There is a moment in every generation when society must decide whether it will treat children as mysteries to be protected or as messages to be molded. Faith has always answered that question clearly. Children are not ideological terrain. They are entrusted lives. They are not finished statements. They are sacred beginnings.
From the earliest pages of Scripture, childhood is framed not as a problem to be solved but as a season to be guarded. Long before debates, labels, or movements existed, faith understood something essential about human development: becoming takes time, and love refuses to rush what God is still forming.
That is where this conversation must begin—not with fear, not with slogans, and not with condemnation—but with reverence for the slow, deliberate unfolding of a human soul.
When faith says there is no such thing as a “trans child,” it is not dismissing pain, denying feelings, or erasing struggle. It is making a far deeper claim. It is declaring that children are not equipped—emotionally, neurologically, spiritually, or morally—to bear permanent identity conclusions based on temporary developmental states. It is insisting that childhood is not the destination of identity but the journey toward it.
Faith has never believed that who you are must be finalized before you have even learned how to live.
Children arrive in the world dependent, curious, imaginative, and unfinished by design. Their minds are forming. Their bodies are changing. Their emotions surge and recede with intensity that adults forget once they mature. Faith does not view this instability as disorder. It sees it as evidence of growth.
Scripture repeatedly frames maturity as a process rather than an instant. Wisdom is learned. Discernment is cultivated. Identity is revealed over time. Even the most faithful figures in Scripture did not begin their lives knowing who they would become. They grew into it—often through confusion, uncertainty, and long seasons of waiting.
This matters because modern culture increasingly treats childhood feelings as destiny rather than data. It treats early discomfort as definitive truth rather than developmental information. Faith pushes back on that not because it lacks compassion, but because it understands the weight of permanence.
A child saying “I don’t feel like I fit in” is not making a theological statement. They are expressing vulnerability. A child saying “I feel uncomfortable in my body” is not declaring a final identity; they are navigating the disorientation that accompanies growth, comparison, social pressure, and rapidly changing physical reality. Faith recognizes that language does not always mean what adults think it means, especially when it comes from a child.
Children borrow words before they understand their consequences. They borrow emotions before they know how to regulate them. They borrow narratives before they can evaluate their truth. This is not manipulation. It is immaturity—and immaturity is not sin. It is a stage.
Faith insists that stages should not be mistaken for destinations.
One of the most overlooked truths in Scripture is how often God delays answers—not because He is absent, but because timing is part of love. God does not rush transformation. He walks it. He does not force clarity before relationship. He establishes belonging before purpose.
Even Jesus, in His humanity, did not arrive fully formed in public identity. He lived thirty years in obscurity before stepping into ministry. He learned obedience through experience. He grew. That alone should humble any culture that believes children must define themselves before they are ready to understand the weight of definition.
If the Son of God was permitted a process, how much more should children be granted the gift of time.
Faith also understands something crucial about authority. Adults exist to shield children from burdens they cannot yet carry. This is not control. It is stewardship. Childhood is not the season for adult conclusions, adult politics, or adult existential pressure.
When adults rush to label a child, they are often transferring their own anxiety onto someone who lacks the capacity to discern what is being placed upon them. That is not guidance. That is abdication.
Jesus’ warnings about children were not vague. He spoke directly to adults about the seriousness of influencing them carelessly. He did not accuse children of error; He cautioned adults about responsibility. He understood that children are impressionable not because they are foolish, but because they are trusting.
Faith treats that trust as sacred.
To tell a child that their feelings must immediately translate into identity is to collapse the distinction between experience and essence. Faith has always resisted that collapse. Scripture teaches that feelings fluctuate, circumstances shift, and self-understanding deepens with maturity. Truth is not hostile to emotion, but it does not surrender authority to it either.
This distinction is not cruelty. It is wisdom.
There is a difference between acknowledging a child’s emotions and assigning them a lifelong identity. Faith draws that line clearly. It says, “Your feelings matter—but they are not the final word on who you are.” It says, “You are allowed to be confused without being defined by confusion.” It says, “You are permitted to explore without being imprisoned by conclusions you cannot yet evaluate.”
That is not rejection. That is protection.
Modern culture often mistakes speed for compassion. Faith does not. Faith knows that some things must ripen before they are named. Identity is one of them.
Children live in bodies that change rapidly. Puberty alone introduces disorientation, discomfort, embarrassment, comparison, and self-consciousness at a scale adults often forget. Add social pressure, online narratives, peer validation systems, and adult language to that fragile stage, and it becomes easy to mistake overwhelm for revelation.
Faith calls adults to slow down.
Not to ignore.
Not to silence.
But to wait with.
Waiting is not abandonment when it is accompanied by love. Waiting is not denial when it is paired with care. Waiting is often the most faithful act available.
Throughout Scripture, God repeatedly chooses formation over force. He shapes people slowly. He corrects gently. He reveals truth progressively. He does not demand answers before hearts are ready to hold them.
Faith believes children deserve that same grace.
