This podcast was recorded at the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina’s 2019 Annual Meeting and focuses on sharing Christ with your LGBT neighbor. Sharing Christ with the neighbors around you is a mandate given to us throughout Scripture, but how do we share Christ with our LGBT neighbors? Meleah Allard tells her story — a woman who lost her way but found redemption in Christ. After becoming a young single mom, she spent many years wanting to belong somewhere. Eventually she settled into a long-term homosexual relationship; however, God didn’t leave her there and, thanks to a simple church invitation, she found her way back to Christ and His church.

Here is an excerpt from this podcast:

“My mother taught me perseverance. The reason she taught me perseverance is because she would always say that my dad was either the best husband in the world or the worst nightmare.

My dad had a problem with rage. He didn’t know how to manage it. He had grown up with an alcoholic rage-a-holic, and that’s what he’d been taught his whole life. When my dad became angry, he also became violent.

One of the names I remember being called as a little girl was the “devil’s prostitute.” What my dad meant was that I was letting the devil use me, but my little ears didn’t understand those words.

Words have a lot of power. My mom called me a boy chaser, but I was desperately seeking love and attention and affection from anybody who would give it to me. I just wanted to feel like I mattered.

Unfortunately when I was 14 years old I decided to end my life. I begged God to change my family — to heal us and make the suffering go away. I begged God night after night and when He didn’t change things, I didn’t understand why. I knew He was all powerful, I knew He could change things. I just didn’t understand why He wouldn’t. So I just decided I was going to end my own life.”