When Your Adult Kids are Going Off the Rails: Mary DeMuth

God the Father has billions of prodigals and has had through the ages, if you add them all up, He knows the heartache of it. He knows how to walk alongside a parent of a prodigal. He is good, and He knows about my own rebellion against Him.

Therefore, He is the best empathetic Savior who can come alongside those of us who are suffering in that. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Shelby Abbott, and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com or on the Family Life app.

This is Family Life Today. So we were doing a workshop on the Love Like You Made It cruise a few years back. And by the way, you can go.

I know it doesn't happen until February, but go to familylife.com, sign up. It's an amazing cruise. So do you know which one I'm talking about? The workshop with Bob. This workshop with Bob was unique because it was a workshop that we were going to do for parents of adult children. And we thought, will anybody show up? You know, it's a marriage cruise. There'll be a few people.

It was completely packed. And then after we shared some thoughts, we said, there's a mic. Walk up, ask us questions. We've got Bob Lapine, the expert of the world. I was a little petrified at this point because I'm wondering, can we even answer these questions? Well, the thing that was, I guess it shouldn't have been shocking, was the pain in the room.

Every question. It was excruciating, the struggle that many Christian parents had with children that are living lives much different than they dreamed of. And it's surprising too, because you think with young kids, like, this is so hard.

It's just going to get better and better. But even for us, I think adult children, I had no idea how- Because our kids are perfect. No, it's so hard because a parent doesn't have control at this point. So it's hard to know how to navigate those relationships.

Yeah. So we're going to navigate those relationships today with Mary DeMuth is in the studio with us. Welcome to Family Life Today. So great to be here. Thanks for having me. Your book, Love, Pray, Listen, Parenting Your Wayward Adult Kids with Joy.

I like that ending part. Yeah, with joy. Mary, tell our listeners a little bit about what you do besides writing books. I do a lot of different things. I wear a lot of hats. When you write books, you realize you can't make a living as an author.

People don't understand that, do they? No, they think I'm super rich. So I am a podcaster. I have a podcast called Pray Every Day where I read the Bible and then I pray according to the Bibles five minutes long.

So that's kind of a big chunk. And then I'm a literary agent. I am an artist, a visual artist. And then I write books in my spare time, I guess. I've been married for almost 33 years.

I've got three adult kids and we live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Do you have like a favorite book that you've written? Probably my memoir.

It's called Thin Places. It was a Zondervan book back in, I think, 08 or 09. And that just lays out my story of where I came from and what the Lord has done in my life. And, you know, as a literary agent, I know it's very hard to sell memoir. It's a miracle that it ever sold. And so I'm grateful that it's out there, continues to sell. Well, let's hear a little bit of the memoir.

Yeah, let's start there. What's your story? My story is, it's interesting. It actually ties into this book because I grew up in a highly problematic home and a lot of, I wouldn't say abuse, mostly neglect. My mom and dad were married, then divorced. My mom married several more times. My biological father died when I was 10 years old, but he was one of my predators. He was grooming me for all sorts of terrible things.

And there was drugs in the home, completely unsafe, constantly, only child, very lonely. Just, I don't know how I survived it. And even as I have triggers as an adult, and even though I've done all my work and I've healed so much, I still have scars from that time in my life.

But there's been a lion's share of healing. And when I made it to junior high, which is not our most favorite time of life, I've never met anyone that's like, well, my junior high days were awesome. They were not. And I was suicidal. And I didn't know anything about Jesus.

I thought he was a swear word. I didn't know he had anything to do with Christmas or Easter. I literally was an unchurched girl.

I was like a negative 10 on the evangelism scale. I knew nothing. Really didn't know he was Christmas and Easter?

No, I didn't. I didn't know anything. I literally knew nothing, except that when I was probably about 10, right around when my dad took his life, my grandmother weirdly insisted that I get baptized. So I went to this church and they made me go, they said, in order to get baptized, I had to go to one day of Sunday school. And I just remember that they had these like bricks made out of cardboard and it was the walls of Jericho and you had to kick them over. Really?

