Authentic Motherhood - Juli Slattery

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For all licensing information, go to NMLSConsumerAccess.org, corporate NMLS number 1330, equal housing lender, not licensed in Alaska, Hawaii, Georgia, Massachusetts, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah. Does brokenness disqualify you from being a good mom? Find out today on Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman. I think most moms are feeling a sense of just overwhelming concern for their kids and feeling like they don't have the resources they need to do well in this stage of just parenting and motherhood.

Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Today, Dr. Julie Slattery gives help and hope for moms who feel like they'll never be able to give their children what they need. And just in time for Mother's Day, so if you're struggling in some way as a mom, don't miss the conversation that is straight ahead. Dr. Chapman, I think it is normal, with air quotes, normal to feel inadequate as a parent.

There's so many things that you don't know, and I think that's one of the problems, you don't know all the things you don't know. But that pain goes deeper when there's brokenness in your own life. You've met those moms who've felt that way, haven't you? Absolutely, Chris. You know, if a mother grew up in a home where she had a lot of struggles, you know, because of her parents, many times, then she doesn't want to put her children through what she went through, and she's struggling, and how am I going to do this differently?

I don't know how to do this because I never saw it done wisely. Yeah, a lot of parents are struggling with that. Dr. Julie Slattery is going to help out then. She's a psychologist, author, co-founder of Authentic Intimacy. In the summer of 2020, Julie launched SexualDiscipleship.com. It's designed to equip Christian leaders to address sexual issues with gospel-centered truth. So in addition to her speaking and her teaching, she hosts the podcast Java with Julie, where she and a guest have coffee and conversation about these types of things, relationships, sex, intimacy, and why God cares about her sexuality. She's written a bunch of books, 10, I think, including Rethinking Sexuality, God's Design, and Why It Matters.

You can find out more about her, link to her website, at FiveLoveLanguages.com. Well, Dr. Slattery, welcome back to Building Relationships. Thanks for having me back. It's always great to be with you. Well, tomorrow is Mother's Day, so what goes through your mind when you think of this holiday? Well, I kind of wonder what my kids might get for me. You know, I think the first thing that I feel is gratefulness, gratefulness for my mom and the impact that she's had on my life, but also gratefulness that I have the blessing of being a mom to three sons and all the highs and lows of that journey. I think Mother's Day is just a day to reflect on just what a blessing motherhood is as we receive it and as we have the opportunity to give it.

You know, I agree with that. I'm looking back on my mother's life. Of course, she's in heaven today, but just a lot of good memories, you know, and for those of us that had moms that really loved, we were deeply grateful for that. Well, let's talk about this last year that families have been through during the pandemic. It's been a hard time for many of them, and particularly a difficult time for mothers, right? Yeah, it really has. I've talked to so many moms who every semblance of normal just kind of got thrown out the window around March of last year with work schedules and school expectations, with the kind of support that we're used to getting as moms from other moms and just community.

And so not only did our support systems and our sense of normal normalcy got the window, but also we've just been hit ever since then, I think, with wave upon wave of things to be worried about, some of them related to the pandemic, but many of them not as related to the pandemic. So I think most moms are feeling a sense of just overwhelming concern for their kids and feeling like they don't have the resources they need to do well in this stage of just parenting and motherhood. It's almost like mothers or many of the mothers and maybe fathers too kind of forced to be homeschoolers, right?

Yeah, I think most of them have been and some of them have said, I like this. Their structure changes in our home now that we want to keep and then others are saying, no, I can't wait to go back to the normalcy of schools and schedules and trying to get back to a routine. You know, even apart from the pandemic, we know that being a parent has never been easy, but it's different today than it was even 20 years ago, right? Is that your observation?

Oh, for sure. I think if you just take the element of the internet and how it's revolutionized our lives and our children's experience, the things that is brought into our home without us knowing that is coming into our home and reaching our children, the distraction of the smartphone and constant media. And that's just one element of our society that's changed. But the last 20 years have really revolutionized how we learn, how we interact, the pace of life, how much information we're taking in every day. And so that has changed every relationship.

