LGBTQ

“God is so proud of you”– a BBC Pause for Thought

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

Here’s the text for the 22 June 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Gary Davies on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

It’s Pride Month, y’all, and I’ll bet if you ask any friend or family member who’s lesbian or gay or bisexual or trans, they will be able to describe, in detail, the point in their life – not necessarily when they came out to others – but the point when they woke up themselves to that beautiful dimension of their humanity.

Me, I was nineteen-years-old, sitting in my car, waiting for the green light at the intersection of Mendenhall and Poplar Avenue, in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee.

Windows down, a heavenly summer day, and a song by my favourite band came on the radio. I’d heard it 100 times before, but that day, the lyrics broke through, and I heard God say, “Trey, baby, you’re gay.”

It’s something I’d stumbled around at a hidden level, an ashamed level, for a long time – but that day, the windows came down. A spiritual awakening, a sense God was proud of me.

The year before, I’d had an unexpected divine encounter – and I’d made a conscious decision to follow Jesus wherever he might lead. When I started reading the Bible seriously for the first time, I read Jesus’s promise. “You will know the truth” he says, “and the truth will set you free”. And a year later, on that heavenly day in my car, through the music on the radio, I believe Jesus kept his word.

To be consciously LGBTQ involves learning at a very deep level to be radically honest. It’s one of the many gifts of being queer. Now, I’m definitely not saying that we queer folks are more honest than any of you lovely straight folks. Maybe just that we’ve had to fight a bit harder for the truth, and so it feels extremely precious.

A Methodist church I used to pastor marched every year in the Pride Parade, and we handed out Gospel postcards that said things like: “Gay or straight, you are loved”; “God likes you”.

But my favourite postcard said “God is proud of you”. People would receive that message and smile the biggest smiles, sometimes even start to cry. Hugs often ensued, and many blessings.

I have to say, y’all: I love being gay. Thank you, Jesus, for making me gay.

But whether you’re gay or straight or lesbian or trans or bi: as we are all on the human journey of being honest and true, I believe God is so proud of you.

The Real Me: a BBC “Pause for Thought”

/ Trey Hall / 1 Comment

Here’s the text for the 26 Feb 2021 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Early Breakfast Show with Jane Middlemiss on BBC Radio 2. You can listen to the audio clip here on the BBC website.

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The Real Me is sort of a weird person, and so I know this is a bit unusual: I see a spiritual director every month. She’s a mixture of therapist, mystic, personal trainer, and general straight-shooter.

For example, she tells me how much God loves me, but in the next breath, how full of rubbish I can be at the same time. The real me is apparently wonderful and also quite a mess.  

But welcome to being human! This is us – we’re a mix of things that don’t seem to go together but actually do. We’re courageous and yet we colossally screw up. We’re luminous but a mere pixel in the universe. Beautiful and broken ­­– not either/or but both/and. And life is about navigating these double-truths. 

I remember experiencing this in my mid-twenties on a gay cruise in the Caribbean. A cruise is not my general idea of a good time, but my then-boyfriend, a jazz singer, was playing a concert on board and I went along for free. Free is my idea of a good time.  

It was a week of sun, cocktail parties, and dancing until dawn on the Lido deck.

One afternoon at the pool, I got chatting to a woman who turned out to be the chaplain on board. When she discovered I was a minister, too, she asked me to help with the worship service that day, which was Ash Wednesday.  

Ash Wednesday’s the first day in the season of Lent, which began last week ­– a time when Christians remember what it means to be real.

And to get started, we mark our foreheads with dirt crosses and, though we’re still alive, we hear the words: remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. It’s one of those weird double-truths: You’re going to die, but you’ll be okay. 

Later that evening hundreds of folks gathered in the ship’s rooftop bar and we put ashes on each other’s faces. I remember old men in wheelchairs, two women partnered for 60 years, and loads of fresh-faced university students with their whole lives before them. All of us crowded in to mark the glorious weirdness of being human, the truth we’re all facing in these pandemic days: we’re going to die, and here’s to life. 

The worship service in the bar flowed onto the dance floor that night. Our bodies pulsing in the light of the moon, you could still see the ashes on people’s faces, shining in the dark.