Points of Discussion:

Melinda emphasizes the importance of prayer and surrender to God, highlighting that your LGBTQ identified child’s same-sex attraction itself isn't a sin, but acting on it is, and her main prayer is for her daughter's holiness rather than heterosexuality. Melinda emphasizes that a parent's responsibility is to love, pray for, and support their child, but not to control or fix them, as transformation is God's role.

The conversation covers practical steps for parents, such as setting boundaries with love, having open and honest conversations, and not compromising biblical truths, while still showing unconditional love and support to their children.

Melinda shares her personal experiences and the transformation in her relationship with her daughter, advocating for the pursuit of Jesus and intimate prayer as key elements in walking this difficult journey.

The show notes include resources, as well as Melinda’s links where you can purchase her book, sign up for her newsletter, follow her podcast etc. If you sign up for her newsletter you can find out where she’s speaking next and the various events that are available for parents dealing with similar situations. 

Podcast Intro:

My guest Melinda Patrick is multi-talented on many levels. She is a podcast host of two podcasts, one of which is The Bridge Between Us: Loving Your LGBTQ Identified Child Without Compromising Truth. Melinda is a writer, an international speaker and she recently added author to her writing credentials in early 2024 when she published, The Daring Rescue: Joining Jesus Christ in His Pursuit of Your LGBTQ Identified Child’s Heart.

What I believe makes Melinda successful at connecting with people and loving them well is her passion to love Christ first and foremost; to discover His heart and to willingly make her own heart transparent so that the Lord can write His love story with her, onto/into her own heart.

I’m going to try and make this intro super short because I want to get right into all the information and insight that Melinda has to share but I am excited about everything she shared so hopefully I can contain myself. May you have ears to hear all that the Holy Spirit shares through her. Listen to this episode a couple of times because you don’t want to miss anything. From practical advice, deep wisdom, a parent's insight, knowledge of how to navigate this sensitive topic with God, you simply do not want to miss anything.

Here are just a few of the questions she addressed:  What is the parent’s responsibility? Is it our job, the parent's job, to save our child? Is there any hope for relationship if our child doesn’t want to be saved? What is the difference between desiring our child to change vs our child being transformed? How do we navigate hard conversations? Melinda says we need to define some words as the basis of hard conversations. I think we can all agree that in this particular time and culture, words have been hijacked and they no longer mean what they used to mean. 

My biggest take away from our conversation was personal. I loved how her experience of allowing God to challenge her heart, her fears and her pride was in line with what I am discovering about the Lord myself.

Taking our emotions, fears, lie based thinking and all the ways we feel/believe that God should/would/could answer our prayers and we pause. We bring Him our pain and our hard questions, expose what our heart believes, we get real about our motives with the One who thoroughly knows these things about us. 

God’s not afraid of our emotions. He gave us emotions and I personally believe they also serve as an alarm system of sorts. Emotions let us know when we need to engage the heart of God for His truth and healing. In 2 Corinthians 10:5, the word says, "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”  In short, we bring God our pain and we allow Him to speak His truth/His Word into that pain and it redefines what we’ve built our false belief system on.

I can’t express to you the level of freedom, peace, truth, love that is available to you through this process of trusting God with our pain. Actually, here’s a perfect example. Let’s jump into my conversation with Melinda! What you see, in this case what you hear, is what you get in real life with her. 

Listen in and be encouraged by her passion for the things of God because He’s doing a deep revelatory work in this woman’s heart and you get to glean the wisdom.

Live Loved and Thrive! @alifeofthrive.com

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