First Steps Out Quotes

“When you encounter a struggle or a grief, embrace that as a time when you are being privileged to allow Jesus to pull you up to His chest and comfort you in a way you’ve never experienced before. Embrace the opportunity to know Jesus in a new way. And in this way, you can find the power to be thankful in any circumstance.”
― Christy McFerren, First Steps Out: How Christians Can Respond to a Loved One Coming Out

“Love must become a parent’s default response to all circumstances. It is the bonding agent that sustains and strengthens relationships under stress. When the ‘righteous’ world and our own human nature dictate a response involving anger, demands, and rejection, a parent must choose love.”
― Christy McFerren, First Steps Out: How Christians Can Respond to a Loved One Coming Out

“Fear brings pressure with its demands. Fear can’t see another option beyond it’s own very forceful solution. It seeks control. It does not trust, it does not believe the best, and it speaks before it thinks. It needs its way, and it needs it now.”
― Christy McFerren, First Steps Out: How Christians Can Respond to a Loved One Coming Out

“I love you, but I don’t embrace this with you. It’s not who you are. It’s not the world you were made for.”
― Christy McFerren, First Steps Out: How Christians Can Respond to a Loved One Coming Out

“We must tell them they have options, and one option is to allow God permission to transform their lives.”
― Christy McFerren, First Steps Out: How Christians Can Respond to a Loved One Coming Out

“He is a patient, long-suffering Father who would rather us live with purpose and bear up under some struggle than abandon life altogether.”
― Christy McFerren, First Steps Out: How Christians Can Respond to a Loved One Coming Out

“The hope and beauty of the American system is that if we as the Church were to stop being afraid and do the hard work of relationship-based discipleship, the laws and officeholders who govern us would eventually reflect what we fight tooth and nail for in every election cycle.”
― Christy McFerren, First Steps Out: How Christians Can Respond to a Loved One Coming Out

“The key question of our time is learning how to respond in love when people don’t agree, without compromising our view.”
― Christy McFerren, First Steps Out: How Christians Can Respond to a Loved One Coming Out

“When I first began to see and understand that this is what was at work in me, I started to rise up a little bit against it. The foundations of my faith gave me the understanding that I could and should call out to God for completion and identity in these areas instead of trying to draw it out of a relationship with a woman — or any human for that matter. The revelation came that I was engaging in idolatry, expecting wholeness and fulfillment from something and someone that wasn’t designed to give it to me, and I was valuing that as primary to God. It was angering and humiliating when I saw that I was underestimating my own womanhood and allowing some other woman to define what was rightfully and uniquely mine to express. This marked my freedom from the bondage of looking to women for affirmation in my womanhood, and I started looking for that affirmation in the mirror — the one I dressed in front of each day and the one this is the Word of God.”
― Christy McFerren, First Steps Out: How Christians Can Respond to a Loved One Coming Out

“I learned that more than angering Him, my failures broke His heart. I learned in order to please Him, my heart only needed to be in agreement with His. And to make agreement, I only had to yield my pride to His love.”
― Christy McFerren, First Steps Out: How Christians Can Respond to a Loved One Coming Out

“I don’t have to make an enemy of God just because I’m not quite like Him yet.”
― Christy McFerren, First Steps Out: How Christians Can Respond to a Loved One Coming Out