in the pink...

Standing near someone the other day with a young baby, I glanced over to see glittery pink shoes. I smiled, not necessarily intending to initiate conversation. I did chuckle and say, “I have a young friend who has loved glitter shoes before she could talk”.

She replied, “in today’s crazy world, I just want her to always love pink and remember that she’s a girl.”

I paused, since not knowing this person, wondering how to respond. My thought, which came out in a short sentence, was “I don’t really think wearing pink is the magic bullet against gender questioning, but I do hope you build a great relationship with her so that if she has questions, she’ll know that she can talk to you.” 

Being someone that people feel safe to talk to is incredibly valuable. Too often we speak before anyone wants to listen. And we haven’t invested time to speak intelligibly.

I promised in my last post, that we were going to spend some time thinking and reasoning together around topics of gender the first part of this year. I say reasoning together, because I’d really love for us to take small ideas, topics, and thoughts related to or surrounding gender, and think together about them.

But first we need to pause and consider ourselves: are you or I a safe person to talk to? Do people talk to you about meaningful issues in their life? 

I work at a Christian summer camp and in the last decade we’ve seen an explosion of questions in our teen campers related to first, sexuality, and now, gender. I remember consciously thinking about nine years ago now, “how can I become someone safe to talk to? Why would a camper share their story with me?”.

From a variety of people, places, and circumstances, I come with these two ideas today:

Be genuinely loving: someone who has done your own work related to your biases, your language, and your preconceived ideas. I had a pile of those- and you probably do as well if you are honest. A humble posture that wants to listen goes a long way!

Be literate: someone who has spent time reading, listening, learning, discovering my own answers. Let that be reflected in my posture, in my words, in where I invest my time and energy. Not in a way that is posing or posturing, but genuinely becoming such a person.

Perhaps you are thinking- ‘I thought we were going to reason together about gender?”. We are. 

But we do not need to amass information, we need our characters to be formed.

Before we speak, we should ask ourselves, “is anyone wanting to listen”? We need to become people that are safe to talk to first. Then we can speak about what we’ve been learning if the person in front of us wants those words.

And don’t think that I haven’t blown it in huge ways in this area. Working through my biases took a while- I didn’t even recognize some of them and would have done well to just listen and pray. I hurt some friends wrestling with these issues because I hadn’t done my own work first.

Don’t make my mistakes.

As I walked away from the young mom in the beginning of this post, I prayed for her that she and her daughter would always be good and safe communicators. That her daughter would love talking to her.

So are you up for this discussion? 

Are you up for the heart work that precedes the discussion?

I am hoping that you are because there is a score of people around us in the world asking questions and the evangelical church thus far has been pretty darn quiet. That needs to end.

Since you’ve read this far, I’m hoping you are wanting that and willing to work.

Start with praying and asking the Holy Spirit to teach and equip you to love and learn.