And certainly that includes motherhood. Yeah. You know, Julie, I did my memoirs. In fact, they were just released this week and I was looking back over my life and, you know, when I was a child, of course, there was no computer. I remember when television started.

Okay. So before that there was no television. It was just radio. And I just asked myself, I wonder how my life would have gone if I were growing up in today's culture, you know, rather than the culture I grew up in back in those years.

And I have an idea. It would have been a lot different. Yeah.

Do you think it would have been better or worse? I don't know. You know, I mean, you're just bombarded with information today, you know, with the internet and all of that and TV and everything else. You just, I mean, it's overwhelming to adults, I think, the constant information that's reaching out at you. And I don't know how, you know, but I think parents do have a responsibility in that area, right?

Moms have a responsibility in terms of what they, depending on their age, what they allow their children to be exposed to. Yeah, we really do. And so it really hits us two different ways. First of all, as you're saying how it impacts us as an individual. And so most of us do feel that sense of there's so much good content. There's so much information that I need to stay on top of that we're constantly attached to our smartphones.

We're constantly listening to the next new thing that's coming out. And when we have free time, we find ourselves scrolling through Instagram, which creates this sense of I'm not good enough and wow, look at what this woman made and what she's doing with her kids. So there's the element of how it impacts us and our insecurities and our distractiveness. But then also, as you're mentioning, we have this concern and responsibility to be on guard with what our kids are consuming. And what makes it really scary, Gary, is the fact that we don't understand the technology as well as our kids often do. And so once they hit those 11, 12, 13 year old, they're learning about different apps and different ways to stream things that we don't even know about. And so it's almost like this fear of what we don't know and how do we monitor what our kids are engaging in. And so that can feel very overwhelming for the average parent. Yeah. Would you think that a daily time of just conversation with our children about, you know, what did you see today?

What did you learn today? What those kind of things is that just would that be a part of a natural flow in a healthy home? Yeah, I really think it is. I think we are needing to shift to having normal discussions about things that maybe 10 or 15 years ago were one time sit down discussions like about pornography, about Internet use. We really need to switch to more of a this is a normal conversation that is just going to be part of our daily life. It might not happen every day, but we're going to have conversations about what's on Netflix and what are we watching and what do we need to be watching out for? And how are we using social media and how addicted are we to our smartphones? And so if we don't have those conversations, then the technology really can overtake our lives. And we don't realize it's a problem then until something pops up like pornographic images on your kid's phone or you find out they're engaging with people over technology in an appropriate way.

Or you just find that your kid is depressed and anxious because of all of what they're consuming and the information that they're just not able to handle in their daily life. Well, Julie, in your ministry, Authentic Enimacy, you talk a lot about sexual issues. How is the changing landscape of sexuality and gender impacting today's parents?

It's moving very quickly, as I think all of us are realizing. And one of the ways that it's really impacting parents is that our kids are growing up with an understanding of sexuality and even a language around sexuality that is totally foreign to us. And so what we have to realize is that our children are being raised in a worldview around sex that is all around personal fulfillment, identity, self-actualization. And so when they talk about discovering who they are and wanting to be their authentic self, and our vocabulary is, well, God created sex for marriage, God created male and female.

It's almost as if we're speaking two different languages. And so parents, particularly of teens and young adults, are having a really difficult time bridging that gap of how do I connect with my kids on this? The way they're thinking about things seems so off and I don't even know how to get handles around it. And there are things that for all of our growing up and for generations before us were just assumed to be fact, now we're under question. So the most obvious example is gender, that your biological gender at birth is part of who you are and you navigate that throughout life. Well, now we have parents who are choosing to not even put a gender on a birth certificate because the prevailing thought in modern culture is that the more freedom you have to explore identity, including gender, the healthier you'll be in the long run. And so these kinds of concepts are so foundationally challenging that it's hard to even know where to begin, particularly, like I said, with teenagers and young adults. Yeah, Julie, how do you think we got here as a culture? I mean, when you think about what you just said, you know, not putting the gender of a child on a birth certificate. I mean, you know, from my perspective, it's stupidity. Maybe that's not a good word to use, but how did we get where people would even conceive of such a thing?

