Yesterday Today Tomorrow

Voiceover: Yesterday, connecting past. Today, with an outer view. Tomorrow, to understand future. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow is the program that covers the current contemporary social issues in the light of our history, to understand our yesterday, to live fully today and tomorrow. Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow with Inseong Kim.

Inseong J Kim: Hello, this is Inseong Kim from Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, and we have a very special guest. We are going to share the burden of parents today. Thank you so much for coming to our program, Debbie McNinch.

Debbie McNinch: Yes, thank you so much for having me. I look forward to talking to you today.

Inseong J Kim: Hope for parents on the front lines of prodigal parenting. I have children with millennials, so I don't know how much different and difficult it is to raise Gen Z and younger generations. Thank you so much for sharing what is happening with us.

Debbie McNinch: Thank you for opening up this dialogue. It's a subject that not a lot of people are talking about and there are just so many hurting parents that are suffering alone.

My story started probably like a lot of your listeners. We had three children. They all grew up. We didn't have any problems. They were all adults out doing their own thing. I thought that we had already done our job, that we were these rockstar parents that had already raised kids. I was just sitting on this make-believe Malibu Barbie dream house front porch that I created. I was just watching the waves and the ocean in my mind waiting for the next step, which I thought was going to be grandkids and trips around the world, big Christmas dinners, and things like that.

What I didn't know was there was a tsunami out in the ocean getting ready to come in and knock my house off its foundation. Nothing that I had planned on, none of my dreams, none of my hopes—those were all gone in a flash.

About eight years ago is when this happened, when this tsunami came in. It came in the form of a phone call when one of my children called and said, "Mom, I'm transgender." At the time, I didn't really know what that meant. Honestly, it was still kind of at the beginning of the movement we see today, but I did know that my world was about to change and that the hopes and the dreams that I had for my family had just vanished in an instant.

What I was left with that day when I hung up the phone was I had to decide: Is my house built on the rock of Jesus Christ or is it on shifting sand? I had to trust right then and there that God was God and that somehow He was going to make a way, and that nothing was too hard for Him. I had to find a way out of my pain. That was the beginning of my journey of writing a book called *Battle Cry* and starting a website for moms and dads of prodigal children to just pray and believe together that their kids are coming home.

Inseong J Kim: Please share with us about the website first and then about your book.

Debbie McNinch: At the very beginning of my journey, I promised myself a couple of things. If I could ever find a way off the bathroom floor where I spent a lot of time crying out to God and wondering how anything good could come out of this, I promised myself that I would never forget that God was a God of miracles and nothing was too hard for Him.

I promised myself that I would tell my story every chance I got, even if I cried the whole time or even if it was hard to talk about it. I was going to tell it so other parents would know that they're not alone. Then I promised myself I would start a support group for other moms like me that had dreams and hopes and had raised their children in the Lord, and now our kids have decided to go a different direction.

That's where Battle Cry was founded and started. You can find me at battlecrymoms.com or battlecrydads.com. What it is is you go to the website and there's five questions that you answer to get in. It's a little bit about telling your story, and then I approve you. When you get in, it's the most beautiful, hope-filled space.

We have over 1600 moms that join us and it grows every single day. We have moms in our group that have LGBTQ kids. We have moms that have children addicted to drugs and alcohol. We have moms that have estrangement issues, that don't talk to their children anymore. We have moms that have children that simply don't believe. We have all kinds of different scenarios, but I promise you that whatever you're going through with your family right now, there's another mom going through the exact same thing. That's where Battle Cry Moms comes in. It's a place of hope and connection and joy as we praise the Lord, we worship Him, and we look to Him to bring our kids home.

Inseong J Kim: We are living in a very strange time. That's why my program is Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, to figure out why this phenomenon is happening suddenly. Like you described, it's like a tsunami of cultural problems. Meantime, we don't know what's going on and we're in the maze, and we are suffering with this issue like this.

There are so many parents. Thank you so much for stepping out and having the courage to share your story and also encouraging the parents to go through a similar issue.

Debbie McNinch: I am so thankful. I've said from the beginning that I wish that I was not walking through this. I wish our story was different, but I'm so thankful that God has allowed this to happen and has chosen us to steward this story because our story's not over. We're stuck in the middle moments right now, and the middle moments are hard. There's a lot of pain and there's a lot of uncertainty. I have to remember that God knows the end from the beginning. He knows that there's going to be a day that all of our children are going to wake up and they're going to come back to the Lord, back to His will, back to serving Him. Anytime we're stuck in these middle parts it seems like all is lost, but right now I just believe with all that is in me that Satan's days are numbered. He's not getting our children and they are all coming home.

