Virgil Walker, Sola Veritas, Dec 11, 2025
And every once in a while I see an expression on a parent’s face that makes me pause. It usually happens after a sermon, or while we’re walking to the parking lot, or in the back of a quiet corner of the church where they think no one notices their eyes. It’s a cocktail of confusion, and sadness, and something that feels like fear. Parents of adult kids who have that look on their face I’ve seen people have in front of a grave.
Except that their children are still alive.
Still texting them.
Continuing to turn up at birthdays and holidays.
But something has changed.
These aren’t challenges of teenagers slamming doors and pushing curfews. They are sons and daughters in their 20s, 30s, 40s — educated, employed and articulate — but ever more distant from the people who raised them to believe. Parents sit at a kitchen table across from their adult child and think: I don’t know who this person is anymore.
And it hurts.
Somehow, the worldview that had created their home — the gospel that felt like a shared plotline of their relationship — had fallen out from under them. It didn’t happen overnight. It never does. It’s generally slow, quiet, almost polite. A soft pulling away. A conversation that concludes not as it once did. A tone you can’t quite place. A comment that makes you wonder: Wait … where did that come from?
And then one day you’re looking at this kid you raised, and he just seems like a complete stranger who shares your blood but not much else.
Perhaps that’s why it is on my mind now.
The holidays really exacerbate things that we are able to overlook in June. You sit in a crowded living room, surrounded by people you love, and somehow the gap between your own child and you is starker. You listen to their voice, but the convictions contained within it seem to belong to some distant land. Conversations tiptoe around landmines. You want to say something. You’re terrified to say something. You attempt to focus on the impending cool air, but a knot is lodged in the middle of your chest.
The holidays don’t make the wound.
They only make it so you can’t hide.
When I wrote Letters to Parents of Prodigals, I had not written from theory. I wrote from somewhere that had already been battered. I wrote because I knew what it was like to rehash conversations at two in the morning. I knew the pain of watching the child you disciplined embracing beliefs that would turn them from the faith you had hoped they’d build a life on. I knew what it was to love a child fiercely and still be powerless.
I still remember the same questions I used to ask myself then, that so many parents are asking themselves now:
Where did I miss it?
What should I have said?
How come it seems that other parents didn’t fall into the same potholes I did?
That kind of thinking, you can lose whole nights over. Whole months. If not careful, it just becomes a lifestyle.
But here’s a lesson that took me a while to get:
Your child didn’t drift alone. They were raised in a world designed to push them towards drifting.
And I don’t mean “the world” in some fuzzy, theological sense. And I don’t just mean the larger cultural ecosystem in which your child masks (an ecosystem designed to tear down Scriptural authority, obscure moral identity, supplant objective truth with personal preference, and so on).
Identity politics.
Gender ideology.
Deconstruction as virtue.
Therapeutic language that substitutes “living in truth” with “living your truth.”
Social media disciples faster than the church in town ever will.
Your child had no chance of avoiding all that unscathed.
And while that doesn’t absolve anybody’s responsibilities — theirs or yours — it does make clear why so many of these Christian parents feel this same ache in their bones. They’re grieving because their kids are thinking. They are in mourning, because the compass they once followed has been replaced by something wobbly.
There are some parents who have told me that they feel like their children are living in a bubble, and they’re walking on glass. Scared to say the one wrong thing that will blow up the relationship. The others who write to me say they’ve gone quiet, not because their conviction has flagged but rather out of fear that they’ll lose connection.
There’s no easy balance.
Truth, without love, can shut a door.
A key to the wrong door can also be opened by love without truth.
It’s a tension parents live every day, often alone.
And many are ashamed of the grief itself. They don’t want to overreact. They don’t mean to be dramatic. They don’t want the church to consider their home a failure. “They don’t want their child to believe that they are disappointed in them.
So they smile.
They nod.
They pray quietly.
And they bleed privately.
I need you to be able to hear this without your hair standing up on the back of your neck:
Your grief is not evidence of your failure.
It means you care.
And just because you are tired doesn’t mean God is.
I get this question from some parents: What should they do? They want steps, clarity, a plan. But this is not a formula kind of pain. It’s slower work — deeper and quieter. It’s the choice to remain in one’s child’s life even when it feels lopsidedly of service. It’s truth telling with a whisper not a shout. It’s praying even when prayer feels like the tiniest thing in your hands. It refuses to just be passive, without panicking either.
It waits — but not one of the waiting in defeat.
The kind that moves toward hope, not away from it.
Because prodigals do come home.
Not because a parent talked them back.
But because God always knows how to get through to the person who feels un-get-through-to-able.
Before you look at your child and hardly even recognize them: Know this.
God does.
He hasn’t lost track.
He isn’t confused, or cowed, or fatigued.
He sees the road they’re on.
And He sees you too.
He is not yet done telling their story.
And He is not done with yours.
https://virgilwalker.substack.com/p/the-silent-epidemic-of-christian
This sounds pretty tough. The Christian parents want to impart Jesus Christ’s words of Eternal Life, which will never pass away, to their children who only know the words of this life which is only temporary and will all pass away.
If those children can’t hear Jesus speaking to them through their parents, then the parents must ask Jesus Himself to speak to them. If they have ears to hear.
May The Lord be with them both.