One of the biggest mistakes we make as parents is basing our happiness and emotional well-being on our kids’ happiness and emotional well-being. When we do this, we’re just setting ourselves up for disappointment. We’ve learned that even though we began our parenting adventure with a wonderfully written script that included no difficulties, bumps, or bruises, God had a different script for us to live. His script wasn’t 100% percent happy like ours. While it was difficult for us, we learned that God gives us and our kids the opportunity to struggle through life so that we might grow and mature. If we were all to base our happiness on how well things were going with our kids. . . well, we’d all wind up spending time being miserable people. The Apostle Paul laid out a better way. . . in fact, it’s the right way. He writes in Romans 12, “Base your happiness on your hope in Christ. When trials come endure them patiently, steadfastly maintain the habit of prayer”

Listen to these words from detransitioner Laura Perry Smalts in a recent Salvo Magazine article: “If I had known in 2007 that God’s creation of male and female was not only good but impossible to alter, I would have saved myself a tremendous amount of pain and suffering. At the time, I would have repeated the typical cultural catchphrase that I was born this way. I believed I was a man trapped in a woman’s body and that the only way I could be myself was to transition from female to male.” Laura Perry Smalts goes on to tell her story of transition, and how she came to the realization that she had been wrong, leading to a detransition. Her words are so helpful: “God said to me, “You cannot love me and yet reject my creation. Then I heard him say, Let me tell you who you are. In that moment, my whole idea of identity shifted from what I wanted to be, to who wanting to know who I was created to be.” Thank you Laura Perry Smalts, for reminding us of where to find our identity!

Fifty years ago there was little or no knowledge among teenagers about eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. In today’s image-obsessed and social-media saturated world, the great majority of our kids not only stress over their appearance, but many are struggling with body dysmorphia, which is defined as a mental health condition in which you can’t stop thinking about one or more perceived defects or flaws in your appearance. New data from a study of thirty-nine-thousand adolescents ages fourteen to eighteen reports that the dominant factor raising the risk of self-harm, including suicide, is one’s perception regarding their weight. Our kids are being hammered by a constant diet of marketing images and social media posts which leave them feeling inadequate and less than. As Christian parents, we must affirm their standing as loved divine-image bearers, emphasizing the fact that God looks on the inside, not the outside. Our identity is not to be found in appearance.