Children and Grandchildren gone astray
I am 76 years old and my husband is 77. We’ve been married nearly 54 years and have five children and 13 grandchildren. We raised our children to attend church and they attended a Christian School, where my husband taught. We prayed with them and taught them and thought they were well grounded.
Our middle child, a son, has been teaching in a Christian school in Singapore for over 20 years. His oldest son graduated from the school a year and a half ago and wanted to move to the States. So, we welcomed him into our home. He is now 19 years old. He’s been living with us for 16 months. But we are saddened by the path he is taking. He’s decided that he wants to be a woman and has been taking hormones to make himself look like a woman. We are walking a difficult road! We don’t know how to help him. We daily show him our love and treat him with respect and even have good times with him. But we don’t call him by his chosen name or pronouns.
We do pray a lot - for wisdom for us and for him to see the truth and stop taking the hormones and return to the young man that he was born to be.
Besides that, our youngest daughter, and her husband who pastors a church, have watered down the truth. They have not just accepted, but celebrate an alternative lifestyle in their church and have encouraged their three children to pursue whatever they want. Their oldest daughter is 13 and has decided she’s “non-binary”, and we see the other two children leaning in that direction also. We are expected to call her by her chosen name, and the pronouns “they / them”.
Our daughter is pressuring us to be more supportive and accepting of the transgender lifestyle of our grandson and of her children’s choices. Our daughter has pulled away from us because we won’t call our grandson by his female name and pronouns. (This is his aunt). She says that because we’re in our 70s and he is only 19, we should be mature enough to change our thoughts on the transgender lie, and should call him what he wants to be called — to accept “her” as a “woman!”
It’s not something I ever would have imagined, or asked for, to walk through with my family. It hurts! But God is helping me. And I read things like the letters you post to gain insight. It’s helpful to learn from others who are walking the same road. Thank you for being a support to parents and grandparents like us who find ourselves in such a hard place.
It does hurt but as I told my daughter, her relationship with God is more important than any other relationship. I have to prioritize my relationship with God and I pray that one day she will too. Lying to placate and keep the peace doesn't show love. I avoided using pronouns at all and stopped sharing detrans stories because my daughter said she would cut me off I continued to share those. Didn't matter. She eventually stopped talking to me anyway, just more gradually. Darkness and light have nothing to do with one another so it was inevitable. The only way to have a restored relationship is through God. We must prioritize our relationship with God and encourage others to to as well. Keep praying for them fervently.
I was raised in a “progressive,” secular home, and was derisive of Judeo-Christian faith traditions growing up. I thought I was “intellectually above” people who worshipped God and had faith. I was also lonely, and felt like I was on the outside looking in to the values and traditions supporting a functioning, civilized society— including civil rights.
Now I have embraced Christianity, and am humbled and extremely grateful for all I receive in my faith and community, but it has been difficult to find a Christian church these days that hasn’t warped its doctrine around the twisted concept of “trans kids” and “inclusion,” to the detriment and destruction of their own time-honored faith traditions, and the boundaries that preserve them.
“Trans” is not “gay.” Churches that demonize same-sex attraction to the point of threats and violence are quite rare these days, but you’d think that the sexual mutilation of healthy adolescents was specifically preached in the gospels, the way this “trans compassion and kindness” cult has hijacked Christianity, common sense, and simple reverence for Creation.
It turns out that the threat of being labelled “hateful,” “bigoted,” or “phobic” is the magic wand to transform any church into an organization acting as handmaidens for the horrific chemical and surgical destruction of vulnerable people.
I will never be a religious fundamentalist, but I do pray that God will show me what is mine to do. I realize that being a moderate and faithful Christian these days makes me a suspicious character to “progressives” — as suspicious as I was to Christians and Jews as a non-believer 50 years ago. But I think the world desperately needs more people who are grounded in the faith traditions our civilization was built upon… not “progressives” who won’t rest until every last vestige of human stability and tradition is destroyed.