Podcast: How to Talk to Your Kids About Suffering (Beth M. Broom, LPC)

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Explaining Where and Who God Is to Children in the Midst of Suffering

In this episode, counselor and parent Beth M. Broom discusses the challenging questions that arise when helping children who encounter suffering. Beth talks about what children may need, how to teach them empathy, and how having a biblical worldview with a theological foundation is crucial for both understanding and teaching them about pain and suffering.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

• Experiencing Suffering as a Family
• A Firm Foundation
• Answering Questions About Suffering
• Balancing Hope and Honesty
• Practical Encouragement

00:38 - Experiencing Suffering as a Family

Matt Tully
Beth Broom is a licensed professional counselor supervisor and certified clinical trauma professional. She also serves as the executive director of Bridgehaven Counseling Associates, a nonprofit counseling practice in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the founder and director of the Christian Trauma Healing Network, a nonprofit organization that equips Christian helpers to care for trauma survivors. She co-hosts Counsel for Life, a podcast focused on mental health and the Christian life, and is the author of a new book with Crossway, 10 Questions About Pain and Suffering: 30 Devotions for Kids, Teens, and Families, which is part of the 10 Questions series of devotionals. Beth, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Beth Broom
Thank you for having me. I’m excited.

Matt Tully
You’ve spent years walking alongside people who are dealing with different levels and different types of deep pain, both as a counselor and as the director of a trauma-focused ministry. So I wonder if you could just start by telling us a little bit about your own background and your experience.

Beth Broom
Sure. I actually was a school teacher before I became a counselor. I worked a lot with kids and in school settings, and that actually taught me a lot about how to work with children who are struggling in particular ways, which, as we’ll talk about, is helpful for this book that I’ve written. I became a counselor after having experienced a lot of suffering of my own, honestly. I had a recognition that there are not a ton of spaces, unfortunately (or there weren’t at that time), in which a believer who really wanted to stay tethered to her faith in the midst of suffering—there just weren’t a lot of resources out there for someone like me to just think theologically and also from a care perspective about difficult topics related to suffering. And so that really sent me on a journey—both for my own healing but also as I began to think about this, the Lord began to bring my way many people who were kindred spirits with me who’d experienced very difficult things and really had not known where to turn. And that sent me towards counseling. It became a passion of mine to want to sit well with people, to be able to love them through their struggle, but also to help create—or at least re-foundation—a person’s understanding of who God is in the midst of suffering. What is he doing? These big questions that we have. Where is he? Why is he allowing these things? Those were things that I wanted to infuse into my care for people. So that sent me on a counseling journey. And because of my own history with a particular type of suffering, which was a history of abuse, I wanted to work specifically with people who had experienced that kind of suffering. So I went on to get a special certification as a trauma counselor. And then that led me towards even further development of an equipping ministry for pastors, ministry leaders, and counselors who were dealing every day with the struggles that are specific to traumatization. It just became a passion to not only counsel people who were suffering but also help other people to do the same—to just multiply what the Lord had been teaching me through my own journey of healing but also as I learned to become a counselor.

Matt Tully
Obviously, this book goes beyond just the most extreme kinds of suffering that we might experience—the category of maybe trauma, as you mentioned. It’s really dealing with a broader spectrum of the types of pain and suffering that all of us experience as part of just living in a fallen world. But I wonder, as you think both about your own professional background and experience and maybe your own personal experience with suffering, but also through the lens of your life as a mom of children, how did that side influence your approach to this book as well, as you’re kind of thinking about your own kids, perhaps?

Beth Broom
Actually, my three children are the ones I dedicated this book to. They have been my greatest teachers in terms of how do we help not just explain where God is and who God is in the midst of pain and trial, but how do we embody it as parents with our children so that they’re not just learning by hearing, but they’re also seeing it modeled? And they’re learning by doing. They’re experiencing together with the family. What is it like to link arms, to share one another’s burdens, to actually turn to the Lord in lament—doing that together as a team? Obviously, we’re a normal family, so we’ve experienced all kinds of suffering as a family and have grown along the way. It’s really funny because, actually, there are a lot of things that I naturally do as a counselor that I forget to do as a mom, if I’m honest. There’s the whole thing of go slow, be careful, and make sure that you’re just being with somebody and bearing their burden. As a mom, sometimes what I want to do is fix it and make it stop really quick.

Matt Tully
Why do we so often do that? We can kind of have a different approach and a different mindset when it comes to our own kids or our own family members and maybe our spouse. What is it that leads us to sometimes think of our own families in a different way, perhaps?

