out the perfect place to climb, and Jessie scaled the side of the Cliffs with ease, golden hair tied into a tight ponytail. When rays of sunlight found their ways through the trees and landed on her back, she glowed.

She was sick, though, having developed a severe case of IBS which limited her diet to a very strict set of safe low-FODMAP foods. My parents did not hesitate to cater to this, and when she saw the soymilk in our fridge purchased just for her, she cried. Her own parents would have never taken the time to care.

—

During my freshman year of college, I became friends with another freshman named Josh through the campus Christian fellowship. Josh and I jived well, and we went church hopping together frequently to see what was available in the area. We went to a church one Sunday with a couple other young adults from the fellowship group, and halfway through the sermon, the preacher began to speak about homosexuality. As expected, he labeled it a sin, a crime against God, invoking the famous God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, extended it, yelling not Eve and Evelyn! He repeated it over again. Not Adam and Steve, not Eve and Evelyn. Josh and I exchanged pained glances. After the service, one of our other friends said that even she had been made uncomfortable because “if you think about it, God did make Adam and Steve.” She wasn’t saying that she was okay with homosexuality, but she was deeply disturbed by the framing of the message.

At that point, Josh had already come out to me, and I’m certain that he’d clocked me as an oblivious gay so deep in the non-affirming church that I couldn’t even see it myself yet. I was nineteen and indoctrinated, but also clearly accepting in a way that most of our Christian peers weren’t.

One night I had a troubling dream, a vivid one. Over the past few years, these vivid dreams had become common, and I always called Jessie to interpret them. She believed, and I believed, that these dreams were messages from God. I may have been a background chorus girl during Joseph, but I was living his dreamer’s life in the twenty-first century.

In this dream, Josh was in a house that was on fire. I ran through the house to find him and pull him out, but when I finally found him, he was comfortably in the kitchen and there was no fire; it had all been replaced by spaghetti sauce. According to Jessie’s interpretation, Josh being trapped in a house on fire was a reference to his sexuality, and without intervention, he would surely burn in hell. As for the spaghetti sauce, perhaps that was just because he came from an extremely Italian family.

—

My first “sex dream,” if you could call it that, was about two women. It was another vivid dream, maybe my earliest that I could remember in full detail, and it haunts me with its beauty to this day. The dream featured two celestial bodies, not even humanoid shapes, just whorls of color in a distant space. The peaches and pinks pulsed and swirled into the lavenders and blues, dancing together until joining to form a sudden burst of bright white light. I awoke with the knowledge that this had been an erotic dream between two women, and promptly buried it as far away from my conscious mind as I could (as any unknowingly demisexual teenager easily “saving herself for her Boaz” would).

I did not share this one with Jessie.

—

In Peru, we learned to share our testimonies: the recounting of our life stories, how we came to know God, and the works that He had performed in our lives since then. As the month went on, each member of the team had the opportunity, and the requirement, to share their testimony at one of the churches we visited. Translated into Spanish by a budding fire-and-brimstone preacher in his mid-twenties, we teens poured our hearts out to strangers who’d come to see the spectacle of foreigners with no grasp of what our presence actually signified: an attempt to convert not just their religion, but their culture to ours. Because more than anything, that’s what White Evangelism is when taken abroad: cultural colonization.

Mine was simple: on the first day of fifth grade, I met a girl (a quiet and gentle type, with warm blond hair cascading down to her waist and a soft, inviting smile) and immediately felt drawn to her. There was something enigmatic about her, and it was clearly the Lord shining through her and reaching out to me. She invited me to AWANA, a children’s program at her church, and through that program my sisters and I all found Jesus and our parents became Christians and we joined the church. My testimony worked, but it was nothing like Jessie’s.

Jessie talked to God, and God talked back.