Yeah, it seems like such a modern contemporary problem. But as we read the scripture, we see that societies before us, ancient societies, were doing these same kinds of things, even if they didn't have the technology we're having. If we look, for example, in the book of Romans, the way the book of Romans starts out is by saying that the Roman culture was in relational and sexual chaos.

And Romans 1 describes what that chaos looked like. But before Paul got into describing the chaos, he answered your question of how did you get there? And the way we get there is when we neglect our worship of God as our creator. And Paul basically says, God revealed Himself in creation, but we chose to not acknowledge that. Instead, we chose to worship created things. And in our culture, we worship humanity. We are God.

We are the center of the universe. And we see that even with progressive Christianity, people want God to revolve around us instead of us looking at who He is and what His design is and worshipping Him, letting Him alone be the one that defines right and wrong. And so when we lose perspective of who God is, and we begin worshipping ourselves instead of God, then you said it's stupidity. And the Bible says it's foolishness. All of our wisdom turns to foolishness. And unfortunately, I think that's what we're seeing happening as, again, the prevailing wisdom of our day.

I've been reading through, in my devotional time, 2 Chronicles. And it's just the whole pattern of one king leads Judah away from God, and then all the tragedies come, and then they repent, and then they come back, and God restores them, and then the next king. It's just a cycle of that. It sounds like we're just still in the same cycle all these years later, doesn't it?

Yeah, we are. It's just the human heart is rebellious, and we don't want to acknowledge that God is God, and we don't want to bow before Him and worship Him. And so that's going to lead to all kinds of craziness. And if we look at the last 20 years, our culture, first and foremost, has changed what we believe about God. And as a result, we're going to see God giving us over to all kinds of passions and thoughts and beliefs that are really going to lead to a lot more pain and to eventually just our ruin.

We really need God, and without Him, we're in a heap of trouble. What are some of the questions that you're getting today that you didn't get 20 years ago about sexuality? Yeah, some of the questions are the same, but I think they're more honest than they would have been 20 years ago. So for example, 20 years ago, there was still sexual trauma. There was still childhood sexual abuse, but we weren't talking about it. And so in the positive light, we can see that we're bringing up issues that need to be discussed that have always happened but have been more in secrecy. But we're also seeing the normalization of all kinds of sexual behaviors and experiences that are painful and represent brokenness.

And so questions about 10 or 11 or 12 year olds being addicted to pornography, questions about young children wondering about gender and what do we do as a parent? What is the most loving response? Questions about how do we engage with friends and family members who believe differently than we do about God's design for sex? How do we interact with a culture that is celebrating, for example, gay marriage? What is a Christian's response to that?

So I think there's a whole host of questions, and a lot of times when I speak, I'll take a whole hour just to do anonymous Q&As. And I can tell you that every time I do that, you can just feel the pain in the room. And again, there's always been pain around sexuality because I believe the enemy is always trying to just assault God's design on sexuality. But the pain today is so great, and the pain is normal now. It's the norm that somebody is going to say sexuality represents a huge area of confusion for me, brokenness, I'm not sure where to turn.

And so I think one of the big differences is we don't even know what health and unhealth look like today because our culture has messed that up so much. So what advice do you give to moms who are just totally overwhelmed with all of this? Yeah, well, I can say I'm often feeling very overwhelmed by all of this, and so I'm going to preach to myself. But I think what has really helped me navigate through all of this as a mom and also just as a believer in today's world is to seek God's wisdom. And it gives me so much comfort to know that God is not surprised by the things that are happening around us.

He's not surprised by what's happening in my children's lives, that His wisdom is able to equip me through the Holy Spirit to navigate the circumstances that I'm in. And we can look at scriptures like in James where God says, Hey, if you call out to me for wisdom, I'm going to give it to you in abundance. Or we look at Proverbs where it actually says that wisdom is calling out to us and saying, I have good things to give you, just seek me because I'm here for you. And so I need to return to those promises again and again and again, and trust the Lord that He really can give me the wisdom that I need to navigate situations both personally and in ministry. You use the phrase sitting at the doorway of wisdom. What do you mean by that? Yeah, well, I actually stole that from Proverbs chapter 8.

