Changes in the Air

words & music by Doug Howell • © 2022 Creative Measures LLC

walking out your front door
I heard it slam behind me
I got the strangest feeling
that nothing was the way it used to be
“Come down from your tree,” you said,
but I heard a voice in my head say
that could be hazardous to the health
of all my childhood dreams

there are changes in the air
inside my heart and everywhere
they’re the answers to my prayers
so hold me down cause they’ve
got me running scared

you asked about my fantasies
and I gave you detailed stories
but just before they got to you
they laughed at me
now I don’t know what path to take
cause you’ve robbed me of my resignation
and given me no choice 
but daring to believe

there are changes in the air
inside my heart and everywhere
they’re the answers to my prayers
so hold me down cause they’ve
got me running scared

it once was peaceful all around
while war was raging in me
but now they’re all turned upside down
and all I feel inside is free
they’re saying I turned my back on God
but I hear a voice in my heart say
“I will be with you till you are
everything you’re meant to be”

there are changes in the air
inside my heart and everywhere
they’re the answers to my prayers
so hold me down—

cause there are changes in the air
inside my heart and everywhere
they’re the answers to my prayers
so hold me down, cause they’ve
got me running scared

Reviews

I really love these songs. Soothing, thoughtful and very encouraging. Thank you for sharing. The world needs to hear these especially now. May God Bless you. —Kathy R.

You have such a beautiful, soothing voice! Reminds me a bit of Jimmie Spheeris, my all time favorite artist. —Paula B.

Powerful truth-telling and art-making —Pressley S.

Very Beautiful song. —Clarence H.

One of your best, Doug. I can relate on several levels. Oh…and Dan is wonderful as usual!! —Kurt S.

Beautiful! I wish you peace and love! —Michael E.

Beautiful! And thank you for the background story. Thank God for grace that finds us in surprising places. —Tim P.

…as always, reasons to listen and revel in your work. Obviously “Changes…” is a window into a disturbing passage. Your approach is slightly dissident which touches the inner dissidence. This is not “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree,” but these songs must be written. I remember playing one of my down deep songs to my mom, who then asked, why do you write these David? Because I must mom… —D. B.

2022 Notes

This song was begun in 1981, but only completed recently. It describes my years in “conversion therapy,” and it’s not been an easy one to finish. 

By 1980 I was so tortured inside I didn’t think I could go on living the way I was, and felt that I was losing my bearings. So I asked some very close friends if they could recommend a therapist that might help me change (help me become heterosexual is what I was really asking). I’d always been open about my sexuality struggles with a few close friends and mentors, but keeping things between myself and God and a few close friends just wasn’t working anymore.

So they recommended someone. Let’s just call him Dr. H., a psychiatrist who tried to help me understand my homosexuality and to (hopefully) change. It was change therapy—that was the whole point—but thankfully not the kind that employed the inhuman, brutal methods far too many LGBT young people have experienced, and are still experiencing today. (Over 700,000 and counting, according to the documentary, Pray Away.)

Thankfully, Dr. H. seemed genuinely interested in helping me—to the point of significantly lowering his fee, since I could definitely not afford to see him as often as he thought I needed to. I kept journals, discussed dreams, shared my thoughts, analyzed my actions with him, and prayed. It was a tremendous relief to be able to be that open with someone—for whatever reason. I met with Dr. H. off and on, sometimes twice a week, sometimes with several months between appointments, for eight years. I had many personal revelations during our sessions, many moments of insight. And walking out his front door after one of those early meetings, past the rows of dark tree trunks lining his driveway, I felt as if I was going back in time. Or was it forward to another time? Maybe suspended is a better word. And I had a strange feeling that nothing would ever be the same, that I was starting a journey that would take me somewhere I’d never been.

During my last three years with Dr. H., I joined Homosexuals Anonymous, a 12-step group modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous, which basically treated homosexuality as if it was an addiction. I now believe the group is misguided and hurtful (at the least), but at the time it served a purpose for me, giving me a chance to share openly with a wider group of people, both men and women, who eventually became friends, some of them very close. It turned out to be an important part of my voyage. But like every other so-called ex-gay group under the umbrella organization Exodus (now defunct, and discredited by its own leaders in 2013), it was based on a premise: there is something wrong with being gay. Something needs to be fixed. Well, as far as I was concerned, that was the understatement of the year. Of course, something needs to be fixed! I knew that without any help from an outside group. And the fact is that it did get fixed, but not in the prescribed fashion, and not to everyoneʻs liking.