Her mother was a witch, and she slept with demons in her cradle. Her father was a nightmare made of terror and rage. She grew up surrounded by spirits that had been summoned into her house by her mother’s practice, and as a preteen, she became possessed by these harmful spirits. They led her to all sorts of dangerous things, drinking and drugs, self-harm and much older men. When she was in the absolute pit of despair, Jesus found her and liberated her of the evil spirits. It was a journey, but by the time she was seventeen, she had left her wickedness and her wicked family behind. Jessie was living with her spiritual mentor and had virtually no contact with her biological family. She had been rescued from evil by God, and the gift for her devotion was a direct line of communication with God.

When God saved Jessie, he reached out to her very soul and spoke the Truth.

Jessie had the gift of prophecy, and she spoke wisdom and insight into the hearts of those who would hear. She spoke of sin and salvation, redemption through blood. She spoke of God, and God spoke through her.

When Jessie finally shared her testimony, it was the last night of the trip, and I knew she’d been putting it off because of the pain that still surrounded talking about her family. For the first time that month, her lip quivered and her voice trembled as she talked about burning herself intentionally with cigarettes and lighters after promising God that she wouldn’t cut herself with razor blades anymore. The recovery process was long, but she had come through with the conviction of the redeemed that through Christ, all things truly are possible.

God did not talk back to me, so I hung on her every word.

—

Jessie spent time at Bethany College of Missions, earning an Associate’s degree in ministry before landing an internship at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Missouri. The first time I visited Jessie at IHOP while I was still in high school, I fell in love with the city and the location. People were constantly worshipping, and in the charismatic atmosphere, freedom of expression reigned supreme. Dancing, standing, kneeling, sobbing, smiling, laughing, crying out in tongues—all of this and more filled their 24-hour sanctuary in an unending chorus of praise.

Small miracles abounded. I felt compelled to take the change from my wallet and leave it on the ground; half an hour later, a young woman with short brown hair and bright freckles across her nose walked by and picked it all up, and it was just enough to buy a bagel and eat for the first time in two days after a fast. She was a friend of Jessie’s, and she told me that she’d been intending to fast longer, but the Lord had told her that she needed to stop and nourish her body. When she realized she had no money, the Lord told her to look down, and she found the coins. Later, this same woman would tell me that the Lord had told her that I had the spirit of Ruth, the Moabite great-grandmother of King David and ancestor of Jesus, and that I should study her.

As I studied Ruth over the next two years, I came to two conclusions: First, marriage is sometimes about convenience, and second, your relationships with the other women in your life are more important than your romantic relationships with men. After all, Ruth’s story is about her love and devotion to Naomi, not Boaz. Boaz is the convenience that allows Ruth to provide for Naomi, less a soulmate and more a survival mechanism.

Sometime after my first visit to IHOP, Jessie met Keith, and I could not understand why I was so jealous underneath my happiness for her.

—

People come out in a million different ways to a million different people, but the first time you come out is to yourself. Others had been clocking me for years, but I was so blindly unaware of my attraction to women until I was 22. I have no idea what triggers it for most people, what thing about the same sex keys them into the fact of their difference, especially not for the kids who grow up knowing. Sometimes I feel jealous of those kids for coming into their personal identities at an age where my only identity of importance was in Christ. I have no idea how they got there. For me it was Lucy Heartfilia, the kind and gentle blond protagonist of the anime Fairy Tail whose magical powers gave her a connection to the spirit realm that the other wizards of the Fairy Tail guild lacked.

—

Until you’ve experienced a miracle, you can’t imagine how intoxicating the sense of divine power can be. The Peruvian pastor partnered with our organization held a special prayer session for our team as we were preparing to leave Iquitos and head back to our lives in the English-speaking world. This prayer meeting came with an offer: the pastor’s wife had the gift of miraculous healing, and she was happy to pray over us for the immediate healing of our physical needs.