Beth Broom
Well, I will give my charitable answer to that first, and then I’ll say another thing that might be happening that might not be so charitable. Anybody who we love desperately and deeply, we have a deep instinct to protect and shield as best we can to prevent pain for those people that we love. And sometimes the way that that comes out as a mom is I don’t want you to know what’s happening in the world. I want you to just keep your eyes shut because it’s so terrible. I don’t want you to feel pain, or I want to sort of helicopter this situation. As a mom, I want to fix it, because I want to make sure you don’t have to endure something difficult and experience adversity. And at the same time, we all know it’s not possible. We can’t do that. But I do think there’s a place of love in our hearts. I’m from Texas, so we call it the “mama bear gene.” We have an instinct to bring the babies in close, bring the spouse in close, and shield from harm. So I think there is a goodness to it. And at the same time, I also think there is a tendency in us—I’ll just be really honest—as a believer and in the spheres that we are in, I think sometimes we want to appear to have it all together or to make sure that we know exactly what to say and we’re doing the right thing. And so our outward appearance might not look the same as what we’re doing behind closed doors with our families. And that’s just the honest truth that we need to be able to talk about. But I do think there is sometimes a tendency to do things differently in the home than what we do outside the home. And I think that’s an area of accountability for us to grow in, to be able to ask what it would look like to have integrity—that what we do behind closed doors is the same as what we do in the public sphere.

Matt Tully
That’s something that I think all of us as parents have probably felt and maybe wrestle with knowing where the line is. I want to protect my children from things, but I also don’t want to stick them in a bubble of shielding them from the world. As you think about it from a counseling perspective in your experience, what happens when parents avoid having hard conversations with their kids about suffering?

Beth Broom
First of all, if you don’t have a foundation built, when the storm comes, the house falls. That’s the concept. If there is a complete shielding, a protection from, then you’re not providing opportunities to have real conversations about who God is in the midst of this and who we are supposed to be as believers. What does it look like for us to not just endure suffering but actually allow the Lord to teach us and grow us through it and to become stronger as a unit and a family? If we shield from that, then inevitably, when suffering does come—which it will—there is a greater risk (a much greater risk, if I’m honest) that that person who’s been shielded, however old they are, when the storm comes, they don’t know what to do. And what I’ve seen over and over again is people, when they’ve not received a firm foundation of who God is in the suffering, where I should be turning, what to do, and how to fix my mind on truth, if they’ve not done any of that work, it is so easy to lean into false beliefs. It comes naturally for us to just make an assumption that if suffering is happening, that means that God is angry with me or God is punishing me. We draw these quick conclusions. And it makes sense to us, and so we hang onto it. And it only gets reinforced over time if we don’t work that out in the midst of our sanctification. So if you don’t have the foundation, you don’t have anything to grab onto when the storm comes. And there’s a great danger in that, and I see it over and over again. People who had every intention and deeply desired to trust the Lord through their suffering, but because they’d never really experienced who God is at that level, it was just easy for them to fall into the pit of the lies that the enemy will feed us when we’re in the midst of our times.

Matt Tully
I’m thinking of my own kids and my wife and I and how we’re trying to lead them. I could see parents feeling a little bit like, Well, my kids haven’t maybe yet experienced suffering. Nothing terrible has happened, so what does it look like for me to help prepare them for this and have it not just be kind of abstract doctrines that I’m trying to get them to learn?

Beth Broom
You really don’t want to wait until a tsunami is coming to actually have these conversations. I kind of liken it, if it’s okay, to the sex conversation with your kids. If you wait until they’ve made a decision in a particular direction to have the conversation, it will not be successful, by and large. But if you can have conversations all along the way, then when they hit these bigger moments, they’ve already got a foundation. So I think it’s incredible. And I think about my own kids who experienced some levels of suffering. For example, bullying, when they were in elementary school. Coming home and saying things like, Nobody likes me in my class. I just want to quit school. I feel terrible about myself—things like that. That’s suffering. Again, I think our instinct sometimes is to say, Oh, they’re just jealous. Oh, you’re going to be fine. You don’t deserve that. Pick some different friends. These are all understandable things to say, but they miss the moment. You have a moment there to be able to lean in with your kiddos and say, That’s really hard. Nobody likes that. That does not feel good. It makes sense that that would be very painful for you. You want to talk some more about it? Can you tell me more? Give them opportunities. And that’s one thing I love to talk about when I work with parents is that every opportunity is an additional open door that you’re giving to your child to talk to you. Because if we wait for them to really talk to us until they’re fourteen, they will not. It’s this idea of let’s continue to have open doors even when they’re very young and they can’t really articulate their feelings. It’s okay. We still just give those opportunities. We empathize, we show compassion, and we even meet them where they are and say, Hey, you know what? I had some of those things happen to me, too, when I was a kid. I remember what that’s like. Not fun at all.