At the end of all these years of focused prayer, sharing, openness and unequivocal honesty—plus the many years of struggle before that—and with the help of groups like Evangelicals Concerned, and authors like Sylvia Pennington, and long discussions with friends about the grace of God, and my own prayer and study, I came to the simple yet stunning realization that God really does love me. As others have said, “God created me, and God donʻt create junk.” And like the song I had sung literally hundreds of times said, God loved me “Just As I Am.” I’d learned that long, long ago on some level—long before I was even aware of self or sin, and that knowledge had been my anchor during the storms, my rudder when the winds of change blew strong. Now I saw that it was all I needed. God loved me. Just the way He had created me. I was a new creation already. It was a new day.

I can’t detail here all the questionings, conversations, and scripture studies that led me to this understanding or this would be a multi-volume set instead of a page, but anyone sincerely searching for answers will find many resources nowadays to get the ball rolling: books like God and the Gay Christian by Matthew Vines; memoirs like Boy Erased by Garrard Conley; blogs like GAYoda, by Dr. Mike Rosebush; films like Pray Away; Facebook groups like Trey Pearson’s LGBTQ Safe Space; organizations like Making Things Right and the Reformation Project… And that’s just a start. You’re not alone. There are plenty of people whoʻve been there before you, and who want to help. Above all, listen to the loving voice of God within you, and believe the promise that he ”will guide you into all truth.” Sometimes it’s OK to tell everyone else to shut up.

I think the best way to summarize my shift in thinking is through a quotation that really resonated with me as I made my way like a pilgrim from a strict Baptist upbringing toward the ancient, catholic faith of the Episcopal church. From a little unassuming booklet called “Episcopalians and the Bible” published by Forward Movement came this game-changing statement: “Episcopalians…stand in Christ and read the Word. We do not stand in the word and read about Christ” [emphasis mine]. You might want to read that again, and let it sink in. This is not some trivial difference of viewpoint. It’s a life-changing one.

After all the inner weighings and wranglings about what constitutes the truth, the Way, Truth and Life himself took the upper hand and led me out of the storm. The Author of Grace showed me firsthand how far grace extends: he went with me in my searchings and wanderings, answered all my unanswerable questions (even if sometimes with silence, or other, deeper questions), sent personal messages in reply to the fleeces I had laid out like Gideon in my desperation not to take a wrong turn, or bring anything but glory to his Name. (See Judges 6:36–40. I’ve written about these fleeces in my description of “If You Were”.) Eventually, God showed me it was time to stop focusing all my energy on trying to change what he had created, and not loving. He created me from love. He created me for love. He created me to love.

On May 19, 1989, my mom came to visit, and I took her to see Dr. H. It was my last session. I planned to tell her I was gay and thought Dr. H. might be able to help her deal with it. After I came out and we chatted for awhile, I thanked him for being so kind and understanding to me all those years, and he surprised me: He chuckled and told us that after all this time meeting together, I had changed his mind more than he had changed mine. 

That night I felt such a weight lifted that I just had to celebrate, and went out dancing with my friend Carole. It was probably the first time I’d ever felt totally comfortable in my own skin, so maybe it was no mistake that that very night I met the inimitable David C., draped over a chair with his ciggy, oozing attitude and holding court. He would soon—after a short, befuddling episode initiated by his dyslexic best friend—become my life partner and, after it became legal, husband of nearly 33-1/2 years and counting.

I look back on that decade of conversion therapy now with very mixed emotions. It was dark, difficult, excruciating at times, and all based on the false premise that I was not the person God wanted me to be—but it was also the means God used to unravel that premise, get me healthier, help me share more openly, question more freely, think more deeply, depend more on others, and just plain get to know (and like) myself. Of course, as you can probably guess by now, that didn’t mean that everyone around me—fans, friends, family—was happy with my conclusions. But that’s another story…

As I say in the song, “It once was peaceful all around / while war was raging in me / but now they’re all turned upside down / and all I feel inside is free.” Instead of me trying to keep everyone else at peace, Peace—God’s peace—was now inside of me, while the world outside went a little crazy.

My dear listener, it’s not an easy thing to become the person you were created to be. It’s your life’s work. It’s different work for each one of us. But one thing I know: there’s nothing you could ever do that would please God more.

Music Notes

Thanks to Dan Leonhardt for helping me move this song along to completion with his usual stellar guitar work. Thank you so much, Dan, for believing in me even when you didn’t always understand me. I was planning to perform this song in a concert chronicling my coming out process, but the concert never took place. So here it is for the first time.