Okay. Where we're actually told to sit at the doorstep of wisdom. And for me, what that means, I love that visual of just waiting and waiting on God. And for me, what that looks like is every morning taking time to sit before the Lord, to sit before His word, to pray and ask God to give me wisdom and to wait on Him to give me that wisdom.

And I think it's a great visual. Sitting is something we're not good at today. We're always moving around. We're always moving to the next thing. And really, it reminds me that in order to receive wisdom from God, I need to shut other things out of my life so that there can be some quiet every day. We even sometimes need to shut the good noise out of our lives. There's so much great content and we need that teaching. We need that encouragement. But nothing should take the place of sitting at the feet of God, of just asking Him to give us specific encouragement, asking Him to teach us from His word and to give us wisdom for what we're facing in our own lives. Yeah, and I'm sure you found that when I do ask for wisdom and I look to the Scriptures and just say, God, show me what I need here, it's amazing how the Spirit of God leads us, isn't it, to the passages that really speak to us in our situation.

It really is, yeah. And I love in the Psalms how the psalmist keeps saying, I will remember, like I'll remember the times that God came through for me. And it's good for us to remember the times when we were so desperate for God's comfort and for His wisdom and where God met us. And He really did guide us through difficult situations.

And remembering that gives us faith and hope that when I call out to Him today, He really is going to counsel me and direct me and show me the way I should go. You know, I have, Julie, a friend who's a mom of some young kids, and one of the things that she said to me recently was, with the pandemic and with school at home and doing things on Zoom, the internet, she said, some things have surfaced in the life of my daughter that I wasn't ready for, I thought I had a few more years before I had to deal with some of these issues, and here they are, first, second, third grade, they're coming up now. And I think there was in her voice, it was like, I wanted more time to prepare for this, number one, and number two, I just don't feel adequate to be able to do what I'm doing. Are you hearing the same type of thing?

Yeah, I really am, Chris. And that can be related to our kids being exposed to pornography, it can be related to young children, six, seven years old, saying, why do some families have two dads? And can a guy marry another guy? And so these are conversations that our kids need to have. But as this mom told you, I'm not ready for that conversation with such a young child.

They're not able to understand all the nuance of concepts involved or the biblical truth and how you love people. And so yeah, I think that's how a lot of parents are feeling. It's like the innocence of childhood has been shattered. And now we have to have very heavy, serious, difficult conversations with kids that are going to have a hard time absorbing what is truth and what is love. And so I think pretty much every parent of young children today is feeling that way. You know, Julie, when a parent is seeking to do that, again, some things still are age appropriate, right? I mean, the kind of answer you would give to a six year old or seven year old who may raise a question like that, you don't have to give, you know, the academic college answer to that. But we do need to give an answer that's consistent with Scripture.

That's probably the biggest issue, right? That's so true. You know, Gary, one of the things that I've learned on this journey of ministering the space of sexual issues is that our traditional approach to sexuality in the church has been one of either silence, like we don't talk about those things, or it's been education, which is, okay, I'm going to read a book, and then I'm going to tell you the facts that are in that book. And what I've been challenged to do is to think more in terms of discipleship, that teaching about sexuality has to be using a discipleship model.

And so discipleship is this idea that it's not going to be one book we read or one piece of education I give you, but I'm going to seek God to teach me and to train my heart and to help me see his perspective and his character in these issues. And then as I walk with my kids through life in age appropriate ways, I want that wisdom to overflow from my life onto my children's life. And absolutely wisdom means that you're going to have very different conversations with a six-year-old than you're going to have with a 16-year-old. And that those conversations are graded with understanding what they can handle, just even their own levels of discretion, not wanting to overwhelm them with facts that they can't make sense of, but also being very wise and aware of the conversations they're going to be hit with in our culture today, what they're going to see at school, what they're going to learn, what might come through a computer.