12:17 - A Firm Foundation

Matt Tully
Beth, one of the things that I love about this conversation so far and about the book that you’ve written is the way it is so robustly theological. You’re coming from a really robust clinical background and with a lot of experience, but you also are incorporating a distinctly Christian worldview when it comes to helping our kids understand suffering. How did you think about the importance of incorporating that Christian worldview but also learning from some of the broader insights that the counseling profession has gleaned over the years, in terms of human psychology and relationships and all of that?

Beth Broom
Well, you used the word incorporate. I’m not going to correct you, of course, but I do want to modify what you said. I’m not at all thinking of incorporating Christian beliefs and biblical concepts. That is the foundation on which we are standing. There is no other thing that we’re standing on. If I’m providing any kind of a helpful thing to people that is more based in the methodologies of psychology and what not, I’ve not given you something that’s eternal. I haven’t. Nobody knows better than those of us that are in the field that psychology is changing all the time. What was the only thing that worked ten years ago is completely debunked now. Why? Because if it’s not based in biblical truth, it’s not going to last. So we start from that place. Now, I think there are things that we can learn. I call it the trellis. It’s not the thing that causes growth, but it’s kind of like the scaffolding that we might run the vine up through to help it get light. There are things that we learn, obviously, and things that I will utilize in a book like this—although, you’re really not going to know that when you read it. Kids won’t pick up on specific methodologies for how to have an empathetic conversation and things like that. But in truth, even the conversational tools that might be woven into this book so that parents can have those conversations are really founded in the gospel—the truth that we are meant to one another. We are meant to link arms in struggle. We are meant to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. And so these are the concepts that are woven through the book. And we did not mince words. We were careful and we said words that were fitting for children, but we went to all of the hard places in Scripture that talk about suffering. James 1: “Consider it joy when you face trials.” What? What does that mean? And Paul talking about how we rejoice in our suffering because it produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. We actually do utilize those Scriptures because we want our kids to understand what these things mean. They sound strange, so how can we talk about them in a way that’s deeply theological? So yes, there are definitely things that I’ve learned over the years. There are plenty of bones that I’ve spit out over the years, if I’m being honest, related to psychology. I do think some of the tools and methods can be helpful along the way, as long as you’re standing on that firm foundation of the gospel.

15:24 - Answering Questions About Suffering

Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful clarification and helpful confidence builder for those of us who love God’s word, love the gospel, and do see, ultimately, what the core issues are when it comes to all of the brokenness in the world around us. You mentioned some of the issues and the specific questions that you’re trying to address in the book. For the 10 Questions series, across all of the volumes in the series each book is looking at ten key questions and trying to answer those questions through these daily devotionals. And so I wonder if you could just give us a little sense for what some of the questions are in particular that you are trying to answer throughout the book.