Even though half of my face was swollen and blistered from a spider bite, I requested one thing: healing for my vision. Ever since I was a child, my left eye had been deteriorating at a rate that was leading me towards early blindness, and my vision problems had been a serious concern earlier in the trip when my glasses had fallen into the Marañon river. It took several tries, but some of the members of our team dived for them until they were found. I was afraid of being that vulnerable again, and if I could see clearly out of my left eye, then I wouldn’t even need those glasses anymore.

The pastor’s wife began to pray over me, placed her hand over my right eye. I was too nervous to correct her hand to the problematic eye, so I wasn’t surprised—heartbroken, but not surprised—when I opened my eyes after her prayer and nothing had changed. Other team members had been truly healed of aches and pains, but my ask was probably too big, even though she was said to have cured broken bones in the past. I went to bed that night and sobbed, convinced that my faith was not strong enough to move mountains.

In the morning, I put my glasses on and immediately grew dizzy. Mark, a team member, was the one who first told me to take off my glasses, and I did. Overnight, my vision had healed. I was good enough, after all.

—

During my second visit to Kansas City in 2010, I finally got the chance to meet Keith, a tall, handsome black man who’d grown up in the city and led a chaotic young life which had led to two children from a first wife that he’d left before becoming a Christian. He’d been transformed since then, coming to know the Lord and dedicating himself wholly to ministry in his hometown. He was five years older than Jessie, and just as smitten with her as she was with him. “We can’t even kiss anymore,” Jessie told me in secret, “because we just get so overwhelmed with desire and we’re waiting for the wedding night.”

She also confided that she was worried about their future, that they’d been labeled “race-traitors” by some of their friends. But, she said she knew that God had a plan for them and that he was calling them into this lifelong partnership.

I was there for the wedding, and Jessie was preoccupied with preparations, but she still made time for me and for her other ministry commitments. We answered a call for help from a friend of hers to come pray in her home. When we got there, the friend confessed to Jessie that she had fallen back into a pattern of same-sex attraction, and she begged Jessie to help. Though the back of my mind tickled with the thought that maybe this was wrong, I also believed that Jessie could do no wrong. I had never known anyone to be as in tune with God’s Word as Jessie, and I trusted her interpretation of scripture implicitly.

I absorbed the moment as Jessie walked the four corners of the room, anointed them with holy oil, and began to pray. Invoking the name of the Lord and Christ the Son, she commanded the evil spirits plaguing her friend to flee, banishing them from this home. She spoke to the demon of homosexuality and cast it out of her friend’s body. I prayed with her, fervently demanding that any spirits and demons present in the room be banished to the bottom of the ocean and to the outer reaches of space. Together, we were caught in the ecstasy of devotion to God.

—

For six months after returning from Peru, my story of miraculous healing became a major topic in my home church. I was asked to give a talk on the trip at evening service, and part of my talk was to do a demonstration on how well I could see. This was impressive enough to garner attention, and soon I was being asked to pray for divine healing over others’ eyesight, which I did. I had been touched by God and was now sharing that blessing.

I did not notice my vision deteriorating again for another three years, and to this day I do not know if I had ever been truly healed or if my desire to be healed, to interact with God in a tangible way, had placebo-affected my mind into believing it. When I did suddenly revert back to near-blindness in my left eye, I was distressed that some lack of faith on my part had caused God to recall his blessing.

Jessie was the only person I trusted to confide in with these changes, and with my fears. When I talked to her about my changed vision, and how I’d been struggling in my faith because of it (or the reverse, who knew), she confirmed this suspicion that God could be testing me and encouraged me to rededicate myself to the Lord. I tried, and I tried so hard, but my miraculous vision was never restored.

—

Whenever the question of faith comes up today, I dodge the questions as much as possible and fib my way through in whatever way I believe will best suit whoever is talking with me. At any given moment, depending on the audience, I could be a diehard Christian or agnostic or a fully pagan witch. Witchcraft, after all, invokes many of the same elements of charismatic evangelicalism: blessings, prayers, physical components like oil or smoke, purifying evil, setting intentions, prophecy. Depending on the witch, the power that you rely on might not even be different from the charismatic prophet.

