Are You Ready for the Conversation You're Afraid to Have?
What would you say if you found out one of your kids was gay?
Or maybe it isn't your child, but a family member or close friend who comes out to you. Some of you have already had this experience. I suspect quite a few readers are afraid of what to do if it happens.
You probably have an established position on Christianity and homosexuality. Plenty of people in this situation have read the Bible passages closely and still don't know what to say to someone at the kitchen table. Even if you know the relevant verses, how do we read those verses alongside the rest of the Bible?
This topic remains one of the most discussed tensions among Christians right now. It can also quickly create an us vs. them mentality when someone arrives at a stance that's different from yours. A lot of fear is involved, and it often causes people to shy away from exploring it further.
That led me to do something I've never done before. I wrote a fictional story. It's a short story designed to be listened to in one sitting as an audiobook. The story is called Loving God More.
When a fifteen-year-old boy tells his Christian parents he's gay, neither of them knows how to handle it. But then a letter arrives. Anonymously. With only one word. This is a journey into uncharted territory.
The parents don't know how to react and must work through their ideas of truth and love and what it means to follow Jesus in this new development. The story invites you to take a deep dive into this topic before you navigate it at your own kitchen table.
The narrative is told from the parents' point of view. My goal is for you to sit in their seat and feel what they feel. I've tried hard to bring multiple perspectives into the conversation, and specifically to voice the traditional view sincerely while holding it in tension with an invitation toward affirmation. My primary audience is people who will relate most to the parents in this story as they try to make sense of something that feels unfamiliar.
I asked a friend in the LGBTQ+ community for feedback on an early draft, and they told me, "So much of what you wrote is literally a part of what I’ve experienced, so I noticed visceral responses reading through it." If you are in the LGBTQ+ community yourself, I hope it feels honest to you, even if some of the arguments in the story are hard to hear.
Some of Jesus' most powerful teachings were stories. Stories have a way of getting us to think about things on a different level. They invite our emotions to meet our heads.
I'm really proud of how this story turned out, and I hope you'll listen (or read). It would mean the world if you told others about it, so it can become a tool for better conversations. Each purchase includes the audiobook, a PDF manuscript, and an ePub file for an eReader. The audiobook is forty-four minutes long and I narrated it myself. Membership in the Rebuilding Faith online community also includes all three story formats.
You can get the story from either link below:
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