When Christian parents have a homosexual loved one, they’ve often got two heartaches to deal with: the fact their son or daughter is outside God’s will, and the fact that some people tell them they don’t love their child, just because they can’t say “I condone this.”
Over the years, these parents have told me 3 things they feel. Let me pass them on, as is they’re speaking to you in their own words.
“Dear Friends and Family Members,
We’re glad you love our gay son. Thank you for embracing him, and for reminding him how much you care. We’re grateful for that because we loved him first. We always will, and we hope others will, too.
But some of you have told us, “If you think it’s a sin, then you’ve rejected your son, and that’s hatred!” Where or how you came to believe that disagreement is hatred, we cannot imagine. But when you presume we can’t love our son if we disapprove of this part of his life, you deeply and unfairly wound us.
So let us tell you 3 things we feel.
First, We Feel Pre-Judged
Some of you who say we’re unloving have never even met us. You know nothing of the joy we felt when our boy first came into the world, nor of the years we’ve spent expressing that joy by caring, listening, guiding, providing, praying, laughing and weeping with him.
You know nothing of the sleepless nights we’ve worried, the long hours we’ve worked, the thousands of times we’ve put his needs over our own, or the more-than-thousands of times we sacrificed to the point of exhaustion without saying a word about it to him because, after all, that was our job.
You also know nothing of the grief we felt when he told us he was embracing something that’s contrary to all we believe in, nor of the resolve we felt when we told him, from the heart, “We will always love you, even if we can’t agree.”
Yet you, knowing nothing about any of that, feel entitled not only to pre-judge us, but to also judge our love or, in this case, our supposed
lack thereof.
The arrogance of it leaves us astonished, not because you hold a gay-affirming view, but because you so recklessly assume that holding a different view keeps us from loving the son you say we’ve rejected.
Second, We Feel Betrayed
Some of you do know us. In fact, some of you have known us for years, which makes your judgement of us all the more confusing.
We read social media, so yes, we know it’s cool these days to shun people you disagree with, then write them off as bigots.
That gives folks the luxury of avoiding honest dialogue, and the discipline of a reasonable analysis.
It’s the times. Today’s an age of tribal mentality over respectful co-existence; sound bites instead of conversations; and contempt for that long-abandoned virtue of tolerance. So it’s trendy to assume the moral high ground by saying, “Judeo-Christian beliefs are for bigots. If you hold them, you’re a bigot, and if you’re a bigot, you have no credibility, no character,
no worth.”
We can understand hearing that from strangers. But from you?
Are you really going to ignore everything you know about us for the sake of a heavy-handed trend? For just a moment, drop the cliches and the group-think, and be honest with yourself. Can you really say that you’ve seen evidence of us hating our son? Where’s the proof?
What words have you heard us say that were cruel? What hateful actions have you seen us take towards him? What parental responsibilities did we have over the years that we ignored, and what have you seen in our attitude towards him that told you we felt anything but love and care?
More to the point, if you hadn’t heard someone else say that respectfully holding to our beliefs makes us guilty of hatred, would you have ever come to that conclusion on your own?
We fear you’ve taken the easy way out by going along with this “Belief equals Hate” nonsense. In so doing, we feel you’ve betrayed not only us, but your own common sense and integrity. That’s one heck of a betrayal.
Third, We Feel Gaslit
When you “Gaslight” someone, you tell them “Black is White” so many times, and so forcefully, that you undermine their confidence in their
own intelligence.
So when you keep saying, “You can’t love your son unless you affirm him,” we start to wonder, “Are we crazy? Have we stopped loving him without being aware of it? We’ve always been sure we love him, but if everyone says we don’t, could they be right?”
That’s classic Gaslighting. When it starts to wear us down, we remember a few of our basic beliefs.
We believe in a God who’s communicated His will to us in this inspired document, the Bible. That document tells us to love the truth, and to love others, and that there’s no contradiction between the two.
We also believe the God who created human sexuality knew exactly what He was doing, and that He knew what He was talking about when He said what Was and what was Not His will for our sexual behavior.
He’s also made it clear, in that document we revere, that homosexuality is in the What is Not category.
We believe, finally, that loving the truth never means not loving the person who’s living outside of it. We love God’s Truth, and we love Our Son. Period.
When you demand we choose one over the other, we feel the gaslight. But respectfully, we also refuse it.
That’s What We Feel. Now Here’s What We Hope
We hope you’ll reconsider. We also hope you’ll see the unfairness of discounting our love for our son, or worse yet, labeling us “haters” when our love for the person you say we hate has been proven, time and again, over the span of his lifetime.
And finally, we hope that you will never know the pain of having someone prejudge your character, misunderstand your beliefs, discount your love, then dismiss the very essence of your heart. That’s the pain we feel today, and though you’ve contributed to it, we still cannot wish it on you.
We’re not going to agree. But by letting us share our heart with you, perhaps a door to better understanding has been opened. So we thank you for that.
We also thank you for reading this, and for at least trying to hear us.”
(To learn more about my video series “When Someone You Love Is Gay” click HERE)
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