Well, hi, everybody. Happy Monday to you. This is Heidi St. John. You have found me here at the intersection of faith and culture.

This is the Off the Bench podcast. It's mailbox Monday and you guys have sent in as usual a ton of wonderful great questions

and I'm going to spend the next 20 minutes or so answering them. Stick around. I think you're going to be encouraged.

Well, I hope you guys are doing good wherever you are. I want to say, I guess I want to start out the show today by just saying thank you to everybody who's listening, all those of you who are writing in to me at the show.

We get dozens of questions every week and it's just a joy to hear from you, to hear your feedback. A lot of your questions very thoughtful and it encourages me because what I see is a whole bunch of people wanting to dig into what's happening around them to be thoughtful and how they educate their children, thoughtful and how we receive medical care, all those kinds of things and your questions even that you that you send in for Dr. Mark are really phenomenal.

So thank you guys for doing that. If you'd like to have your question answered here at the show, the very best way to do that is to become a subscriber to the Heidi St. John podcast and you can do that by hopping on over to Spotify and clicking on the subscribe button.

That'll take you to a VIP listener section and also will give you VIP access here at the show to submit your questions.

So we hope you guys will do that becoming a subscriber to the show is just really another way to help keep this show moving and keep it on the air five days a week.

We really appreciate those of you who are subscribing to the Heidi St. John podcast.

Alright, I'm going to just tackle your questions one at a time today and during happy hour, I'm going to tackle more of them.

So we'll spend 20 minutes or so today going through your questions and then I'll come back and I'll tackle some more for happy hour.

The first one comes from an anonymous listener in Maryland. This one actually broke my heart. She said Heidi and elementary aged child in our neighborhood is transitioning.

The child and his siblings come to our house and they ask my children to play. What should we do? We have told our children our beliefs on this, but this is still a child.

So as I said before anonymous this issue is absolutely heartbreaking. I don't understand why the church has largely remained silent on it.

This is the gender mutilation of children. It's child abuse. You're in a ref spot anonymous because we are talking about a child, but I want to remind you that your first priority is not to this child that is transitioning.

It is to your own children and we are called to protect our children. And so if your mother instinct is telling you that you need to protect your children from the influence of this young child who is being lied to you and is transitioning.

The reality is the Bible teaches us that bad company corrupts good character. Our children are very unwise. They come to us as literally a blank slate. The government schools are writing on our children and we are seeing the devastating results of that right now in the skyrocketing number of rapid onset gender dysphoria patients that clinics are seeing around the United States.

The explosion of gender ideology in our schools has led to an explosion of clinics really for transitioning all around the country. And I'm telling you what you guys it is evil. It is evil from sun up to sun down. And so if it was my child, if it was if it was my neighbor who was coming over to play with my children, I would probably be limiting that contact.

It wouldn't be a jerk, but there are lots of ways that you can say, oh, you know, it's sweetheart, we can't play today. And I would just keep doing that.

You know, be nice to this child. You can, you know, forget to say, I'm just telling you right now because I've seen this with my own two eyes and I've heard stories from parents around the country that this ideology is like a virus. And once it infects a child, it's very hard to unseat it.

And so that would be my counsel to you. Your first responsibility is to your own children to protect their hearts and their minds. And then pray for this child, pray for his parents. That is a tragedy that shouldn't be happening.

And unfortunately, I think we're going to be dealing with a fallout from this kind of ideology now for years and years to come.

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