And so it's being very much in touch with, all right, I want to quit my children for this, but I also want to be ready to have that conversation that I didn't think we needed to have quite yet. So Julie, what I hear you saying is that if a six-year-old asks you, why does Johnny have two daddies and I only have one? We don't have to give them the full gamut of things, but we can say, you know, honey, in the Bible, there is a plan, you know, and this is God's plan. And there's a man and there's a woman, you know, and they have children and that's not God's plan. But people don't always do what God says and so sometimes they marry two people and sometimes they do other things.

Because other cultures, you know, people do have four wives. But if we simply plant the word that in our family, you know, what we do, we look to the scriptures, we look to God's word and we want to do what God has told us to do. Yeah, that's beautifully put. So they just need, they need you there to give them that answer in that moment, Dr. Chapman, because that was beautifully put. We're celebrating moms today on Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, especially moms who may be struggling. Dr. Julie Slattery is our guest. She has a blog post at her website, authentic intimacy.com that may be helpful to you. It's titled Parenting Through Weakness. She's also written the book Rethinking Sexuality, God's Design and Why It Matters.

Find out more at authentic intimacy.com. Julie, I have to ask you specifically if there's a mom that's listening or dad and she has had a son or daughter has come and said, Mom, I think I'm a boy instead of a girl or I think I'm a girl trapped in a boy's body. How do you, you're shocked as a parent, you're shocked as a mom. How do you get past the shock in order to help the child understand? Well, Chris, unfortunately, this is happening more and more. I get emails and calls on a regular basis from parents who are saying that story is happening in their child's life. And I think some of it is in the moment, as you said, there's a shock, there's fear and there might be feelings of guilt or what did I do wrong? There might be anger at the culture. There might be panic. And the hardest thing to do as a parent, and I know with the children that you've had, you've had so many kids, Chris, that I'm sure this has happened many times with different situations where you have to push that down in the moment and just say, Thank you for telling me this.

I love you. And whatever this is, we're going to get through this. And I work with a parenting ministry who tells parents you need to practice your I'm not shocked face. And I think that this is true for all parents, particularly of maybe young adolescents through teenagers and young adults, that when your kid comes to you and confesses something they're struggling with, being able to to be a parent in the moment and look at the needs of your child instead of just reacting to your your own emotions is the most difficult thing.

And just being able to pray to God, God, would you give me the wisdom in this moment to respond rightly? And so there is that initial 24 hours of how our mom and dad can respond and what do I say to my child and what do I do with this torrent of emotions that I'm feeling? But then there's the walking out of now what do we do? And I really think that there's so many different roads to how we seek wisdom here, but one of them is we as parents need support. And we as parents need a place to process all the things that we're feeling, the fears we have, the things that we don't know, even within some parents, the blaming of each other.

You didn't have this talk or you were too tough on him. And so I really encourage parents in that situation to seek out a Christian counselor to help them process what they're feeling and to get on the same page as a parenting team. And then what you need to really do is look at, OK, how do we understand the needs of our child? And the situation of gender dysphoria that you're describing of a young man or woman or a boy or girl saying, I don't know what gender I am or I'm confused about this. There's so much nuance to this today that just that one statement doesn't tell you what you're really dealing with. Traditionally, there's been about less than one percent of people that have genuine what we would call gender dysphoria, where there's a sense from a very young age that I'm in the wrong body, that my biological gender doesn't square with my experience.

And that's a real issue. It has been identified by the psychological expertise and psychiatric expertise for decades that people experience this and it can be debilitating. But what's happening in our day and age is that that gender dysphoria, that questioning is actually being encouraged so that so that young men and women, particularly adolescent girls.

It's almost a trend now to say it's a good thing, it's a normal thing for me to be questioning my gender or to be experimenting. And so there's a very big difference between a child who has that significant, genuine gender dysphoria versus a child who's going through identity struggles, going through adolescence, being impacted by what's happening in culture. There's often anxiety and depression that live alongside that kind of questioning. And so you really want to seek help from somebody who can help you sort through what is my child really going through and what is the root problem and what are the symptoms of those problems. And in today's day and age, you really want to make sure that you're consulting and counseling with somebody who first and foremost has a biblical perspective on what wholeness is, what gender is, what mental health is.