Inseong J Kim: Absolutely. This is my personal journey that I want to share with you. I grew up completely in a Christian family, hardcore strong Presbyterian church. My father was a pastor, but I experienced abortion. Totally I did not understand what even happened to me for 25 years of subconscious oppression, and then God brought it to the light. Now I'm sharing the hope and encouragement with those people. We don't know God's story until the end. There is hope that God is at work and God is good. I hope that your ministry has some purpose and calling as well.

Debbie McNinch: Amen. I have learned as I've been on this journey that this is a story about me. I thought at the beginning this was something about my child, but he has his own story to tell. God is worried about me and where my heart is and where my faith is. He is using all of these things. I know the Lord better today than I did eight years ago because there are just parts of His personality and parts of Him that I didn't know existed because I didn't need those at the time, but now I see Him so much differently and I know Him so much deeper than I ever would have known Him had we not been walking through this.

Inseong J Kim: Also not only understanding our story, but we can understand other people's stories as well. God walked us through to see what's going on with other families and what is going on in our culture, what is going on globally. That's God leading us to see that as well, I think.

Debbie McNinch: Definitely. I think sometimes we get caught up in our own family and our own stories and we just have one speed, full speed ahead just doing the things that we want to do and we forget to look around. I know before this happened to me, I probably was guilty of on a Sunday morning not looking around me, wondering if there were hurting parents sitting beside me. Now God has just illuminated that in my heart, that there's so many hurting people out there and that everybody has a story of some kind. We all need to do better about reaching out and talking to people, finding out and talking to them, not in a gossipy way, but in a way that just shows that I care about you and I care about your story. We've got to do better about reaching out and communicating and connecting with people again.

Inseong J Kim: When we do that, we have to be very sensitive about people around us and how they have individual journeys and different journeys. Without the understanding of the cultural context and globally, we can only focus on just one side and live in guilt or shame, or focus on too much of the problems. I think it helped us to come out and see what is going on globally. So we don't particularly condemn our children, because they're in such a vulnerable place right now through social media. We are in the cultural war, so I think understanding where they're coming from and believing them, praying for them, and never giving up our hope—I think that is a so powerful strength that God is giving us. Right?

Debbie McNinch: Absolutely. We've got to learn how to learn to love our kids right where they're at. That's part of my story of just figuring out where that line is. How can I still love my child and support him as a person? He's still my child and I would do anything, I would die for my children, but at the same time standing firm on the Word of God and where my rock and my foundation is and never fraying from what I believe.

I don't think we do a great job in the church of teaching parents how to walk that line and what it looks like to love. That's one thing about talking about Battle Cry, is talking about what I'm going through. I want to help parents to say and look at them and their stories and say, "You know what? I love my family. I love my child. I love the Lord more. But we're going to learn how to walk this path we're on, never fraying from our foundation, but never stop loving and believing that God is a God of miracles and that He is going to bring our children home."

Inseong J Kim: Absolutely. Because we're created in the image of God, something in us will guide us and tell us something is off. It's matter of God's timing taking us out of there to see ourselves and how much we were deceived or how much we are into this cultural lie that our children are in. So they will find a way and there are already people who have already stepped out and shared their story as well.

Debbie McNinch: 100 percent I agree. We've got to do better in our churches and in our faith communities about talking about hard things and sharing with people because I know at the beginning of my journey, I had to figure out there was two doors, I like to say, that the churches I was noticing and I was learning about.

There was door number one over here that said these children are sinning, they're going to hell, we need to turn them out, not talk to them. Then there was this door over here that said, "Oh no, we affirm everything. Come on in, God loves everybody." I found myself kind of between these two doors going, "I don't think I believe really either one."

If we fully believe that this is a sin and these kids are going to hell, how come I'm not seeing prayer movements at our churches? How come I'm not seeing altar calls that parents are on their faces before the Lord praying? How come pastors aren't praying over the parents of prodigal children every single Sunday and believing with them that their kids are coming home? No, we just like to condemn them to hell and then forget they exist.

But over here, if we say, "Come on in, God loves everything," what are we saying about Jesus? Why did He come and die if we're not willing to call out sin? I found myself knowing that there was just no way that I could hate my child enough to get into heaven. I couldn't do it. I couldn't hate him enough to get him there, but at the same time I refuse to love him straight to hell. So we have to learn to love our children in the truth.

Inseong J Kim: We are in a different time, definitely different time because we cannot stereotype all the ancient way of this we call it prodigal child. It's a little different with this where the transhumanism is promoted and also this global agenda, the technocracy, all those are included in this story. The way we look at it is absolutely unconditional love of God that we pour out to our children to save them from the dark culture.