Yeah. But I remember telling my mom and then they sprinkled me and my uncle came up to me and said, now you won't go to hell. And I thought, I don't know what hell is, but it sounds bad. And then I begged my mom, please, please, please let me go back to church. I just had this hunger for the Lord, even though I didn't know who he was. And so junior high happened, suicidal thoughts. I had a counselor in my junior high who saved my life and listened to my story. And I believe he was a Christian. And then in ninth grade, I began going to Young Life.

Let's just pause for a minute. I'm just thinking of this lonely little middle school girl. Did you feel that, that loneliness? Did you have any relationship with your mom or your stepdad? At that time in my life, this is why I was suicidal. So my mom was currently with someone else unbeknownst to her husband and so was never home. And he was working a swing shift so he would get home at like 10 at night.

So they would like beat each other home. But I was alone and we had a 10 acre farm. We had seven horses and I was feeding horses and cleaning stalls and that's where I learned how to cook. I'm a really good cook because I had to be. As this little girl?

Yeah, like 10, 12, 11, 13, all of that. And so, yes, very lonely. I remember just wanting one friend, you know, just wanting one friend and finally met this girl who had scoliosis. And so she had a back brace and no one was her friend. And so she became my friend.

We became really close friends. But it was just a horrible time. And I'm surprised that I made it through. There was drugs in the house, but I didn't know how to take them and there were no guns. So I couldn't take my life.

I didn't know how to. So then you meet this guy in, how old were you when you met, did you say? The counselor. He was like the school counselor. And he gave me this special hall pass that if I ever burst into tears because I was such a wreck, I was a straight A student.

He would let me leave the class and go and talk to him. And so he was just this great guy who just really helped me. And then that, I think, laid some groundwork for, you know, hearing about Young Life and attending it and just hearing about Jesus for the very first time.

I just didn't know. And I remember at the end of every session after the water balloons and, you know, the shaving cream and all that, they would have like a 15 minute talk about Jesus and my heart would just like, oh, I could feel it in my chest. Like, oh, this is the truth.

This is what I've been looking for my whole life. All I was was this little girl who wanted a daddy and having had three or four dads and most of them predatory was, you know, just difficult. That summer of my ninth grade year, I remember hearing one of the stories and the story was about Jesus calming the seas. And the question was asked, who is this that even the wind and the seas obey him? And that question just stayed with me all summer long. And that fall of my sophomore year, I went to a weekend camp where they just told you the whole gospel, dying on the cross, resurrecting.

And I remember going outside and this is in the Pacific Northwest, big, huge trees, right? I sit my back against this tree, big, huge hemlock sign of death and hearing about Jesus, death on a cross, on a tree, and the stars are up above me. And I just say this very simple prayer. Would you please be the daddy who will never leave me? And in that moment, I was completely healed and fine for the rest of my life. Wouldn't that be nice?

I would love that. That's not my story. But that was the beginning of a very long healing journey and the beginning of just falling in love with Jesus Christ and following him for the rest of my life.

And I'll never forget that moment. Miri, I had never heard the gospel either. And when I had put all the pieces together and I started reading my Bible, I had this like, how have I never heard of this? It felt like this is the most amazing good news. Did you feel that? Yes, because I was so lonely. And I didn't know there were times where I would look at the earth and I would look at my feet on the earth and I would think, why am I taking up this one square foot?

What's the point of all of this? And so when I finally understood that there was a point, it really helped. And a huge shout out to all ministries, to high school and college kids, because when I got to college, it was not a Christian college that I went to. But the lion's share of my healing happened in college because of people praying for me to the point that when my husband went to Dallas Seminary and we were so poor, could never afford counseling.

They would allow me to use some of their people who are in training to be counselors. So I sit down with this counselor and I tell her my story. And she said, well, how many years of therapy have you had?