But also somebody who has some training and expertise in adolescence in some of these questions. And so God is raising up people that address these issues very well, ministries and counselors, and this would be a time where you'd really want to reach out for that kind of help. And Julie, I think in another generation, people were less inclined to reach out to counselors. But I think that's changing, and I think that today many parents are realizing that when there are situations like you're describing, along with depression and anxiety and all of that, counselors are people who are trained to work with young people in this area. And they are available out there, and to reach out to them, just as in the past we would reach out to a medical doctor if the child had a medical problem, when they have an emotional problem and sometimes mental problems, the counselors can be really, really helpful to parents.

Yeah, that's really true. They can, and not just the things we're talking about, but there's so much expertise now, for example, in trauma recovery that we didn't have 15 or 20 years ago. And so there really is a growing expertise in some of these very specific areas of struggle and of brokenness, but we also have to recognize that the brokenness is getting greater. And so, as I mentioned earlier, these things are now normal rather than the exception, and so there's really a need for, I think, not only the counseling, but also the information, just our knowledge as Christian parents.

We need to know more about these things than we ever needed to know before. What do you say to the mom who just feels like, you know, I don't want to mess my kids up, I want to say the right thing, I want to do the right thing, and I'm not sure I'm doing it right, and she's kind of anxious herself. How do you respond to that mom?

Yeah, well, first of all, I know what that feels like. When I had my first children, I was just starting out as a psychologist, and so I'd meet with these people every day that basically would be telling me how their moms mess them up. So, in some ways it made me even more aware of, it doesn't matter what I do, someday my kids are going to be sitting in a counselor's office talking about the things that I did that hurt them, and so I remember just feeling overwhelmed by that sense of fear. And the first thing that the Lord really spoke to me through His Word is that He has not given us a spirit of fear. He did not give you children so that you would constantly be worried about what you might do wrong or the ways that you might mess them up.

That's just not of God, and the enemy is the one who wants us to live in fear. And then I think that there's an acceptance of we all are broken parents. None of us do this perfectly. In some ways, you kind of say it jokingly, but we all at some level are going to mess our kids up.

We're going to do our best. We're going to seek wisdom. But if we were perfect parents, our kids wouldn't need God. And it is in the places that I failed, it's in my limitations, that I can say to my kids, that's why you need to look to the only one who is the perfect parent.

That's why you need God in your life. And so when I started to realize that God was the one that I eventually wanted my kids attaching to, He's the perfect parent, He's the healer, He's the wisdom. Then it took a lot of pressure off of me feeling like if I mess something up, it's going to forever alter my child's destiny. And it took some of that pressure off.

Yeah. How about the mom who, in her own childhood or teenage years, was either abused or neglected or whatever, and has really not totally processed all that. It's still plaguing her. And she doesn't want to even talk about it to herself, let alone be honest with her children about some of her past things that happened in her life. How do you recommend that mom move forward?

Well, first of all, I am so sorry for the extra burden that moms in that situation are carrying, because just parenting as a whole is difficult. But when you add on the past and the burden of the past and the wounds of the past, you can feel like now you're running a marathon with a 50-pound backpack that you have to carry. And my encouragement would be that God doesn't intend for you to continue to carry that burden.

God is the healer, and He calls Himself a Jehovah Rafa, which means He is the healer. But God is also a gentleman, and He invites us to healing. But we have to accept that. And I think this is true to some extent in all of our lives. But when you've grown up in a home where you were abused emotionally or abused sexually, there's a sense of there's shame there.

There's secrets that you don't want to speak out loud. You just want the past to be in the past. But you really do carry the past with you, and it does burden you down. So my encouragement would be as much as it might feel like a scary step to get help, you'll be walking towards freedom. You'll be walking towards letting go of lies that make you feel bound, fear that makes you feel tied up in knots. You'll be letting go of the fear that you're going to repeat the same patterns with your kids. And you know, Gary, as you mentioned, there are so many wonderfully trained counselors who are able to help walk that road with you, that you can find a good counselor really in any corner of the country today. And so my encouragement would be, you know, say today, no more.

