How We Can Offer LGBTQ Youth Our Unqualified Love

If you're a parent of an LGBTQ child, you know what it's like to have unanswered questions, especially when it comes to how best to support your child. In his book, That We May Be One: A Gay Mormon's Perspective On Faith and Family, 2018 TOFW presenter Tom Christofferson offers valuable insights for parents struggling with same questions. Drawing on his own experience from the example of his parents, Tom shares how we can best love our LGBTQ children and provide the support they need.

If you are the parent of an LGBTQ child, I think you will agree that we do not have all the answers we would like to have in this life. We don’t know much about how being gay, for example, in mortality plays out in an eternal sense—the place of this particular child in the plan of salvation. A dear friend who is the mother of a gay son in his twenties once said to me, “I’m a convert to the Church. I was drawn to it because it had the answers to the questions in my heart. And now the most important questions I have are left for me to work out!” Joseph Smith has been quoted as saying; “There is no pain so awful as the pain of suspense.”

The righteous desires of a parent’s heart may entail a substantial requirement for faith, patience, and perseverance. The principles found in Joseph Smith’s letter from Liberty Jail provide a model for how we can effectively reach out to a challenging child or to those who have, for whatever reason, become alienated from the Church: “No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without hypocrisy, and without guile” (Doctrine and Covenants 121:41–42).

When I told my parents that I did not see a place for myself within the Church, I know it was a severe blow to the hopes and dreams they held for my life. I had served an honorable mission, and they knew how deeply I loved the teachings of the gospel, which continued to resonate with me even when I felt at odds with the Church. As they struggled with how to respond, my parents concluded that the two most critical elements of their lives, their testimonies of the gospel of Jesus Christ and their love for their children, could only be fully realized together. Their faith was based on their understanding of eternal life, including eternal families, and their family’s strength was found in the teachings of the Church. To leave either rock on which they had built their lives, faith or family, Church or children, was incomprehensible to them.

For a couple of decades when I chose not to have any involvement with the Church, as they listened to the promptings they were receiving, my parents focused on their enjoyment of our time together, ensuring that I was always included in family events. I know their constant prayer was that I would feel the desire to become active in the Church and to make the necessary decisions to allow that to occur. But I also felt that they liked me, they were genuinely interested in all elements of my life, and they wanted me to share my whole life with them. They weren’t waiting for me to return to church before they could fully love me, and so through them I came to understand the meaning of unqualified love. More powerful than any sermon or lecture they could have given was their example of steadfastness, “by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned”: the family prayers I joined each evening when staying in their home, hearing that both my partner and I were included in those prayers, watching and listening to them read scriptures together before they would go to sleep, and the occasional shared spiritual experience—all conveyed their love and acceptance of their gay son.

I have reflected on the “kindness and pure knowledge” my parents displayed in how they piloted our family through this journey, and especially how markedly different their approach was from that of others in the same era. Although they provided absolute clarity in words and actions within our family, they took the approach of waiting to be asked by others outside the family before offering advice or sharing the wisdom they had gained. It strikes me that they held the revelations they received for their stewardship of their children to be both sacred and personal. Their reticence to trumpet the “right way” for all families to approach these challenges reflected their reluctance to impose upon the sacred space of any other parents’ opportunities and obligations to hear Heavenly Father’s counsel, reflecting His knowledge of the unique personalities and needs of those children.

My parents’ willingness to walk in faith was deeply ingrained in them. And it allowed them to continue to walk without clarity of how, or if, their righteous desires would be fulfilled.

Their love for me erected no barriers. If I was interested in something, they were interested. I recall Dad asking me one night at a restaurant, when the four of us had gone to dinner during one of their visits to New York, what I had learned about wine and the differences between types and vintages. If I had not understood it before that night, I clearly learned that my father wanted to know me—not the person he hoped or wished I might be, but the person I had become. That, to me, is love unfeigned.

Through my parents’ actions, I have gained additional understanding of the love of the Savior. Because of their unqualified love, I have at least in a small way begun to comprehend how the Father can offer helpful commandments and ensure agency is untrammeled. Seeing my parents’ life of patient faith and their willingness to wait upon the Lord, I also have learned to trust His promises and rely on the invaluable gift of His Atonement.

Elder Richard G. Scott proposed to parents and Church leaders: “As a companion to that love, trust them. In some cases it may seem difficult to trust, but find some way to trust them. The children of Father in Heaven can do amazing things when they feel trusted. Every child of God in mortality chose the Savior’s plan. Trust that given the opportunity, they will do so again.”

As lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or same-sex attracted members of the Church of Jesus Christ, we live in the reality of two independent, contradictory truths: first, that every element of who we are is known to our Father, and we are His beloved children; and second, that His prophets have said that what comes naturally to us, what feels like it is at the core of our being, must not find physical expression. I recognize that the situation for transgender brothers and sisters is slightly different and that the counsel is less clear—you have the most challenging path, and there are even fewer answers available to you currently. I am grateful for the trans people in my life: your courage, your patience, and your good humor beckon me, with my far lesser challenges, to aim higher in order to follow your valorous example. Thank you!

How will we go forward, what decisions will we make, what costs will we pay, and what grace and joy will we receive? Especially with Alma’s words ringing in our ears, “For I ought to be content with the things which the Lord hath allotted unto me” (Alma 29:3). “Being content,” as Elder Neal A. Maxwell expressed in his usual discerning manner, “means acceptance without self-pity. Meekly borne, however, deprivations . . . can end up being like excavations that make room for greatly enlarged souls.”

As a teenager and a young adult I prayed that God would transform me into someone I imagined would be more acceptable to Him. I thought righteousness, as measured by scrupulously obeying every possible commandment (see Hebrews 10:1), would be my way of paying for such a miracle. I aspired to be the most diligent missionary ever in an attempt to earn the change I sought. I hoped marrying in the temple would persuade God that I was a faithful follower, and therefore He would, in effect, put a new intelligence, a new soul, into my body.

Clearly that is not His plan. But I learned to take comfort, as I hope all LGBTQ individuals and their loved ones will, in the Savior’s words to His Apostles at the Last Supper as He was preparing them for the challenges they would yet face: “I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. . . . Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (John 14:18, 27).

Want more from Tom Christofferson? Find him at a TOFW event near you! But if you can't make it (because, you know, life can get pretty crazy) then be sure to check out his book, That We May Be One: A Gay Mormon's Perspective On Faith and Family, at Deseret Book stores and deseretbook.com.