The truth, though, is nearly as fluid as my sexuality and gender identity. Some days I believe in the Christian God, other days I don’t. Some days I call myself a witch, other days I don’t. I know two things to be true about my spirituality: I believe there is a god, and I do not believe that god loves me.

—

The third and final time I visited Jessie and her now-husband Keith, I went along with her to all of the different prayer meetings she was a part of. I attended her church’s Sunday service and prayed grace over dinners with her stepsons, converted mother and infant daughter. I helped with the kids when needed, arranged a romantic dinner date for the two of them, cooked meals for the whole family to show my appreciation for them hosting me. I began looking at graduate programs in Kansas to be closer to them, and Jessie, Keith and I began to talk seriously about the idea of me moving in with them for a while to help me establish myself in the area. By the end of that trip, her stepsons asked if they could call me “Aunt Maggie” since they didn’t have any aunts. Jessie smiled at me and said, “Of course!” with neither of us telling the boys about her two half-sisters back in Wisconsin that still refused to speak with her.

—

To this day, I do not know why Jessie ghosted me. When her husband lost his job, they ended up moving from their house in Lenexa into a one-bedroom apartment back in Kansas City, and our plans of me moving in with them were put on hold. Then Jessie’s second pregnancy ended in miscarriage. I remember sitting on the phone with her for hours from my aunt’s guest bedroom in Spain, racking up a $200 phone bill for the international call just to listen to her pour out her heart in grief. My heart broke for her, because I loved her. I loved her so much, and there was nothing I could possibly do to ease her pain. So I did what I do best, and I wrote her a poem.

In the poem, I pray to lesser gods, begging to take the place of the infant who was lost, to bring her back and set a smile on her mother’s face again. I plead and cry out for justice until the One True God acknowledges me and tells me to be still and worship. I sent this poem to Jessie in an email saying I wanted to do something for her, and this was all I could do. She never spoke to me again.

At the time, my mother said she suspected that when their financial life overturned and they were no longer able to hold up their end of the plan for me to move in with them, Jessie might have been too embarrassed to say as much, and that embarrassment caused her to go silent.

I believed it was the poem, that I had offended her in some way through it. I called and left voicemails, sent texts and emails for months with no response. Eventually, I sent one final email saying that I would be there for her when she was ready to open up, but that she had also hurt me by shutting me out. I said that no matter what, I still loved her as one of my closest friends and that I was praying for her.

—

I started coming out to myself when I was 22, came out to another person for the first time at 23, and lost Jessie that same year. I hadn’t ever come out to her and never would, and I was honestly still trying to pray it away until I was nearly 26 and moving to Massachusetts. I wonder, though, if she knew. If somehow she realized it, long before even I realized it—not that I was gay, or bi, or demi-bi-sexual homoromantic genderfluid she/they demigirl Sapphist, or whatever—but that I was in love with her. My love was deep, passionate, and ultimately romantic. I had confused lust and longing with being spiritual accountability partners. I thought my admiration was of her spiritual prowess and not her soul.

When Jessie left me, I obsessed over her for months, desperate to figure out how to win her back, to restore our lost friendship, to keep her in my life. She had been my rock, my mentor, my friend for nearly a decade. We were just a few months and a moving van away from sharing our lives together, platonically, and I would have done anything and everything in the world to have protected her smile. I felt the abandonment and betrayal of rejection radiating through every inch of my body as eventually my grief turned to anger and frustration. I had never done anything to hurt her, and I could not understand why Jessie wouldn’t call me back. She had loved me as a friend, as a sister, for all of these years, and then vanished.

—

After enough time, I took the cross necklace that Jessie had given me off of my neck and placed it in my jewelry box, letting the chain entangle itself with a dozen other cheap necklaces.

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