I Found You

(and it might not be who you're thinking it is)

I Found You

I loved writing this song. I wrote it with my son, Johnny Stevens, but like so many of my songs, it had been growing quietly in me for years. It was also one of the hardest to bring into the light, because it required me to speak kindly about myself—words I still sometimes struggle to say. (Some of you know that feeling, I hope!)

The very first whisper of this song came to me in the early 1980s, right when the pushback to my coming out began. People around me treated it as a catastrophe. I already carried the sorrow of divorce—sorrow for my children, for my family, for everyone whose lives were shaken. But the divorce was seen as a sad event; being gay was treated like a diagnosis, an affliction. People told me they had “known all along,” or that “God had revealed it to them.”

That always felt a little strange. If God was revealing things, wouldn’t God have whispered it to me first? Yet even in the confusion, another feeling rose up—quiet, bright, electric. It felt like uncovering a buried treasure:

So this is why I’ve felt different.

This is the real me.

Hurray.

When I came out, I stopped singing for almost five years. Silence wrapped itself around me. It wasn’t until I found MCC (Metropolitan Community Churches), and met Rev. Troy Perry (who founded that denomination), that I began to write again. And suddenly the old joy was there—the joy of sharing my experience as a child of God, and discovering that God’s blessing had never actually lifted.

One of the first surprises of the 70s was meeting people who knew the very first song I wrote, For Those Tears I Died. For some it had become a kind of Mizpah—a sacred memory-stone of their own walk with God. They remembered the song from summer camp, from home, from the moment they first knelt at an altar and asked God to guide their lives. And when they discovered the song had been written by someone like them—a queer believer—they found themselves again in its words.

Meanwhile, in certain conservative circles, my life was being narrated as a tragedy. I heard leaders mourn my “fall from grace,” describing the life they imagined I should have had, compared with the lonely, broken life they imagined I lived now. “Her story is a sad one,” they said.

And inside I wanted to answer, How do I tell you how blessed my life is? How deeply I have been loved? How many lives Jesus has touched through me—not despite who I am, but because I dared to be true?

I never felt like a great songwriter, and perhaps that is why every blessing astonishes me. I was only seventeen when Pat Boone called my house. He seemed ancient to me, someone my mother liked—someone who sang and wore white shoes after Labor Day. When he asked to record For Those Tears I Died, I had no idea it was kind of him even to ask. I certainly didn’t know people got paid for songs. My friends and I just shortened the title to “FTTID,” and laughed about it like kids who’d found a secret code.

A friend translated part of it into Spanish, then another into Dutch, and someone else into ASL. Slowly the song drifted through languages and across oceans. I became “the girl who wrote that song”—and somehow, that never felt ordinary. The song was never pushed, never published, never promoted. People simply sang it to each other. And still do. In 2024, the African Children’s Choir of Uganda released their own arrangement.

After I came out, some Church leaders mourned what they believed I had “lost”—fame, travel, a certain life they had planned for me. They were sure I must feel abandoned by God. But that was never my truth.

I’ve told you about the man who approached me after I sang in a gay bar—the one who said softly, “I used to be born again,” and asked me to pray with him. And the Assemblies of God pastor dragged unwillingly to one of my concerts. He was sure I didn’t know Scripture. But two songs in, he was weeping. By the end of the night, he had rededicated himself to follow God wherever God led. Today he is an MCC pastor and still faithful in his calling.

There was the woman who had grown up hearing her missionary parents sing FTTID at the close of every service. When she came out, they were devastated. But at their very first MCC service, I “just happened” to be there—singing the very song that had shaped their memories of God. And the woman with AIDS from IV drug use, who sang FTTID at summer camp every year. Months before she died, she brought me to meet her mother—a woman who had never known one could be both gay and Christian. By the time her daughter passed, they both knew: she was loved by God, and God’s grace could be trusted.

These are only a handful of the holy places where I’ve watched God use my life and my music to draw people toward mercy, tenderness, and home.

When I wrote my first song, I only wanted to share Jesus with my friends. I honestly thought Jesus might return by next Tuesday, so I didn’t think much about the future. I just wanted to tell as many people as I could before Tuesday came.

As I Found You began to form, I realized how different my life had become. I truly did lose my home, my car, my children, and my music ministry. But just as Jesus promised in Matthew 19:29, those who lose these things for God’s sake will receive a hundredfold—and life eternal. I thought I’d understood God’s plan, but I could never have dreamed the abundance God intended.

There is nothing tragic about my life. I am blessed beyond measure: with friends, a family of choice, healthy children and grandchildren, a wife who loves me, and a voice still able to carry the love of Christ.

How blessed am I to hear people say, “You’re the reason I’m home,”

“You helped me go back to church,” “You told me Jesus loved me, and I believed it because it came from you.”

That’s the truth of my story. Not that I’m exceptional. Not even that I found God’s love.

The real miracle is this:

I found you.

I Found You

by Marsha Stevens and John Stevens copyright 1999 Balm Publishing

I wrote my very first song thirty years ago this year,

Seems like it was only yesterday

I thought I knew the life I’d live till Jesus came again

But many things have changed along the way,

I lost my job, I lost my home, I lost my ministry

And then I lost my loneliness when I discovered me

CHORUS

And I found you, I found you,

A family of choice and friendships that are true

I found you, I found you

God let me be a part of bringing Jesus to your heart

I left the past behind, but I found you

The church had many plans for me, they feel I let them down

They say that my heart has gone astray,

I think it went in search of Christ’s relentless love for me

A love no doubt can ever turn away,

So when the concert’s done, I can still look in your eyes

And say no matter what I’ve lost, I’ve found a greater prize,

((CHORUS))

(Bridge)

And in those quiet moments when my faith seems to have flown

I hear one of your voices say, “You’re the one who led me home.”

((CHORUS))