Kate Gilgan admitted that she was battling alcoholism. Her memory was so foggy and denial so deep that she had forgotten the day she lost custody of her six-year-old son. The court deemed her unfit to parent, and she would need to earn her parental rights back. She endured numerous supervised visits with her son, and started living a sober life. But as she admitted, she tried too hard to parent. She overfunctioned, and her son resisted. Six years later, her son told her that he didn’t love her anymore. So Kate made a decision.
Kate wrote, “I stopped thinking that love was something I had to prove with court documents. I stopped chasing every possible way to make him see that I had changed. I started focusing on actually changing.”[1]
Kate’s journey mirrors another conversation Jesus had in John 5. Jesus asks a question that seems almost unnecessary but proves deeply revealing: “Do you want to be well?”
[1] Kate Gilgan, NY Times, “Earning Her Son’s Trust,” 11/23/2025.
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