Beth Broom
It was really interesting to come up with what the ten questions would be. And these were not easy. When I agreed to do this, I don’t know that I really had my head wrapped around how difficult it might be to try to talk about these concepts with someone who’s ten years old. Even if I have a lot of experience doing that, it’s really hard to write it down and get it just right. But we really start with just the overarching concept of what suffering is. And we use Bible stories and biblical language to understand what suffering is and the types of suffering particularly. We talk about suffering as a result of our own sin, suffering as a result of the sins of others, and suffering as a result of living in a fallen world. We talk about the examples of those things in Scripture, and the fact that God comes near to us in all of those things, which is just beautiful. Regardless of the reason that we’re suffering, he is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. And so it’s really beautiful and fun to get to talk about it in that way. Then we talk a little bit about why we suffer, and that that has to do with those three concepts. We do ask the hard question of, If we say that God is a good God, why does bad stuff even happen on the earth? Why couldn’t he just snap his fingers and make everything okay? So again, we’re dealing with very deep conversations about the fall and redemption and what it looks like to be in a broken world. We also cover the question, Is there a difference between Christians and non-Christians? Do Christians get a pass, in some way, because we belong to the Lord? Is he going to keep us from experiencing suffering? And then we talk about punishment. Is suffering a form of punishment from God? And that’s a tough concept, because if you’re not a believer, the answer is different than if you are. And how are we experiencing that? It’s tough. And then what does God do? What is his role in the midst of my suffering? What does the Bible say that he’s doing and who he is? So a lot of his character qualities of his nearness and his steadfast love and that sort of thing. And then how should we respond as believers to suffering? Because there is a sense in which if you read James 1, you’re thinking, Oh, I’m supposed to rejoice. Well, what does that mean? Does it mean I’m glad that I suffer? We go into what it means to recognize the hope that’s in front of us, just as Jesus did when he endured the cross? And then there is a very real sense, and I had this real sense as I was thinking about it because I’m all about multiplication, so I want to teach kids how to help somebody else who’s suffering, how to multiply the good gift of bearing one another’s burdens, doing 2 Corinthians 1. I’ve been comforted, and now I turn to comfort others. When I was talking with those that were helping me formulate the questions, I said I really want to include in here information for kids about what it would look like for me to come alongside someone else who’s having a hard time. And that really became a really fun part of the theme of it, because what I’m really doing is teaching kids how to do ministry—to each other and their families. And why not? They’re capable of experiencing suffering, so they’re also capable of experiencing the goodness of loving others in their suffering. So those are some of the concepts of what we do. And then even the endurance component is another thing of if my suffering keeps going, or if I pray for God to stop my suffering and he doesn’t, what does that mean? What should I be thinking and believing When those things happen? So there are a lot of things that went into it.

Matt Tully
That last one, the idea of praying for suffering to end and then God not answering that prayer in the way that we might wish he would, I think it’s so easy for us to set up kids to kind of think, Well, then that means things are going to change quickly. But that’s just not the way prayer works. It’s not the way life often works. That’s something that can be kinda hard to navigate. If you think about all those questions that you were trying to address, were any of those questions in particular really hard to do? Do you feel like any of them you just really wrestled with because of what you were trying to communicate?

Beth Broom
I will say the most common question is the one you’d think would be the easiest because I’m so used to answering it, but it’s also because it’s such a difficult question—Where is the goodness of God in the midst of our suffering? How do we keep our eyes fixed on who he is? The reason it’s a hard question is because what we don’t want to do is to minimize somebody’s pain by saying, Oh, God is good. This is not a trite, quick-fix answer. There’s something deep happening when we say God is good in our suffering. What is that deep thing, and how do you communicate it in 300 words? It was not easy. And I’m not sure I did it. I don’t even know if I did it, but I tried.

Matt Tully
The real test of whether or not you understand something, whatever material it is you’re trying to teach, is if you can teach it to young people, to kids. And so I do think there is something uniquely challenging about addressing what is already a challenging topic, but for young people in particular, that’s just a hard task.

Beth Broom
But it was a huge blessing for me as well. Anytime you have to wrestle again with these concepts, just in trying to write them down and coming up with illustrations or stories to go with them and matching them up with specific passages of Scripture, it’s just a really good, deep, faith-growing activity to do.

Matt Tully
You did a really wonderful job doing that, and I think it will be such a resource to families. Maybe a few other practical questions for parents as they think about leading their children in the midst of difficult trials or suffering of some kind. As a counselor, I’m sure you’ve seen the wide variety of reactions that people can have to suffering. How would you help parents to think about being prepared for the different ways that maybe even within their own family different kids could respond to some kind of difficult event that they’re dealing with?

