Coming Out: Five things parents must do—Part 3

For a Christian parent who has a child who adopts a gay or transgender identity, after the initial hard shock of emotions and feelings settles down, you want to think about how to navigate these messy waters of relationship from here on out with your child. I want to give you some useful tools for you to grow in and consider as you think about having wisdom in conversations.

It can be challenging to know how to engage in conversations with your son or daughter, especially if they’ve embraced this identity so strongly that reason, sound judgment, and even common sense just go out the window. You may have tried to reason with them on the basis of God’s truth or the authority of Scripture, but to no avail. You probably found that hitting them with Bible passages over and over again, as if this will change their mind, is not the most helpful approach.

I want to aim you towards engaging your child by bringing God into conversations in the context of everyday, real-life circumstances. It can be easy to unintentionally make sexuality the topic of most conversations, or even make it seem like you reduce your child down to their behavior. So you want to be mindful in this that your relationship with your child can be one of the most powerful displays of who Christ is for them. So, three categories for you to consider in this.

The first is, keep track of the good you see in your son or daughter. Don’t lose sight of their need for affirmation and encouragement. Be sure to speak about the good things you see in their life, in areas you can sincerely identify. In this way, you have the opportunity to demonstrate and speak about God, who sets his affection on them, not simply reducing them down to their behaviors, but giving them an identity that is first and foremost his child, whom he loves.

The second in this: keep track of what is hard. Because we are all broken people, we not only have patterns of sin in our lives, but we have experiences of suffering and hardship as well. So find areas where you feel compassion towards your child. Express what you identify could be hard in their life, and ask to hear more about it. As a parent, you’re able to affirm and show compassion on them while still disagreeing with the conclusions that they’re making about themselves. In this, again, you can demonstrate and speak about the compassion Christ has for your child and their struggles.

Finally, I want to encourage you to not ignore the bad. You can lovingly mirror back to them what is harmful and ultimately destructive to their soul. I want to encourage you in this to use discretion. Do not badger or condemn them in any way. It also could be a temptation to avoid these hard conversations out of fear of damaging your relationship with your child, but we must not shrink back from speaking the truth in love. And also, in this, it demonstrates that God’s love does not allow us to remain in sin that’s ultimately destructive to us.

So in all of this, you must recognize that above all, your son or daughter’s greatest need is to see and experience the love of God, and to understand their fundamental need for saving grace. And you can be instrumental in showing the love of Christ for them more comprehensively in these particular ways.