I said, zero, none. And she thought I was lying. And it really took me back to that time in college when people prayed for me. And not to say I didn't need counseling, not to say I didn't need trauma therapy, not to say any of that, but that the power of prayer in that vulnerable period of college was everything to me. How important do you think it is, you know, as you've written this book, and again, all kinds of topics that you've written on over the years. But this is about raising children and even the struggle with prodigals. How important do you think it is for us as parents, even a single parent, process our pain and our trauma if we're going to parent the next generation?

It's everything. And I often thought about that before I had kids because I was this pioneer parent. I had no fallback.

I had no example. And my parenting strategy was get on my knees and cry and pray a lot. That's all I could do because I just didn't know I needed Jesus. But the other thing I realized is that my kids, they needed a healed mommy.

And the best gift I could give my husband and my kids was a healed person. And so that really like compelled me almost like in a frenetic activity of I have to get better because I cannot duplicate what happened to me. That was horrible. And I don't want any kid to feel that way. A little story about that is I didn't ever voice it. But internally, I felt like I worried that my kids knew that I loved them because I had that aching place inside of me. And so one day we were living in East Texas at the time and a friend came and visited us and she was just kind of attuned to the Holy Spirit. And at the end of the time, she said, I just need to tell you something internally, just because I'm always like, something's wrong with me. I was like, oh, she's going to tell me about some sin I'm committing.

She says, no, I want you to look in my eyes. And she said, your children know that you love them. And I burst into tears because it was this unspoken prayer request that the Lord already knew about.

And then said through her mouth, I had worked so hard to get well, not to be perfect, but to be approachable by my kids or to know even how to love. I just didn't know. That's very similar to our past because we didn't grow up in Christian homes who had the gospel. We didn't even know it. And we both have pain and trauma in our backgrounds. And so we had no idea how to do this thing, especially bringing the gospel and hope and Jesus into it. Do we do it out of love?

Do we do it out of, you see so many ways of sharing the gospel and loving our kids, but we both felt an incredible sense of inadequacy in being able to parent. Yeah, but I also think what you just said, a lot of us don't understand because we're getting married, we go to the weekend to remember, which is Family Life Marriage Conference. I've been to it.

We were engaged two weeks before our wedding, and now we speak for it for 30 years. But we didn't know what it was. We were just told, go there.

You got to hear God's plan for marriage. But I'm not kidding. We literally sat there. Here we are. I mean, if you put our lives on paper, anybody with a brain would go, you guys are going to struggle.

We couldn't see it. We're sitting there going, man, you know, I come from two alcoholic parents and divorce and abuse and death of my brother. I'm awesome.

She's awesome. We're going into ministry. I have sexual abuse, a very performance driven, never words of affirmation or love. But we thought we know Jesus now. He has redeemed us, but we still had a lot of healing to do, having no idea that would affect our marriage, our relationships and our parenting.

Which I think so many of us don't understand. Yes, he heals. Yes, he transforms.

It could happen in an incident and sometimes it does, but usually it's years. And our kids need us as parents. That's why I ask you that. They need us to do the work. If we don't, that pain that we had that hasn't been transformed, you know, that quote is going to be transferred to them. So as you work through that, now you've written a book on wayward children. How does that play into being a parent? A lot. And people in my age bracket are sad and they're brokenhearted because of the culture wars that are going on around our kids and the siren call of the world.

And it seems like it's winning. And I think a lot of us, especially those of us who maybe not had grown up in Christian homes, and we had been like, I've got to read all the parenting books. I've got to listen to family life today.

I've got to go on the weekend to remember. I've got to do all those things, which is great. And I'm not saying a criticism, but I think underneath all of those parenting books, even though it was not explicitly stated, it felt like it was saying, if you do these things on the other end of your parenting machine, you are guaranteed little happy Christ follower robots. And it was hard to get to that place of saying goodbye to my kids and just the empty nest thing was hard, but then to watch them, I like to say it more positively, to watch them work on their testimonies is excruciating.