Beth Broom
I would love to answer that question. Before I answer that question, I just want to call something what it is. Usually, when our children are suffering, we are automatically also suffering. Even if their suffering is something outside of our family sphere, there’s a connection there. As a counselor, I do not experience the same thing that the parents of that child experience, because I’m disconnected from the experience itself. Let’s say, for example, a grandfather passes away suddenly and it’s tragic, that’s my family too, if I’m mom. I think back to your other question about why is it so hard for us to—I think there’s some of that too, right? I’m feeling things too, a lot of things, but I’m also supposed to steward and care for this child who’s feeling a lot of things. So I think avoidance is actually the coping skill of the century, of the millennium, of the whole world, because avoidance is a way for us to sense that I don’t have to actually engage. When I don’t know how, it’s kind of like an out for me, to just avoid. If I’m also hurting, then it’s difficult for me to engage with my kid who’s hurting, because he’s going to say something that’s going to prick my heart even further. That’s just hard. So let’s just call it what it is. But I will say that in terms of parents engaging with their kids, I think what we recognize is because everybody deals differently with suffering—and by the way, one person will deal many ways with suffering over time in different situations. Right. I’m going to have angry moments. I’m going to have sad moments. I’m going to have denial moments. I’m going to have yelling, screaming moments maybe. And everybody will go through those things. So to recognize that our main goal as parents when our children are suffering is to lean in and go slow. I am not in a hurry. Jesus was never in a hurry. We never watched him hurry anywhere. In fact, his disciples would get really frustrated with him sometimes because he would not hurry up and get to the destination he was supposed to be at because he is ministering to someone. So it’s this idea that wherever our kid is in that moment is where they are, especially with suffering where there’s grief. It’s just grievous. So when grief is involved, there’s not a formula for making it better. You’re not going to come up with a solution in that moment. That’s not the goal. The goal is to connect. And honestly, when we connect with our children, we’re actually modeling what it looks like to have a connected God. And we need to say that. We need to say, This thing that we’re doing right now, God wants to be. He’s in this conversation with us. He wants to talk to us. He wants us to talk to him. And so that idea of connection is hugely important. And again, it’s painful and hard when it’s your kid. Again, all you want to do is just wrap them up and keep the world from hurting them. And at the same time, there’s such a teachable moment there. And it’s not a teaching of words often. It’s mostly a teaching of experience that I’m showing my kid I’m not going anywhere. I’m here. I’m with you. I love the analogy of Psalm 121 that says the Lord is our shade at our right hand. So that means you come up underneath that tree, and even though the sun is beating down, you know you’ve got somebody right there that’s bigger that’s got it. And we get to model that as parents. And then we get to point to the fact that we actually don’t have control, but somebody does. And we can point to him. So I think it’s that sense of we can slow down, take a deep breath, lean in, and then keep leaning in. That’s the other thing. When you say, Hey, do you want to talk about this? and then they say, Nope, then we think that’s their eternal answer for that. It’s not. So it’s this idea that we need to keep opening those doors with our kids over and over. I know I asked you and I know I’m being annoying. It’s fine. I asked you last week and I asked you a couple days ago how you were doing, but I really care, and I just want to give another opportunity if you want to talk. And I’ve even had families where the kid was like, I’m not going to share my feelings with you. I’m not going to tell you what I feel. And I encouraged them to buy one of those charts that you put on the refrigerator. It’s like an emoji chart with feelings. And the kid can just select which feeling it is today, and that way the parent at least has a clue of what it is, and then they can engage slowly but surely and just kindly. Oh, I saw that you said you were angry today. I get angry, too, sometimes. It makes sense. I’d love to hear about it, if you’re willing. You’re just keeping that door open, you’re just swinging it open as often as you can. And I can’t think of any better technique, if you want to say it that way, for a parent to utilize whenever there is suffering happening with their children.

26:40 - Balancing Hope and Honesty

Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful answer. I think so often as parents we are sometimes looking for technique. We’re looking for a silver bullet that’s just going to kind of fix the situation, and it’s just rarely like that. We have to be settled in for the long haul. I also thought it was really insightful to comment about how oftentimes when our kids are suffering, we are also suffering with the same thing. And that just raises the issue of how do we as parents navigate those situations where we ourselves are in the midst of profound suffering and grief? How do we model both faith in the Lord and a confidence in God and his goodness and his sovereignty, but also honesty in our own pain and our own struggle, and do it in a way that’s actually going to be helpful for the kid and not putting our own suffering on our child?

Beth Broom
Well, I will say that if we hope and pray and even expect that our children will connect with us and come to us and talk to us in their struggle in order to to have care but also equipping and some training in what to do, we need to get that ourselves. We are never above the need for somebody to link arms with us in our suffering. That may not look like formal counseling. It may look like a dear friend who’s a wise believer, or a pastor. There will be moments where I do not have the capacity, because of my own suffering, to lean in in this exact moment with my kid. I need it. I need to be able to do that. But I might not have it in this moment. And I recognize that I’m human and I can, I can say, Mom’s having a rough day. We use the word overstimulated in my house. Mom’s overstimulated. Because it’s not a sin to be overstimulated. I’m just overstimulated. I’ve got a lot going on in my body and my emotions in my mind. I want to talk, and we’re going to get to it. Let’s get our own help. Let’s get our own encouragement and exhortation in spheres where we’re able to receive and then we’re able to pour out to our kids. And what you said about putting it on our children, I do think, obviously, we have to be really careful that when we’re honest with our kids about our own suffering because we’re trying to connect with them, we don’t want to be overbearing. Counselors are trained in this. If you’re going to talk about yourself, you do it in a way that’s helpful to the client. Don’t ever just spend time talking about yourself. It’s the same with our kids. I do want to say, I experienced that too as a kid. I’m not going to tell them a long story about it. It’s a point of connection. What we’re doing is normalizing and validating what their experience is without saying, Let me explain to you how I’m feeling, or what I’ve experienced, or what’s hard for me. And depending on their age, of course, the older they get, there may be more disclosure about what we’re experiencing. But as little ones, they may then start to think they need to take care of us, which is not their job, or that they need to make sure they’re really good so mommy feels better. That’s risky. It’s not helpful for kids because they need to just be kids. So in whatever way we can receive our own exhortation, encouragement, equipping so that we are not putting things onto our kids, that’s really, really important.