One of the most dangerous ideas a culture can teach a child is that uncertainty must be resolved immediately. That discomfort demands permanent action. That belonging depends on adopting a label. Faith rejects this not because it fears questions, but because it honors development.
Children do not need answers as much as they need adults who are unafraid of ambiguity. They need people who can say, “You don’t have to know yet.” They need reassurance that confusion does not mean failure, and difference does not mean defect.
Faith insists that a child’s worth precedes every identity question. It insists that love does not require self-definition as a condition for acceptance. It insists that God’s design is not so fragile that it collapses under childhood uncertainty.
When faith says there is no such thing as a “trans child,” it is affirming something hopeful: that children are still becoming, and becoming should never be interrupted by fear-driven conclusions.
This belief does not erase adults who struggle. It does not deny the complexity of human experience. It does not pretend that pain does not exist. It simply refuses to place adult frameworks onto immature minds.
Children are not problems to be solved. They are lives to be guided.
And guidance requires patience, humility, and restraint.
The role of faith is not to shout answers at the vulnerable. It is to walk beside them until truth can be understood without coercion. Faith trusts that God is not confused about human identity, even when humans are. It trusts that time is not the enemy of truth, but often its ally.
This is why faith consistently prioritizes protection over pressure, process over pronouncement, and love over labels.
And this is why childhood must remain a sanctuary, not a battleground.
What children need most is not clarity at all costs, but constancy. Not definitions, but devotion. Not conclusions, but care.
They need to know they are safe while they grow.
They need to know they are loved while they learn.
They need to know they are not required to figure everything out before they are ready.
Faith believes that is not only reasonable—it is righteous.
Faith has always understood something modern conversations often forget: protection is not the same as suppression. Guarding childhood does not mean ignoring a child’s inner world. It means taking that world seriously enough not to reduce it to slogans or rush it into permanence. Protection says, “You matter too much to be hurried.” Suppression says, “Your questions are inconvenient.” Faith rejects suppression. It also rejects haste.
The sacred responsibility of adulthood is to hold space where growth can happen without pressure to perform certainty. Children need that space more than anyone else. Their lives are not auditions for ideological approval. Their development is not a debate to be won. Their questions are not invitations for adults to project unresolved fears. Childhood is a holy interval—a time God seems especially careful not to rush.
One of the quiet tragedies of our age is the belief that children must explain themselves to be protected. Faith teaches the opposite. Children deserve protection because they are still becoming, not after they have proven coherence. This is why Scripture consistently places responsibility on adults rather than on the young. Children are never portrayed as moral burdens; adults are portrayed as moral stewards.
Stewardship requires restraint.
Restraint is difficult in a culture that equates action with care. Doing something feels more loving than waiting. Making a decision feels more compassionate than sitting with uncertainty. But faith tells a different story. Faith tells us that love often looks like patience that refuses to turn a moment into a monument.
Consider how God deals with humanity throughout Scripture. He allows wandering before arrival. He allows questions before answers. He allows deserts before destinations. Rarely does He collapse the journey into an instant conclusion. When He reveals identity, it is usually after relationship has been established, not before. Calling follows belonging. Purpose follows presence.
Children need presence more than pronouncements.
This is why the most faithful response to a child’s confusion is not to interrogate it, amplify it, or immortalize it—but to accompany it. Accompaniment says, “I will walk with you without forcing you to become something for my comfort.” It says, “You are allowed to change your mind.” It says, “You are allowed to grow.”
Growth is not linear. Faith understands this deeply. People mature through trial and error, through seasons of clarity and seasons of doubt. Children, by definition, live at the beginning of that process. To treat their early questions as final truths is to misunderstand development itself.
The body, especially during childhood and adolescence, is a moving landscape. Hormones shift. Self-awareness intensifies. Social comparison sharpens. What once felt simple suddenly feels awkward. What once felt natural suddenly feels exposed. Faith does not interpret this upheaval as evidence of misdesign. It recognizes it as a passage.
Passages are uncomfortable. That does not mean they are wrong.
Adults who remember their own adolescence know how quickly discomfort can be mistaken for identity. Feeling out of place can feel existential when you do not yet have perspective. Faith supplies that perspective by reminding us that seasons pass—even when they feel permanent while we are inside them.
The danger arises when adults collapse that passage into a permanent definition. When they translate “I feel unsettled” into “this is who you are.” When they translate “I am uncomfortable” into “your body is the problem.” Faith refuses that translation because it confuses experience with essence.
Essence is revealed over time.
Faith also insists that identity is not something we invent, but something we receive. This does not mean passivity. It means humility. It means recognizing that we do not stand outside creation assigning meaning at will. We stand within it, discovering meaning as we mature.
Children are not equipped for that level of existential responsibility. Asking them to define themselves prematurely is not empowerment; it is pressure. It burdens them with decisions they cannot yet understand and consequences they cannot yet foresee.
Jesus never burdened children with explanations. He blessed them. He welcomed them. He defended them. He did not demand that they articulate who they were before allowing them to belong. He did not ask them to self-identify before receiving His care.
That posture matters.