And a little bit of anger toward like my evangelical culture of you kind of promised that this machine is going to work. And so there also comes this place in parenting of desperation and sadness. And if we at all have worth issues or we've tied our worth to our performance as parents and then our kids are going off and doing whatever, there comes a crisis to most parents of who am I now? If my kids aren't following the Lord, then is everything that I have done a failure? And many times we don't say I have failed. Yeah. We feel like I am a failure. Right.

You equate it to your worth instead of saying, I did something. And even so, let's go back to truth. Let's go back to the book of Genesis. We have a perfect environment. We have a perfect parent and his two kids rebelled. And so who are we to think that it may not happen to us because somehow we've done this parenting thing perfectly. Every human being has the DNA of sin. And so therefore it should not be a surprise if our kids walk down a path that breaks our heart.

I'm not saying that we should expect it. We should pray opposite of that. But it does take a bit of pressure off me as a parent to know that God the Father has billions of prodigals and has had through the ages. If you add them all up, he knows the heartache of it. He knows how to walk alongside a parent of a prodigal.

He is good. And he knows about my own rebellion against him. Therefore, he is the best empathetic savior who can come alongside those of us who are suffering in that. I mean, that's such a good reminder. Yeah.

I was trying to think of the word. It's such a comforting thought in a sort of scary way. Oh, good. God's perfect and his children rebelled.

I mean, I shouldn't be happy about that. But it is, like you said, perfect environment. We can do all the right things. It doesn't guarantee anything. Although, and I'd love to hear your comments on Proverbs, it says, Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

We hold onto that. Oh, as parents. Not as just a promise, but a guarantee. And then when they do or don't come back, we're like, and I think some parents walk away from the faith at that moment because the Bible's not true.

This isn't even true. I bought a lie. What do you say to that? I think that's the importance of reading the whole Bible and the whole counsel of Scripture. I wouldn't call that particular passage a promise, but an encouragement to do well as a parent. But I think, too, we as Americans, Westerners, we have a very small view of answered prayer. So it says when he is old, he will not depart from it. Well, I have a prayer that I've been praying for 40 years that was just answered last year, and it's beautiful to see that answer, and I didn't expect it.

I thought that it was for a person, and I thought they would just end up in eternity without Jesus. But the Lord was gracious. I think a lot of us are like, well, Lord, my 23-year-old is not walking with the Lord. But this could be the Lord training you to pray deeper, training you to walk a harder path, training you to find joy even when things don't go the way you want them to.

He may be answering your prayer. And the thing that I've seen is when I finally mourned it and when I grieved it, I finally had space to be able to see the small things that God was doing in my kids' lives, whereas before there was just this great big grief that I couldn't see the small things. And so I would encourage parents to work through your grief of it so that that kind of goes away.

And you can see the little breadcrumbs of what God is doing in your kids' lives. Well, that's what I want you to get into a little bit more, because as a parent, I don't know if dads are like this, but as a mom, I feel so deeply. And I worry about them. And dads feel deeply, too.

I know, I'm not saying, but I tend to, probably more than you, and I don't think that this could go either way, I'm up at night thinking about them or worrying about them. And then what happens is it can steal our joy. And it affects every area of our lives because we become consumed with how our kids are doing, which makes me think, like, is that an idol? And so as a mom, how did you learn how to separate that? How did you still find your joy?

Well, it was a journey, and it certainly didn't happen overnight, and there was a lot of tears in the midst of that. But the thing that I went back to is spiritual warfare. And I thought, if the enemy has a target on our kids, which he does, and he's somehow gotten some sort of foothold in there and some sort of victory, if I, too, am taken out of the equation because of my kids' decision, and he has won two victories, and for the life of me, I'm not going to let him have two. And I also believe that this time of our lives, we are more financially free. We have learned a lot of wisdom.

