Not Alone: Trusting God to Help You Raise Godly Kids in a Spiritually Mismatched Home (3 page)

I think my mismatched chronicle began in earnest a few years after I married my husband, Mike, at the end of a long tour in the badlands of the prodigal nation. The story of the prodigal son in Luke 15:11-32 remains one of my most beloved stories from God’s Word and one to which I easily relate.

I was raised in a Christian home. Thinking back to my growing-up years, though, I believe that my childhood faith was more a relationship with church than with Jesus. In my early 20s and lacking a firm faith foundation, I ran far away from my Sunday School background. I abandoned my faith, choosing to live a life in which the only god that existed was me. I made many wrong turns during my prodigal wanderings. I divorced, thus becoming a single mom raising my then-eight-year-old son alone. Not long after my divorce, I met my second husband at a bar in Las Vegas. Yep, what a great way to start a relationship. So if you’ve made a few mistakes—ahem, I mean blunders—in your life, I “get” you. And if you haven’t, please be patient with me, because God likes to work with all of us— short, blonde, prodigal girls like me as well as those kids who never wander from the farm.

Three years into my second marriage, the Jesus of my youth began to woo me back to Himself. I heard His call. My heart soared, and I went running home to the outstretched arms of Christ. I share a lot more about my early years of marriage in our book
Winning Him Without Words.
But suffice it to say, when I first came back to Christ, my husband was not very happy about the new Man in my life.

To be fair to him, my husband had also become an instant father to my son when we married. And the year that I stepped into this journey of living unequally yoked, I also became pregnant with our daughter. Whew! Talk about a lot for both of us to navigate. And, my friends, it’s a good thing that Jesus showed up, because I needed to lean on Him. And lean on Him I did.

I have parented a child through divorce and through shared custody. I’ve faced terrifying times in which my son was outside my influence, protection and control. I have parented my daughter with a daddy who was a proclaimed atheist. I have fixed boo-boos, wiped snotty noses, prayed with fervor for my children’s faith, cried heavy tears, giggled with glee, and kicked a soccer ball and played Barbies more times than I can remember. I have caught my breath as each of my children have walked out the door with car keys in hand to drive to school for the first time, they not knowing that they took every piece of my heart with them as they drove away. Mostly I have loved two little people more than I thought was humanly possible.

The privilege of becoming a mother is absolutely the best gift God has ever given me. I’ve gained understanding of what God desires for all of us: a childlike faith. Through mothering I experienced the joys of discovery as my children grew, as they forged their own stubborn or carefree personalities. My heart soared when each of them were baptized. And I turned red faced and hid under the pew at church when my son, age five, blurted out in front of the entire church after the Christmas pageant, “There’s fire on my butt.”

Ahem.

The church exploded in uncontained hysterics. And to this day I still don’t know why he said what he said.

Ah … the mysteries and hilarity of raising children.

It’s always exciting. Your heart is always engaged. You will never stop caring, loving and praying. These special and purposeful relationships with our children are God’s intentional design. And it is good.

The joy of mothering fills my heart every day. I’m humbled that God found me worthy to parent two children into adulthood. And yet I have agonized over my own confidence and asked myself, “Am I doing this parenting thing right?” And now, as the youngest of my children finishes her senior year in high school, I ponder the scariest question of all: Will she choose Jesus? Has my husband’s unbelief influenced her to abandon her faith as an adult? Will she walk the prodigal path? Or will she embrace her childhood faith and make it her own?

Those questions are yet to be answered, but one thing I know for certain: God loves my two kids with a passion and a purpose that I can’t begin to fathom. He has a plan to prosper them and not to harm them, plans to give them hope and a future. And He has the same plans for us as mothers.

God has always been a faithful parent to my children. He protected them when I couldn’t. He loved them when they needed it most. He laughed with them in the sun and kissed the tears from their cheeks when they were sad. He was an ever-present help, comfort and advisor. He was and always has been Abba Father to my children. And with God leading our home through an imperfect mother and in spite of an unbelieving dad, my kids are going to be just fine. How do I know? Because they rest in the powerful hands of an all-loving God. I will do my part, and I know without a doubt that God will do His. I can’t wait to see what He has planned for my two (grown-up) babies.

I bear witness to the strength and love that God has for mothers. The Lord displays miracles in and through my children and even, dare I say, through my imperfect parenting efforts. If He will do this in my ordinary life, He will do the same for you. Thank you for joining Dineen and me for the journey we are about to share together. I pray that you are encouraged to the depths of your soul and that you experience every gift of mothering that God has stored up for you.

My friends, I don’t think our parenting story ever ends. I know I still worry and pray over my son, who is now married. He and his wife are expecting my first grandchild. So it starts all over again. But this time I will get more sleep! *grin.* I will always be a mother, and I am forever thankful that God believes I am worthy of this highest and holy calling.

So are you.

Please write to me and let me know all that the Lord is doing in your life and in the lives of your children.

I love you, my friend. I really love you.

Lynn Donovan

[email protected]

Dineen’s Story

As I write this, I imagine you, my dear friend, sitting across from me at a coffee shop with our mugs and our hearts on the table between us. I want to tell you my story in a way that will encourage and uplift you, a fellow mom and dear sister in Jesus. I may have not met you (yet), but I love you dearly already!

Not being raised in a Christian home left many gaps in my life that, at times, have felt like setbacks as I traveled the road of motherhood. Although I dare say that in some ways it’s also been an advantage, in the sense that I had only God to look to for the direction and meaning of my faith and for help as a parent. Often I felt as if I was playing catch-up as I tried to raise my kids to know Jesus. Literally as I learned and grew in my faith, they did too. That was the adventurous part. But I confess, if I could go back, knowing what I know now, there are areas in which I would have done more or would have done things differently. Probably all of us can say the same about something in our lives, but I know that God does not want us to live with regret, always looking back.

