AMAZING STORIES
Julie Lyons: Coming Out of the Dark
By Cynthia Savage
The 700 Club
October 22, 2010
CBN.com
– For years, Julie Lyons was a crime reporter for the Dallas Times Herald. Her curiosity took her down some very dark alleys.
“It was such a violent time," she tells The 700 Club. "The drug trafficking was so open and in your face. I saw life just being snuffed out randomly and casually. I wanted to document that somehow, because I knew it had meaning”
Her boldness as a reporter was a result of her childhood fears.
“When I was a kid, I was terribly afraid of the sirens when I would hear them in Milwaukee, and I always thought something terrible happened to my family. I think I was such a fearful, shy, insecure kid, lonely kid that one of my ways of facing my fears was taking it head on, and putting myself in situations that were on the edge.”
Julie’s insecurities brought on years of loneliness.
“I remember at seven, we had moved to a new city in Michigan. I had no friends. At that age, that's when I first recall having a very strong attraction to girls, having crushes on girls at school like usually who had qualities that I lacked. They were popular or socially at ease or were perceived as being cute.”
As an adult, Julie’s attraction to females intensified.
“I was consumed with sexual thoughts at times. Toward men and women. There was this hole in my soul and it was a feeling that I had been rejected and was condemned to a life of being unloved. In a perverse way, it helped me deal with loneliness and feeling rejected and unloved and not whole.”
She was raised in church and knew what the Bible said about homosexuality. But Julie felt powerless over her sexual impulses.
“I was wrestling with things that I knew were sinful. I didn't know if I was going to be consigned to live forever grappling with these feelings. There was a lot of shame as well. I didn't even pray about it directly. Because just saying the word, saying something like, ‘Lord, help me with these homosexual feelings.’ I didn't want to name it. I think that given the right circumstances I could have fallen into a relationship with a woman, even a sexual relationship, and I thank God that that never happened.”
At 25, Julie took a deeper look at her Christian faith.
“I began seeking God, really out of desperation. I realized at that point that my faith was a fraud in many ways. I accepted this watered down, pretty good, powerless, pious kind of Christianity. I read the Word and I read somewhere about how baptism is the pledge of a clear conscience toward God. I thought, ‘Okay, all I can say Lord is I wanna follow You and all I could think to do was get baptized.’ I experienced joy for the first time in my life. For someone coming out of depression, it's a stark contrast. You know it has to come from God. I received the fullness of the Holy Spirit.”
Through prayer, Julie was delivered from depression and same sex attraction.
“My life was very different in that I had power I didn't have before over sin. There was definitely a before and after.”
Julie grew professionally as a journalist. But she didn’t take her new found freedom in Christ for granted. She looked for a church to support her commitment to purity. She found that church through an assignment on former crack addicts in South Dallas.
“While I was working on the story, I met people who were totally strung out receive prayer and the next day it was gone.”
Their testimony of redemption gave Julie confidence to maintain a life free from sexual sin. The Body of Christ Assembly became Julie’s new church home.
Pastor Fredrick Eddington shares, “One of the things that struck me about Julie was her openness and her honesty, which lends to your deliverance. ‘You shall know the truth.’ Not only the truth about God but the truth about you.”
Julie says “Well, if you are a crack cocaine addict or you have a same-sex attraction or you’re depressed and sitting in a corner in darkness, you can't take some kind of lame approach, some indirect approach to sin. You've got to take it head on and deal with it.”
Julie continues to lean on her church family for support, but today, she also shares life with her husband Larry and their son Connor.
“Larry has been a brave man. It takes a special man to walk that walk with me and he is that man. If we begin by repenting of our sin, He will take us on a journey to totally transform and renew our minds. He will do that. It requires obedience. If you want to be whole, you could be as whole as you want to be through the power of Jesus Christ.”
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