Recently, I read an article by a person who had just undergone a gender transition, stepping into the fullness of the woman they had always thought they (to use this person preferred pronoun) were.  They were very happy with their decision.  No regrets.

     Except for the reaction of their father.  Their father could not adjust to the prospect of no longer having a male heir.  He could not imagine life without a son.  Though he loved them, he nonetheless experienced a profound grief.


          Unless we have been in this person or their father's shoes, we cannot easily begin to relate.  Be it theology, politics, or culture, all of these tend to falter and crumble when faced with the vicissitudes of human longing.  It often has no earthly categories.
     Maybe that's the point.  Although I cannot fully divine the mind of God, I can say that, regardless of what a person does with his or her life, God continues to love him/her.  He does not easily let go of those who are made in his image, those who are, in a very distant yet very real way, like him.
     That's the wonder, yes, but it is also the challenge, the challenge of being a finite person in an infinitely designed world.
     Our humanness is often beyond our knowing, yet it is, in a world in which natural and supernatural intersect constantly, the lens through which God, in a signal point in time, has made himself definitively known.