Faithful adults mirror that posture when they prioritize safety over certainty. When they resist the urge to label. When they choose to listen without concluding. When they understand that their role is not to accelerate identity but to stabilize environment.
Stability is one of the greatest gifts a child can receive. It tells them the world is not collapsing because they are confused. It tells them love is not contingent on self-definition. It tells them they are not a problem to be fixed.
Faith teaches that a stable environment allows truth to emerge naturally. Instability, by contrast, often produces urgency masquerading as clarity. When everything feels fragile, quick answers feel necessary. Faith refuses to build a child’s future on urgency.
This refusal is often misunderstood as rejection. It is not. Rejection withdraws relationship. Protection maintains it.
Protection says, “I will not abandon you to adult expectations.” It says, “I will not use you to signal virtue.” It says, “I will not trade your long-term wellbeing for short-term reassurance.”
Faith has always been suspicious of movements that claim children need less guidance rather than more. Freedom without wisdom is not freedom; it is exposure. Scripture repeatedly frames maturity as the capacity to handle freedom responsibly. Children are still learning that capacity. Adults are meant to supply it until they can carry it themselves.
This is why faith places boundaries around childhood—not to restrict joy, but to preserve innocence. Innocence is not ignorance. It is freedom from burdens that do not yet belong to you.
When adults blur that boundary, they often do so believing they are helping. Faith asks a harder question: helping whom? The child, or the adult’s need for resolution?
Faith calls adults to examine their motivations. Are we responding to children out of patience or panic? Are we offering presence or pushing conclusions? Are we listening to understand, or listening to confirm what we already believe?
Children feel these differences intuitively. They sense when adults are calm and when they are anxious. They sense when love is steady and when it is conditional. Faithful adults strive to be the former.
There is also a spiritual dimension often overlooked in modern discourse. Faith teaches that human beings are not merely psychological or social constructs. We are embodied souls. Body and soul are not adversaries; they are partners. The body is not an enemy to be overcome; it is a gift to be stewarded.
Children learn how to steward their bodies gradually. They learn through guidance, modeling, and patience. When adults teach children to distrust their bodies rather than care for them, they introduce a fracture faith has always resisted.
Faith affirms embodiment without idolizing it. It teaches respect for the body without demanding perfection. It teaches acceptance without erasing reality. These tensions require maturity to navigate. Children should not be forced to resolve them before they are developmentally capable of doing so.
This is why faith resists simplifying identity into slogans. Human beings are too complex, too layered, too sacred for reduction. Children especially deserve better than reduction.
What they need is language that leaves room. Language that reassures without defining. Language that comforts without confining. Language that says, “You are not alone in this, and you are not required to decide today.”
That language is rare in a world addicted to immediacy. Faith preserves it.
Faith also reminds us that love is not measured by how quickly we affirm conclusions, but by how faithfully we remain present through uncertainty. Remaining present is harder. It requires endurance. It requires trust. It requires the humility to admit we do not control outcomes.
Parents and caregivers often carry intense fear—fear of doing harm, fear of being misunderstood, fear of losing relationship. Faith meets that fear with a steadier truth: you are not responsible for producing an identity; you are responsible for providing a home.
Homes are places where people grow at their own pace. Where questions are allowed to linger. Where mistakes are survived. Where love does not fluctuate with self-description.
When children grow in such homes, clarity often arrives quietly, without force. Identity emerges not because it was demanded, but because it was allowed.
This is the hope faith offers.
Not that confusion never happens.
Not that questions never arise.
But that God is patient enough to work through them without haste.
Faith believes that God’s design is resilient. It does not require immediate defense from childhood uncertainty. It does not collapse under questions. It does not panic when growth is messy.
Faith trusts that time, guidance, and love are powerful allies.
When culture demands answers now, faith says, “Wait.”
When pressure escalates, faith says, “Stay.”
When fear shouts, faith says, “Be still.”
Stillness is not neglect. It is confidence.
Confidence that a child’s future does not depend on adult speed.
Confidence that truth does not require coercion.
Confidence that love does not need labels to exist.
This confidence allows adults to say something profoundly healing to children: “You do not have to perform certainty to earn care.” It allows them to say, “You are not behind.” It allows them to say, “There is no rush.”
Faith holds the long view. It sees life as a story unfolding, not a sentence that must be finished prematurely. It believes that the most faithful adults are those who resist the urge to conclude what God has not yet finished revealing.
In that light, protecting childhood is not a political stance. It is a moral one. It is the conviction that children deserve the gift of becoming without interference from adult anxiety.
They deserve to grow.
They deserve to mature.
They deserve to learn who they are without being told who they must be.
Faith stands in that conviction not with anger, but with resolve.
It does not shout.
It does not shame.
It does not rush.
It waits.
It watches.
It walks alongside.
And in doing so, it offers children something no label ever could: a future that remains open, guided, and held in love.
That is not denial.
That is not rejection.
That is not fear.
That is faith doing what it has always done best—protecting the vulnerable, honoring process, and trusting God with the sacred work of becoming human.
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Your friend,
Douglas Vandergraph