Encouraging Words 9/10/09-Finding Faith at Gender Crossroads

From the San Gabriel Valley Tribune:

Eva-Genevieve Scarborough's story of how she accepted Jesus Christ into her life on May 4, 1980, is relatively undramatic.

Until the day someone with a booklet from Campus Crusade for Christ knocked on her door in Van Nuys, Scarborough had an unchurched upbringing. That day, she read through the booklets that the group left her. A few weeks later, on May 4, she attended her first church service and that was that: She was unchurched no more.

But Scarborough's road-to-Damascus experience, the moment when Saul became Paul - or in this case when Evan became Eva - would come much later. Scarborough's dark night of the soul - the years when she would first be kicked out of her church, then her marriage and finally her job; the years when she would begin living her life full time as a transgender woman - would come more than two decades after she first made her commitment to Jesus.

Scarborough, 54, has made a new life for herself, another new life, and she's out all the way.

"I am so done with hiding," she says. "I am out of the closet. The closet is broken down, burned up and gone. The world is now my closet. I am not going to hide."

In her new life, Scarborough is out but she still calls herself God's girl. She wears a cross on the outside of her blouse everyday and goes to church every Sunday, sometimes twice. She has found a home, both spiritually and literally, in a small but close-knit community of people that she never imagined existed: transgender Christians.

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