News
Featured Image
Wilna van Beek.CampaignLifeTV / YouTube

PETITION: Support Bishop  who declared: 'You cannot change your gender'! Sign the petition here.

TORONTO, October 2, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — A Christian convert who overcame her homosexual attraction by grace and the support of her pastors is urging Canada’s Liberal government not to criminalize so-called “conversion therapy.”

“I’m a former lesbian who has chosen to walk away from living and practicing a homosexual lifestyle,” Wilna Van Beek says in a video co-produced by LifeSiteNews and Campaign Life Coalition, Canada’s national pro-life and pro-family political lobbying group.

“This has been a long and painful journey at times,” adds Van Beek, a native of South Africa who now lives in Saskatchewan.

She related that key elements contributed to her deliverance from unwanted same-sex attraction after “a rollercoaster ride” of some 18 years of anguish and turmoil.

“The first one was the word of God, the second one was conversion to Christ, and then the third one was the ability to talk to someone about what was going on in my heart. This was helpful, and not harmful.”

Van Beek recalled that she always felt different growing up in a dysfunctional home with warring parents, where there was verbal and physical abuse.

“In the process, my heart got hurt,” and “I also developed a tremendous fear toward men,” she said.

But after she began reading the Bible her mother had given her at age eight, “truth entered into my heart,” and “I learned what was right, and what was wrong. I learned what was pleasing to the Lord, and what was not pleasing to Him.”

“I accepted Jesus fully into my life and in my heart in the early 1990s,” but her homosexual desires continued, Van Beek said.

Her attempts to “follow Jesus” while pursuing lesbian relationships resulted “a huge battle in my life” that continued for almost 20 years, she said.

“This is what happened to me when I entered into living and practicing a homosexual lifestyle: I felt a wall would go up between me and God.”

This feeling of separation became so “unbearable over time” that one day in 2003, Van Beek “fell on my bedroom floor, and I cried out to God, and I said, ‘God, I need you to change me. I need you to help me, because I cannot, and I do not want to, live with…without your presence in my life any longer.’”

At this point, she chose to be celibate but was “deeply” dismayed and disappointed when she felt attracted to a woman she met shortly afterward.

“This time, however, I didn’t cave in to it, because I reached out to God right away, but also had the courage to go to my pastor and his wife and talk to them for the first time in my life,” Van Beek said.

“Not only did they welcome me in their home, but they listened to me, they…they talked to me, they…they prayed for me and with me, and they…they created this safe place in their…in their house, and I was able to pour out everything that was on my heart.”

They also became her “accountability partners,” whom she could turn to for help and encouragement when she felt “weak,” Van Beek said.

Later in life, she went to a Christian counselor to deal with her anger, only to discover that at the root of her anger and her homosexual inclinations was fear.

“And when we were able to deal with this,” she was freed of homosexual desires, she related.

“Today I am celebrating 17 years of celibate life, and also, I can testify that my same-sex attractions no longer exist. “

Van Beek’s story is the fourth in a series of video testimonies of individuals who have left the homosexual life and are now urging Canada’s senators and members of Parliament not to make it a crime to help minors overcome unwanted same-sex attraction, or to advertise or profit from providing such counseling.

Had this been the case when she reached out to her pastor and his wife, “they will be too afraid to go against the law, and so they will not be able to walk with me, talk with me, pray with me, and thus healing and restoration and a…a lot of help that I received would not be able to come to me,” Van Beek said.

Bill C-8, the former federal law criminalizing “conversion therapy,” died when Trudeau prorogued Parliament in August, but Jack Fonseca, director of political operations for Campaign Life, predicted the Liberals will reintroduce a similar bill “very soon.”

“We know that with the possible exception of murdering babies in the womb, nothing excites Trudeau more than promoting transhuman-homosex ideologies while persecuting Christians,” he told LifeSiteNews Thursday.

Indeed, later that same day, justice minister David Lametti tabled Bill C-6, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy), an identical bill to C-8.

In light of this, it is all the more urgent to take action, Fonseca told LifeSiteNews.

Campaign Life is asking “all pro-family citizens and others who value our civil liberties, to share this video with their MP, and with others in their circle of influence, so we can keep building opposition to this frontal attack on the central Christian mission of ‘conversion’ from sin,” he said.

He also urged people to make use of Campaign Life’s Action Alert Email campaign to send their M.P. a message opposing the criminalization of “what’s disingenuously being labelled as ‘conversion therapy’, but which is really just pastoral counselling or traditional psychotherapy.”