As Paul wrote to the Philippians, “Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:13-14). I can’t change the past (don’t you wish sometimes that life had an undo button?), but each day is an opportunity to do things better than we did the day before—a huge revelation for a recovering perfectionist who would like to have learned this sooner!

God’s grace and love are lavish!

I will never profess to be a perfect parent, but God has proven to me that
He
is and He is more faithful than I ever imagined. I promise you, dear reader, that I will share with you openly and authentically in the pages of this book alongside the promise that God is able to do the impossible and He more than makes up for our shortfall. Rest in that promise right now, and let its truth sink deep into your precious, mother’s heart.

When people ask me to share my salvation story, I confess that I groan inwardly. I can’t actually give an exact, specific moment in time at which I gave my heart to Jesus. I think that’s because I continually gave it to Him from the age of four on, not out of piety but out of my great need of God’s continuous presence and protection. In many ways I see myself in my youngest daughter, who seemed to have been born knowing God. I’m sure many of you reading this are nodding in agreement, either because you were this way or you have a child like this. Kids like this just get it and are often referred to as having an “old soul.”

I don’t know that I truly “got it,” but I do know that I seemed to understand what Romans 8:28 meant before I ever read a Bible: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

Somehow I knew that something good came out of everything bad. It just did. Now as an adult I understand that it is part of the gift of faith, which God gave to me at a very early age. Abba is ever so gentle and kind with me.

As I shared in my story in our first book,
Winning Him Without Words
, I was baptized at age four. I still remember the feel of the water on my head and the reverence I felt when I turned the parchment pages of my new Bible, even though I couldn’t read a word.

I grew up an only child—a latchkey kid. I had to learn independence quickly, and I learned it well. I was raised by a single mom who loved me fiercely, and although life was less than ideal most of the time, she never let me forget that I was loved. I did have contact with my birth father growing up, but that interaction was complicated for many reasons, including what I would later find out was his mental illness. Thus I didn’t have a real father figure in my life until age eleven, when my mother remarried the man I grew up calling Dad.

Even as a teenager I was driven and determined to make my life exactly what I wanted it to be. God let me walk this path for quite a while. In my teen years I dabbled with the occult, because I was hungry for the supernatural and somehow knew there was more to this life than what could be seen. However, I had no one to tell me God was more powerful than this darkness, so fear easily took root in my life.

So much of how I mothered my girls came from my examination of my childhood. You see, I had a mother who had broken familial strongholds and abuses from her childhood in her determination to keep from bringing these very issues into her daughter’s life. Though she’ll tell you she only did what she had to do, she is one of my greatest inspirations. She had set the pattern, and I wanted to continue improving the generations of our family.

I share all this to tell you why I walked into motherhood with that inspiration and with the
expectation
that raising my children with their dad in the picture would provide the elements that had been lacking in my childhood and translate into a much more peaceful and easy childhood for my girls. But what I didn’t expect were the travails of a spiritually mismatched home, teenage depression and a cancer diagnosis for one of my daughters, and our family dynamics having to change radically to accommodate special needs. This was the most trying time of our lives, but my daughters and I felt God draw closer to us than we ever had before.

You will find out the rest of that outcome in the first chapter, as life inevitably proves our human predictions wrong. Please know that I don’t share about my difficulties to garner sympathy or pity but ultimately to show how God enters in, takes what we have to offer Him, even in our tough times, and multiplies it to meet our needs and the needs of our children. As Jesus used five loaves and two fish to feed five thousand men and many women and children, God does the same thing in our lives as mothers.

Simply said, God has our backs (see Isa. 58:8).

I say with a laugh that I’ve yet to meet a mother who has said, “I did a good job.” We moms continually think that we fall far short of the mark, and we blame every failure in our parenting on our own lack, even when our children have reached the age of accountability. I will share with you some wise words that a dear woman said to me when my daughters were young: “You can do everything right, and in the end, your children will still make some bad choices.”

God has given us free will, and He gives this same freedom to our children as well. We are called to do the best we can to raise our children to know the truth. God’s truth. Then the time will come when they will have to choose whether or not they will adopt your faith and make it their own. This is said not to discourage you but to assure you that God is in control and we can trust Him. He loves your children more than you do and has a greater investment in their lives than you do. He did create them, after all.

As I write this, my daughters have just turned 19 and 23, their birthdays one week apart in the month of December. My oldest daughter just married a young man whose integrity and heart for God is greater than what I had prayed or even hoped for in my daughter’s future husband.

My youngest daughter is catching up emotionally from her trials with depression and cancer, and the years she lost to depression and illness are slowly being restored. God’s promises sit before her in abundance, and I pray daily for her to fully embrace them much earlier in life than her mother did.

Most importantly, I will tell you three lessons that I have found to be most valuable in life and motherhood. One, life is a journey to be enjoyed, not just endured. Every moment, every hour, every day gives us new opportunities to do things just a little better than we did the moment before. We will make mistakes, but it’s what we do with those mistakes that count most in the long run.

And second, any given moment in time is simply that—a moment. It does not define our entire future—for us or for our children. So when the valley seems dark under the shadow of death, remember that what you are experiencing is just a shadow and that the sun will soon break through the darkness to lead you out of the valley and up the mountain to view God’s glory. Then and only then will we gain perspective with a God’s-eye view.