The Hardest Conversation May Be the One that Matters Most

Moreover, he said to me, “Son of man, all my words that I shall speak to you receive in your heart, and hear with your ears. And go to the exiles, to your people, and speak to them and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God,’ whether they hear or refuse to hear.” (Ezek. 3:10–11)

I was ten when I stood beside my dad’s recliner and told him he was in a coma. That was the first hard conversation that changed my life.

Dad was a wall of inattention in my childhood. As a volunteer fire chief with a day job, if he wasn’t working, he was fighting fires. He wasn’t home often, but when he was, it was usually after a stop by the local bar to decompress. Our lives were messy back then.

I was desperate to reach him. Like every child does, I craved a full relationship with my father. I longed for his attention, but by ten, apparently, I’d realized it wasn’t going to happen soon. So, I navigated the problem in a way that worked for me and then gathered my nerve to inform him. Since I was only encouraged to speak during commercials, I’d rehearsed saying what I had to say quickly.

“Dad, from now on, I’m going to treat you like you’re in a coma. I believe the dad I need is in there somewhere and can hear me. Even if you can’t show me that you love me, I know you do. So, I’m just going to talk to you when I feel like it. You can respond whenever you’re ready. One day you’ll decide to come out of your coma. This way, when you do, we’ll have already been having these kinds of chats. Okay, well, that’s all. I love you.”

He didn’t even acknowledge I’d spoken. Not then. But one day, when I was in my late twenties, my dad did, in fact, “wake up” to the relationships in his immediate circle. For the later decades of his life we’ve been very close. Our family has had the joy of knowing him as a changed man, through the power of prayer and the grace of Jesus.

It took a lot for me, as a child, to speak those words. They had no visible effect on him, but they freed me. In a powerful way, his inability to carry on his end of the conversation no longer held me hostage. It’s a freedom I believe more of us can experience.

The awesome beauty and terrifying truth of hard conversations is that even if the outcome isn’t what we had hoped, they still have the power to set at least one of the participants free. And our job isn’t to change someone. Our job is to speak “whether they hear or refuse to hear.”

We should always aim for true dialogue. Plan for mutual breakthrough. Plant our faith firmly on Jesus’s ability to redeem any situation, relationship, or individual. But when the other person chooses to remain on the other side of the wall, we can still experience release. Hard conversations free us either to work toward resolution or to walk away without regret.

When I was still too young to appreciate the dynamic of it, God led me into a conversation with Dad that freed me in a way I wouldn’t understand for many years. He didn’t change, so I changed. More than that, I named the problem, created boundaries I could live within, and informed him of my choice to write a different story than we were currently living.

Yes, I was a child, but I was a child who knew Jesus, and that made all the difference.

Hard conversations challenge everyone. We avoid them to our detriment or abuse them to our harm. Most of us resist bringing up uncomfortable topics, and all of us squirm when others initiate such conversations with us.

We encounter hard conversations with family, within the church, and with people who don’t follow Jesus. They pop up everywhere, and most days, we feel ill-equipped to navigate sensitive subjects the way we truly wish we could. What if we could address those challenges and find ways to have more real conversations about hard things? We can.

Hard conversations are hard because they matter. We can let their difficulty deter us or determine us. But Christians do hard things every day, by the power of Jesus Christ. Why should navigating meaningful conversations be any different, especially when we know they can be vehicles for freedom? If a ten-year-old girl can find courage in Christ to speak truth to a disaffected father, we can all take heart that Jesus provides what we need to tackle the tough topics in our lives.

Lori Stanley Roeleveld is an author, speaker, and disturber of hobbits who enjoys making comfortable Christians late for dinner. She’s authored four encouraging, unsettling books. Her latest release is The Art of Hard Conversations: Biblical Tools for the Tough Talks that Matter. She speaks her mind at loriroeleveld.com.

Photograph © Charles Deluvio, used with permission