Becoming Myself: The True Story of Thomas Who Became Sara by Sara Jane Cromwell

Author:Sara Jane Cromwell [Cromwell, Sara Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan
Published: 2008-02-12T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Everything Changes

Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamor in fillis

Times change, and we change with them

[HARRISON]

Graduating from the National College of Industrial Relations was such a great experience that it motivated me to go on and do other courses, this time through correspondence. I took two diploma courses with Kilroy’s College, one in business communication skills and the other in business administration. Between my spiritual growth and my academic achievements and life experiences, I was becoming a more rounded person, but I still hadn’t the confidence in my abilities that others evidently had; everything I did came from that same determination to prove I was just as normal as everyone else and an innate desire to make some kind of a positive difference.

In 1989 I started to attend Grosvenor Road Baptist Church in Rathmines. It is the most affluent Baptist Church in the south of Ireland and it showed. I got involved in the Thursday Club, set up for the local children, who would come in and play games and learn from the Bible. I enjoyed the work and had some good fun with the children. I stayed with Grosvenor Road for a year and then moved on to the Evangelical Church Fellowship which met at the Dublin Christian Mission, across from the Four Courts. I was very well received by the pastor, Liam Joyce, and his wife Sheena. Liam immediately recognised my potential as a pastor, but there was something else he recognised in me that affected him in ways which he did not disclose but had a significant impact on our future relationship.

In order to get to know each other better we went for a walk around the Phoenix Park. We walked and talked for about four hours and I shared my life with Liam in a very open and honest way. What I did not do at this time was confide in him about my wearing women’s clothes and the fact that I was experiencing a gender conflict and the fact that I was also struggling with my sexuality. I was twenty-nine at the time and it was to take another several years before I would share this with him. In the meantime, Liam assured me that I had a very special purpose for my life and that God was going to use me in ways I could not even begin to imagine. He wasn’t wrong there. I told him of my previous aborted attempt at sixteen to write my life story and how my mother, once she uncovered my notes, had taken them away and destroyed them. Liam told me that I should write my story and have it published; in fact, he was unusually insistent upon my doing it. He told me that he saw me as a ‘pathfinder’ and that this would mean treading a very lonely path, but that I would come back and show others the way forward. I could not have imagined just how accurate that prediction was to prove. It is

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