We're actually in our prime ministry years, and if the enemy can take us out, this is the way he's doing it, and we are going to forfeit fruitfulness and ministry. And so that's when I was like, forget it. No. Yes, am I sad about these decisions they're making? Yes.

Am I going to cry about it? Of course. But I am not going to allow it to sideline me from doing the work of loving people and discipling people. Oh, that's really good.

It's like you've almost put a stake in the sand. I will not bow to Satan's schemes. And your kids are going to make their decisions, but you're going to continue to seek Jesus to love him, to pursue him, and to pursue the call on your life. That's good.

My children's lifestyle, decisions, choices will not determine my happiness. Exactly. It's so hard, though. Jesus will. It's so hard. And I want to recognize the hardness of that. I don't want to just gloss over and be a Pollyanna and just say, it's no big deal.

Just love Jesus. It's hard. It's probably one of the greatest parental pains that I have ever experienced.

It's agony. So I want to let the listeners know that I hear you. I see you.

I understand. But there is joy on the other side. Ask the Lord to help you. He will help you get to that other side.

I'm Shelby Abbott, and you've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Mary DeMuth on Family Life Today. You know, we're going to hear more from Anne Wilson here in just a second with some hope. But, you know, we want to face the realities of life's difficulties. And like they said, that is incredibly painful when those difficulties are coming from our own children. But don't waste your pain. Acknowledge it. Yeah, sure. Bring it to Jesus. Yes, of course. Allow him in to cry and mourn with you, but know that God can always make good out of the areas you might see as irredeemable disasters.

There is hope. Mary has written a book called Love, Pray, Listen, Parenting Your Wayward Adult Kids with Joy. This book is going to answer some really tough questions that I think a lot of people are asking. Perhaps you are asking questions like, how do I avoid the temptation of meddling in my kids' lives?

Or what do I do when my kids make choices that don't align with my values? Those are good questions to ask, and Mary is going to answer them well in her book, Love, Pray, Listen. This book is going to be our gift to you when you partner with us financially here at Family Life. You can go online to familylifetoday.com or give us a call with your donation at 800-358-6329. Again, that number is 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. And feel free to drop us something in the mail.

Our address is Family Life, 100 Lakehart Drive, Orlando, Florida, 32832. And you know, books like Mary's can help us not only absorb daily truth from God's Word, but also train us on how to communicate that truth to others. Is there a chance that you, yeah, you, could lead a small group, growing healthier families and deeper knowledge of God in your own community?

I think there is. You know, we've stuffed Family Life's Art of Parenting small group study with key principles and practical advice on shaping your kid's character, relationships, and identity, issues every parent in your neighborhood or your church faces, because every one of us, if we're honest, is pretty much winging it. Well, we'll help you facilitate meaningful conversations about messy parenting and help you dig into God's Word through this video-based zero-prep study. Love to hear that. So you can have time for playing chauffeur or homework tutor this fall, right?

Grab 25% off for a limited time and preview it in today's show notes. OK, here's Anne with some hope for parents who are hurting because of our grown kids. I really love the practicality of you seeing the little things or the good things. And I think as a parent that takes discipline with our older kids because we can see the negative, or we can see the way they're going and be so discouraged by the path that they've maybe taken. One of the things one of my sons said to me, I had this habit of saying, I'm worried about you.

I'm worried about this area. And he finally said, when you say that to me, it makes me feel like you're assuming and thinking that I'm failing, which that just discourages me, and it makes me not want to tell you anything. And I realized, like, I've never thought about that. I felt like it was an act of love, like, I'm worried about you, hon.

How can I pray? And yet I like the idea of saying and seeing the things that they're doing well or right or that you love and say those things, encourage them. I think that's a really good step to take. Now, coming up tomorrow, Mary DeMuth is back with Dave and Anne Wilson to talk about how we can love people whose opinions differ from ours, including our kids. That's tomorrow. We hope you'll join us. On behalf of Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.