I'm not carrying this 50-pound backpack. I want to be free for my sake, and I want to be free for my children's sake. And we do have a lot of examples of that, do we not, of people that fail and failed miserably, and yet God forgave and God picked them up and went on and used them.

And so we can overcome things that were done against us or to us, as well as our past failures. Let me share something that I hear too often in my office, and that is the mom who has endured or is enduring abuse from her husband. And she's staying in the marriage because she doesn't think that she has an option.

What do you say to that mom? Well, you know, there are really two reasons why women feel like they don't have options in that situation, and one of the reasons is because of physical circumstances. They think, well, I can't support myself, or if I leave, I'm afraid that the violence will get worse. And so it's that physical, practical thing that keeps them from reaching out for help or from leaving. The second reason can be a little more subtle, and it's actually more of a spiritual reason where they feel like to be faithful to God, to be faithful to my marriage vows, I have to endure this. And in either of those situations, we need to realize that, first of all, there is freedom available.

There are people that will help with the physical needs. There are systems in place that can protect you and that can provide for you through the local church, as well as through just different agencies that are designed to help people that are in domestic violence situations. But also that there are spiritual resources available. And although marriage is a sacred covenant between two people before God, we also have to recognize that we see even in the book of Malachi, God hates divorce, but what he hates even more is a man who's covering himself with violence. And that abuse was never God's plan for marriage.

And that actually when we stay in a situation where we allow someone to be abusive to us or to our children, we're enabling a sinful pattern, a destructive pattern. And there is a time to stand up to that kind of sin and to say, no more, I'm drawing a boundary. And a woman in that situation really doesn't feel empowered to draw that boundary. She probably feels confused. She feels like she doesn't have a voice.

She's afraid. And that's why I'm so glad women like you would find themselves in your office, Gary, or another counselor's office. Because if you're in that situation, you really do need an advocate to help you stand and to help you draw boundaries. And that really is the role of the church.

And when that doesn't happen, that's such an unfortunate thing. When women go to the church and they feel like all they hear is, no, you have to put up with abuse. That's really so contrary to the purpose of why God created marriage. And so my encouragement would be, find those resources first in your church and then also in agencies that are set up to help you to get the financial help you need, to get the spiritual counsel you need, and help you set healthy boundaries.

Yeah. And in fact, it's not an act of love for her to stay in that situation and do nothing. Far more loving to say, I love you too much to sit here and watch you abuse me and let our children see this happening. But I fully agree with what you're saying that if a wife is at that stage, she needs somebody to be walking with her through this journey, a counselor type person who can help her as she makes that hard decision on what we call tough love. And it doesn't always lead to divorce. Many times that person will wake up when we express tough love and realize, I've got to get help. And if they get help, then we can do marriage counseling and the marriage can be saved. But we're not doing the loving thing simply to accept physical abuse.

That's absolutely right. And although it doesn't always lead to divorce, very often it leads to separation. And I think we have to talk about the difference between sometimes separation is very necessary for the sake of saving a marriage or giving a marriage a chance to heal. And that's certainly the case when there's addictions involved or abuse.

So reach out to that person that can help you through that. Here's another thing I think that moms are struggling with, some moms are struggling with, and that is they brought their children up in a church. They've tried to pass their faith along to them. And now that child is an adult and they are walking away from God.

And say, I no longer believe all of that. How do you respond to that mom? It's so painful for parents who are going through that. You know, it's one thing that I pray for my children every day is that they'll have an intimate relationship with God.

Everything else pales in comparison to that, what job they have, who they marry, even their health. And so when a child is walking away from the Lord, it is such a significant pain and it is the pain that God feels for us when we walk away from Him. And so, first of all, I would say that's a very legitimate grief that you're experiencing. And God hears that grief.

