A Crisis of Faith: We Choose Love

There are parenting moments that absolutely knock you to your core. The pressure to do and say the right thing because the moment is so profound becomes overwhelming. There’s no winging it or knowing that if you don’t get it right, you can always go back later and do damage control. The core-knocking moments require the correct response–the unwaveringly confident reaction–right out of the gate. This was that moment.

It was like any other night in our home. Baseball practice was over, dinner had been served, and my daughter sat across the table from my husband and me while working on her math homework. It was all very typical until it wasn’t.

“I’ve been thinking,” my daughter said in a questioning tone. “I don’t know if I want to be a Christian if I’m required to hate gay people because I don’t hate them, and I don’t want to.”

Silence.

There were so many things running through my mind – We’ve never taught hate in our family. Who’s filling her with this idea? Why was her belief on this so absolute like one of the math equations she worked on? If A = B and I don’t = B, then I must not be A? I forced myself to silence my brain. This wasn’t a time to go on a fact-finding mission. Our daughter had just opened up to us about something that had obviously been weighing on her heart and mind. This was big league parenting stuff. We had to get it right.

We talked for a long time about her faith and love. We talked about scripture, and that faith doesn’t lie in other people but in our belief in God. We reminded her that hate was never a part of God’s plan.

I won’t give you the more specific details because it was her moment. She gets to own it and pull it out when she needs it to navigate these teen years that bring on so many big issues and uncertainties. I’m confident in the answers we gave her and guidance we provided, but something has bothered me since that night.

As parents who’ve worked so hard to teach our children love and compassion, how had one issue created doubt so deep in my daughter’s heart that she’d actually question everything else she’d ever known about her faith?

As a Christian family, we’ve never shied away from exposing our children to the people of this world who are less fortunate. We’ve spent weeks in third world country orphanages surrounded by children desperate for love–some seriously ill, some living with AIDS, most dealing with stuff we’ll never experience in our entire lifetime. We’ve fed the homeless alongside our children and watched them pray for a man who didn’t know where his next meal would come from. We are by no means perfect and could absolutely do more, but we try.

I don’t say this to show off some sort of Christian badge of honor, but to point out that my children know what love looks like. They’ve seen our friends who give up so much of their lives to provide a home for a group of kids in Africa and then learn that one of those children has died unexpectedly. They know the couple who run an inner-city after school program for a group of kids that live surrounded by drugs and poverty and struggle to make ends meet because people like you and me are too busy to spend more time helping them.

So again I ask, where did the message get lost in translation?

It’s because we live in a world where those aren’t the stories that get told because they don’t sell papers or drive more clicks. Those stories are overshadowed by the politically charged voices who suddenly think they get to speak for my faith. I’m here to tell you that they don’t, and I will fight to protect my children from the noise that tells them otherwise regardless of where that message is coming from.

As a writer, I tend to shy away from hot-button issues because some things deserve to be discussed in personal conversations, and I don’t want to feed into the very thing I’m trying to fight. As a Christian, I sometimes not only fear the judgment from non-believers but believers who think differently than me, so I choose to stay silent. Silence is easier. You live your life, and I’ll live mine. No harm no foul. Right or wrong, I can justify that thought process because I’m accountable for my own beliefs and my own actions. That stance no longer holds water when I’m confronted with my 13-year-old having a crisis of faith because someone else’s voice was louder than mine.

I mentioned above that I wasn’t going to give you the details of our conversation because those words were for my daughter, but the one thing I will say is this. Going forward, my voice will be louder than any others on this earth my children hear, and it will remind them of the following as much as possible. Anyone who speaks anything out of hatred in the name of Christianity is wrong. Anyone who tells them that they can’t love homosexuals, or love anyone for that matter, and still be a Christian is wrong.

It’s my job to raise the children I’ve been entrusted with in the best possible way I know how and today and always, I choose love. There’s simply no room for anything else.