“Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.”
This quote by C.S. Lewis is one of my favorites. As soon as you hold that beautiful baby in your arms, you realize what truly matters. The birth of a child puts a whole new spin on life’s objectives. When children are young, this quote seems to center around the busyness of parenting and surviving the long nights of feeding, rocking to sleep, and each milestone in a child’s life.
But what about the difficult times of parenting as your children get older? What about Susan, who faces the struggle of her daughter’s self-diagnosed gender dysphoria? A mother who painstakingly watches as her daughter begins to change her physical appearance from female to male. The depression, the attempted suicides… that word “important” takes on a whole new meaning as a parent.
The following is more of Susan’s story. It addresses an issue I highlighted in my introduction that you can read—> Here. Susan’s words are block quoted, and I’ve changed her daughter’s name to protect her anonymity.
Grace
Thanks for listening to my story. Just telling it is healing therapy in and of itself. This journey that we’ve been on the past few years with Grace has been a roller coaster of extremes but has caused us to grow tremendously in Christ.
Our daughter was born in 2000. Grace lived life 110% when she was younger. Although she was technically an introvert, she was daring and full of laughter, always playing pranks on people and never afraid to try new things. Whatever the event, Grace was there participating. Of course, things would get overwhelming for her as an introvert and she would need some down time by herself from time to time.
She accepted Jesus in her heart at 5, and baptized at age 6 with full knowledge of what it symbolized and what she was doing
Exposure and Agenda
When she was 11 we began to homeschool Grace. I can’t pinpoint when the change began to happen but she needed to be online more to do school work. This has always been the point where I felt she was exposed to this agenda. She did some inappropriate things online and via text (before the Snapchat era) that we caught and thought were corrected.
On her 18th birthday, we took her to dinner and to the mall to celebrate. She came back with a book entitled This Book is Gay. At that moment, I knew something was up and I had confirmation to some suspicions. Everything kind of snowballed from there and it was a huge blur for several months. An online, long-distance relationship with a girl who lives over 1,000 miles away, secretly cutting herself, and two failed suicide attempts.
The pinnacle was the day when two sheriff’s deputies showed up at our door on a Sunday night. They received a report from The Trevor Project hotline about a 19-year-old male who lost their connection to the hotline’s suicide prevention chat room and they traced it to our ISP. She was upset and got disconnected but they were concerned and sent the deputies. Of course, they wouldn’t just let it go, and we were waiting until 3am for a crisis intervention team to come. When she found out that she would be deprived of her phone and laptop if she were to go to the hospital, she said she would be fine. About a month later, she tried [suicide] again, but got scared and called the crisis intervention team herself.
The next day we went to a crisis mental health center and began to try to sort through the mental health maze. At this point, I must most emphatically state that I did NOT know that there were at least ten different gender identities she could choose from on the intake form! Wow, I went into shock.
She walked in the first session and told the counselor she had gender dysphoria and was transgender and the counselor handed her a stack of LGBTQ literature with groups, clinics, etc. It was a scary, intimidating place. The spiritual atmosphere there was very dark and there were questions on the forms we were trying to fill out that were very leading in support of the LGBTQ lifestyle. It didn’t take a great deal of intelligence to see where this was going. Grace was terrified and very uncomfortable but things had gone too far. Her anxiety and depression spiraled out of control. She felt worse after each session, even though she was on Cymbalta and Risperdone. (We tried many meds before finding something that didn’t cause hallucinations). We stayed on that secular counseling course for about five months.
Irony
One day, Grace heard an advertisement for Christian counseling on the Christian radio station she plays all night while she sleeps (ironic, huh?). She asked me if we could try it. Grace is a very spiritual person even though she is going through this right now. She wanted to go in person to make an appointment instead of calling because she needed to feel the atmosphere there before making an appointment. The minute we walked in, she felt peace. Her therapist is soft spoken just like Grace and makes her comfortable. And she is making progress. For the first time, she finally admitted she felt she was getting better. This has never happened before.
One thing I want to mention is the irony of some of the things she does. She ordered some clothes online. She went to try them on and came out wearing a skirt, frilly blouse and suspenders and a cute hat and earrings. Totally girly. However, yesterday she went to have her hair cut. I mean a drastic cut. Like the kind of haircut we give our boys the day they get out of school for the summer type of haircut. My heart is breaking, but God is faithful. I miss the beautiful curls.
Unconditional Love
Some time ago, I saw an interview on Joni Lamb’s Table Talk with Joe Dallas. It was part of a series of sexual identity that turned my world “right-side-up” again. This was where I learned how to love Grace through this journey. So this morning I felt led to look through my recordings of Table Talk and saw an interview with Joe Dallas was on again and I tuned in. Must have been a programming change, because it was a series called “Identity” that has run all this week and this episode wasn’t with Joe.
The episode I watched was an interview with a woman who had embraced the trans lifestyle and transformed herself into a gangster-style young man (no surgery, just binding and clothing). She talked about how the unconditional love of her mother toward her and her friends was key in showing her the unconditional love of God. How my heart just soared when I heard that! I believed long ago that we have been taken on this journey to reach young people who have been deceived into this lifestyle. My takeaway from this morning after listening to their testimony:
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When facing rejection from “the church”, these people are searching for love and acceptance. The LGBTQ community is waiting with open arms to draw them in, to recruit them.
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Not only are they recruiting the vulnerable, they are actively recruiting anyone that is even slightly weak in any spiritual area.
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They are spreading a propaganda that promotes the idea “if they don’t accept or approve of what you are doing, they don’t “love you”. The one thing that Joe Dallas said that changed my life is that approval and love do not have to go hand-in-hand. For example, I don’t have to approve of my husband’s woefully unsocial habit in order to love him. I love him more than ever and wouldn’t ever think of leaving him because he has an embarrassing habit that I most emphatically do not accept or approve of. God’s love transcends all of that!
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Words carry great weight. What we speak to people and/or what is spoken over them carries a great deal of weight in their lives. I’ve never realized the impact of that statement more than I do at this time of my life. There are words I’ve spoken that I am seeing still have an impact on those around me, and words that have been spoken to me that still have an impact in my life. I know God is greater than that, but it will be a journey to overcome them.
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Lastly, this will be a journey with our family, with Grace. It won’t be an instant fix, but it will be a complete and thorough transformation. I am believing that God will totally transform her life into a testimony for those who are following behind her.
THE. MOST. IMPORTANT. WORK
Susan’s story will continue on my blog. I don’t know who is reading this, but for those going through a similar struggle or maybe different yet still painful, remember God’s unconditional love for you is right where your heart needs to be for your child. But don’t give in to the lies. The world is screaming right now that loving your child is to accept their transgender identity. Extending compassion is not the same thing as giving in to your child’s demands that you know will ultimately harm them. As Susan has learned, approval and love do not have to go hand-in-hand. It’s difficult. It’s messy and painful. But God gifted you with a beautiful bundle of joy. He or she is still that gift created in God’s image. This is the most important work of your life. God chose you to parent your child. Love them unconditionally but protect them. Trust God. And as Susan reminds us, “Resist the urge to ‘fix’ things. Be still and know that He is God.” (Psalm 46:10)
More to come…
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Pastor Brian
Lydia
Julie Klose