Matt Tully
It strikes me that your early comments about how the foundation for this kind of equipping and this preparing ourselves for enduring these kinds of suffering is ultimately a theological understanding of who God is and who we are, as well as the state of the world but also the hope for the future that we have in and through Christ. So as parents, we need to be reminding ourselves of those stabilizing, foundational truths as well.

Beth Broom
If I may draw just a little bit from a psychologist that I do respect. I don’t think he’s a believer, but he works a lot with parents and working with children who are suffering. His name’s Dan Siegel, and he says that we always try to connect before we correct. And I love that. It’s just simple. When I say correct, I mean Let’s give you some correct theological truths during this suffering. This is what makes it seem so trite, because there’s not been any connection. So if you have a connection, there’s more of an open door to be able to say, I’d love to share with you what the Bible says is true about the hope that’s coming. We're holding both things at the same time. We’re suffering, but we also pay attention to what’s coming. That helps us keep going. So, we’re not saying, Your suffering’s no big deal! Just think about heaven! That’s not helpful. But to connect with what the child is experiencing and then connect that to theological truth is going to have a lot deeper, more lasting effect in a positive direction for our kids.

31:31 - Practical Encouragement

Matt Tully
Beth, maybe a couple final questions for you. I’m thinking of the parents who might be listening right now whose family is in the midst of some kind of really profound and deep season of suffering. They just feel overwhelmed or they just feel unequipped to help their children. What’s one simple first step that they could take today to begin to be more proactive and more intentional with helping their kids through their own questions about suffering?

Beth Broom
What I think I want to say first about that is as parents, we do sort of have to give ourselves the space to be human. We’re going to trip over ourselves in this conversation. We’re not going to have this Superman mentality of, I’ve got to get this right. I’ve got to learn all the things so that I can say all the things correctly. We don’t have to worry about that. What we can do is, again, give opportunity after opportunity for conversations to happen. And I think of it as dinner table conversations. We’re together anyway, we might not be reading this book together—that’s okay. But even to be able to say something like, Sometimes I wonder what God is doing in the midst of this trial we’re facing. Sometimes I’m wondering about that. Does anybody else wonder about that? And you’re just generating conversation, and you’re giving the opportunity for honest talk. It’s an opportunity for a kid or a teenager to say, Yeah, I don’t even know if God’s listening. I don’t know if he cares. And so to just be able to validate. That’s really hard. When we’re suffering, all we can see is what’s in front of us and it’s really painful. So it’s hard for us to see what God’s doing, especially because he is invisible. It’d be so great if he was like right here with us at the dinner table. But here’s the thing. He is. It just doesn’t look the same as us with each other. And so to even just to be able to give the understanding of God’s presence. And we have to be present in order to talk about God’s presence. So if we’re present and we’re able to say, God is present. It may not feel like it, but we believe that he is. We see it in his word, and we’ve also watched him come through over and over again. He’s faithful, and let’s pray for that. Let’s pray our hearts will believe that more, because it’s hard to believe. So it’s that kind of stuff that just allows for continued conversation. And we’re going to trip over ourselves. We might say it wrong—whatever wrong is. But we definitely are just trying to have those connection moments with our kids.

Matt Tully
That certainly is a truism for all of parenting. We’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to get it wrong sometimes. But God is good. He’s bigger than our mistakes, and he can use even those—even our parenting missteps—ultimately for good in our kids’ lives. Beth, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk with us and to help us as parents to think perhaps a little bit more intentionally about how it is that we’re helping our children and even just not even our own children, but children that we love and care about around us, maybe in our church or at our school, whatever context it might be, to think more about how to help them as they encounter suffering in the world. We appreciate it.

Beth Broom
Absolutely. My pleasure.

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