He carries those tears when we come before Him and we intercede for our children. And that's what we want to do all the time is be interceding for them, asking the Lord to soften their hearts. And we often have to understand that this is not in our control. Like we have influence with our kids, but they're their own person.

They have to make their own decisions with God. But we can be a faithful source of love. We can walk faithfully in our own testimony and be patient. Be patient in prayer, be patient in love, and hang on to the fact that God listens to our prayers.

And sometimes as a mom, I almost want to like, God, do you see me? I'm praying for my kids. Do you value the prayers of this mom?

And I really do believe God does value those prayers. When one of my kids was struggling with something a few years ago, I went to go see a counselor because I was really struggling just as a mom with what I need to do and what do I do with the guilt I'm feeling and the fear I have. And this counselor said something to me that that really encouraged me.

He said, Julie, you have given your children a light. You have told them about God. You've given them the seeds of Christianity and of truth. And you just need to trust the Lord that what you've planted is still there and that in due time it'll grow and it'll bear fruit. And I think about that often, just that my job is to be faithful in planting that seed and praying for my kids and loving them well, walking faithfully. And I just have to trust that God is the Redeemer and he's the one that's going to bear fruit in their lives. Yeah, you know, the point you made earlier there in terms of freedom that a child has, as an adult, they have the freedom to choose to follow God or not. And I sometimes remind parents, God's first two children went wrong.

They had a perfect father, God, and Adam and Eve turned away from God, you know. So their turning away from God doesn't mean that you have been a bad parent, you know, because they have a choice and God gave us that freedom. But you mentioned prayer and I think that's a powerful tool that we have. Julie, what do you pray for for yourself? What would you encourage moms who are listening to pray for in the whole process of raising children in this generation? Well, I think just praying that God would soften the hearts of our children. We know that God is the one that brings us to repentance.

He's the one that opens our eyes to truth. And so we want to pray for that. We want to pray knowing that there is a spiritual battle. The scripture talks about the fact that the battle around us isn't a culture war. It's not just disagreements.

It's not political differences. That there literally is a spiritual battle that's being waged as enemies are trying to destroy the spiritual kingdom of God. And that plays out in our marriages. It plays out in our parenting.

It plays out in everything. And so we want to pray in such a way that we're aware of that spiritual battle and we're asking God for victory. We also want to pray for just revival and repentance in our own hearts, because the scripture says that the prayer of a righteous person accomplishes much. And so I want to be somebody who quickly repents before the Lord so that my heart is pure before Him, so that He hears my prayers, so that His Holy Spirit is active in me as I interact with my kids and the world. And so those are some of the things that I pray. I pray that I will be faithful to God, that my kids will be faithful to God, that we'll endure through whatever comes our way and cling to Him. And that's all I know is to abide in Christ and to cling to Him and to trust Him with the rest.

Yeah. And if we do that, we can trust God to do His part. And again, God doesn't make our children do right, but God does interrupt their lives, sometimes through a person, sometimes through a book, sometimes through a counselor, but God does interrupt their lives seeking to bring them to Himself. You know, one of the questions I asked myself through the years is, what if my children turn out to be like me? And that's been a very sobering question for me and has led me to realize along the journey. There are some things I need to change. And when we realize that and are open to that, God can change us if we reach out and, as you said, apologize to God for our failures, but ask Him to change our hearts and change our minds.

Yeah. Well, Julie, let me thank you for being with us today. This has been a very heavy conversation, but a very important conversation. And thank you for the book that you have written. And I hope that those who are listening today are going to get that and are going to find it very, very helpful. So thanks for being with us again today. Well, thank you.

It's always a joy, Gary. Once again, Dr. Julie Slattery has been with us, and you can find out more about her at authenticanimacy.com. Parenting Through Weakness is a free blog post there. It might help. She's also written the book Rethinking Sexuality, God's Design and Why It Matters. You can find out more about that as well at authenticanimacy.com. And next week, you've heard that you shouldn't settle for less than the best.

Does that apply to marriage? Find out in one week as we welcome Anthony Delaney. Before we go, let me thank our production team, Steve Wick and Janice Todd. Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio and Association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.