A Parable Reimagined Through Parenthood
Candice Bithell's essay in Wayfare Magazine takes one of the shortest parables in the New Testament -- the lost coin from Luke 15 -- and places it under extraordinary personal pressure. What emerges is not a theological argument but an account of a mother reckoning with her own assumptions about her child, her faith, and the distance between doctrinal certainty and lived compassion.
The essay's central move is reframing who is lost in the parable. Bithell recalls hearing a line that dismantled decades of her thinking about the story:
"It wasn't the coin's fault that it was lost. It was just lost."
This reframe matters because it strips away blame entirely. The coin did not choose to fall. The coin did not sin. The coin simply ended up somewhere the woman could not see it. For Bithell, this insight arrived years before she needed it most, but it laid the groundwork for how she would eventually respond when her fourteen-year-old came out as transgender during a car ride.
The Car Ride and the Question That Follows
The pivotal scene is rendered with a parent's unvarnished honesty. Bithell describes her teenager fidgeting, pulling at a ripped black hoodie, then saying the words that would restructure their family's life. Her child's follow-up question cuts to the bone:
"Does it matter, Mom?"
The question is not really about gender. It is about whether a parent's love has conditions. Bithell's answer -- "My love is so much bigger than that" -- is the right one, but the essay is honest enough not to pretend it was easy or immediate. She admits she waited too long before responding, worried about saying the wrong thing. That hesitation, and her willingness to name it, gives the piece its credibility.
Control as the Opposite of Searching
One of the essay's sharpest observations concerns Bithell's initial instinct to manage the situation through enforcement: demanding church attendance, making new rules, constructing walls. She recognizes this approach as the opposite of what the parable prescribes:
"I couldn't force my child into being found by me. The confusion I felt and the walls I was constructing only made us feel further apart."
This is a meaningful distinction. The woman in the parable does not demand that the coin reveal itself. She does not build barriers to keep it from rolling further away. She lights a candle, gets on her knees, and sweeps the floor. The work belongs entirely to the seeker, not to the lost thing. Bithell's therapist essentially prescribed the parable's method in secular terms: thirty days of deliberate, unconditional love expressed through every available channel. Cooking favorite meals. Leaving treats with notes. Listening without offering opinions. Attending community events. Shopping for boys' clothing together.
The therapeutic prescription and the ancient parable converge on the same insight: proximity and attention, not correction, are what close the distance between people who have lost sight of each other.
Where the Pharisees Enter
Bithell makes a contextual point about the parable's original audience that deserves attention. Jesus told the lost coin story to Pharisees who were uncomfortable with his habit of eating with sinners and tax collectors. The parable was a rebuke of boundary-drawing, a challenge to those who used religious law to justify distance from people they found distasteful.
"Those whom the Pharisees viewed with contempt are the same people Jesus tells his followers to spend their time actively reaching out to."
The parallel to contemporary religious communities and their treatment of transgender individuals is left largely implicit, which is to the essay's credit. Bithell does not build a polemic. She simply places her own experience alongside the scriptural text and lets the reader draw the connection. Her son felt "alone and rejected by a community that treats transgender people as outcasts." The Pharisees rejected the marginalized of their era. The parable's answer, in both cases, is movement toward the person, not enforcement of the boundary.
A Counterpoint Worth Considering
There is a tension in the essay that goes largely unexamined. Bithell reads the lost coin parable as a call to unconditional acceptance, but the parable's traditional interpretation within Latter-day Saint theology -- and much of Christianity -- frames the "lost" condition as something to be remedied. The coin is found and returned to its place among the other nine. The sheep is brought back to the flock. The prodigal son comes home. In the original framework, being found means returning to the fold, not the fold reshaping itself around wherever the coin landed.
Bithell's reading inverts this. In her version, the mother does not bring the child back to an unchanged community. She changes herself, advocates publicly, marches in the streets, and accepts her son's identity as it is. This is a radical rereading, and some theologians would argue it stretches the parable beyond its intended meaning. Others would counter that the parable's deepest message -- that the lost have inherent worth and deserve active pursuit -- is precisely what Bithell enacts. The disagreement itself reveals how much interpretive weight a single biblical verse can bear.
The Glow March as Culmination
The essay's emotional peak arrives at a transgender rights march in Salt Lake City. Bithell and her son crest a hill to find thousands of people carrying lights, waving flags, and standing in support. She whispers to her son:
"The next time you feel all alone, I want you to remember this moment and these people."
The image of handing out glow sticks at a march resonates with the candle in the parable. The woman lights a candle to search for what she has lost. The marchers carry lights to declare that the people society has pushed to the margins are not lost at all -- they are present, visible, and surrounded by community. Bithell's encounter with a teenage girl whose own mother had not accepted her adds a painful counterweight: not every story of parental love and gender identity ends with reconciliation.
The parable ends with the woman calling her friends and neighbors to celebrate. The march, with its thousands of lights and spontaneous embraces, becomes Bithell's version of that celebration.
Bottom Line
Bithell's essay succeeds because it does not treat scripture as settled or simple. She takes a parable that occupies a single verse in Luke and shows how its meaning deepened over thirty years of her life, culminating in the most difficult challenge she faced as a parent. The writing is vulnerable without being sentimental, and the theological reading is creative without being reckless. Where the essay is most powerful is in its insistence that love is an action verb -- that the woman in the parable does not simply feel compassion for the lost coin but gets on her knees, lights a candle, and sweeps every corner of her house. Bithell did the same, and her willingness to document the mess, the fear, and the slow transformation makes this a piece that lingers well after reading.