Debbie McNinch: Yes, absolutely. One of the things that I think about and I still think about it all the time is if your mom is not going to tell you the truth, who will? It's like when we sign up to be a Christian. I always joke about the Christian card. When we sign the card, we think that our life is somehow going to be these unicorns and rainbows, that it's all going to be glorious and glittery and sparkly and wonderful.

We don't talk about the hard things. We like to talk about Jeremiah 29:11 and that our children have this hope and a future, but we don't like to talk about the 70 years of captivity in there that Israel had to go through when Jeremiah was talking about that verse. We're going to go through some hard times, but we don't prepare for that. We don't ever think it's going to happen to our family. It's like a slot machine where we put the quarters in. "Oh, I went to church," I put a quarter in. "Oh, we prayed before we ate," we put a quarter in. "Oh, we went to Christian school or Christian college," I put all these quarters in, but then when it was time to pull the lever, somehow the jackpot did not come up.

That leads me to question: Is God still good? Is He mad at me? Does He hate me because my child has walked away? These are the types of things that we're not talking about that parents are thinking and fearing and laying in bed at night awake wondering about. So it's so important that we start having these conversations.

Just like you said, the culture is changing. How do we adapt to the culture that we're in but not become the culture? It's like when the Lord said to be in the world not of the world. How do we start living out those verses? How do we start proclaiming our faith when a whole community, when a whole world is looking at us telling us that we are wrong, that this is okay? Here we are this small minority standing up and saying, "No, our identity is in Christ. Our identity is in Him and that is it. Nothing else, nothing else, nothing else."

We have to do better about learning how to walk this out in real life. I feel like sometimes we are living right now in the end times. That doesn't matter if that's today or that's 100 years from now, but we are closer to Jesus coming back today than we have ever been before. We're going to go through whatever we're going through today that is hard. Get ready because what's coming tomorrow is going to be even worse. So we have to battle up and get ready and fight Satan and his demons and tell them that he's not getting our children. He's not getting them.

Inseong J Kim: Absolutely. So what would you say to parents who is listening right now and who wants to give up their hope? What would you say?

Debbie McNinch: I would say first, I understand. I completely understand. But I want you to just take a minute and close your eyes if you're listening right now and you think, "Gosh, that's me, she's talking about me. I don't know the hope. I don't know if I have it anymore." Just remember that God is the God of miracles, that nothing is too hard for Him and that the Bible is full of stories.

Sometimes we read some of these crazy stories in the Bible and we think, "Why did God put that in there?" but He knew someday somebody was going to need to read those stories and that they were going to identify with what they were going through. So open up the Word of God, open up the stories. I knew at the beginning of my journey that I had to go deep to scripture. That was where my hope was found. It wasn't found in listening to a lot of podcasts and going to talking to people; it was found in the Word of God. So open your Bible right now.

Let the light come in. It says in Revelation we will overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. Start talking about what you're going through. Let the light in. Anytime there's darkness, anytime there's hurt and wondering what is going to happen, Satan has tried to come in and steal your joy from you. But you just tell him that your joy is in the Lord. Anytime the light of Christ starts shining on a situation, the dark starts fleeing. He will flee. The more light and the more word that you bring to your situation, start declaring the word every single day over your family, over your circumstances, and I promise you that your life will change. You will start taking your eyes off of your problem and start putting them on God and His power.

Inseong J Kim: Absolutely. I think praying over Psalm 91, it encourages ourselves and also praying for children with the Psalm 91 helps a lot too in my personal experience. I think it is very important for us to first of all be educated, of what is happening in the culturally and globally. That way we don't condemn our own children, and that is the worst thing can happen to the children when parents are still believe them, love them unconditionally. I think that is the hope for the young generations to navigate throughout.

I believe that throughout the Bible there are moms or women beginning to kneel their knees and start praying for our children and children of others, and culturally pray. We don't have to wait for church to do it, but I think we all in the quiet room start praying. I think that is the beginning of our battle plan. What do you think about that?

Debbie McNinch: Amen. That's where it starts. At the beginning of my journey, the Lord told me I was going to need a battle plan to get going on this because I couldn't just wake up and pray a Sunday school prayer every day. "Oh Lord, fix my family, bring my kid home." I knew that I was going to need weapons of warfare and I was going to need a plan to get going. Definitely pick a verse. Pick a verse that's part of the battle plan that the Lord gave me. Pick a verse, pick one verse to pray over your family and write it everywhere you go. Start declaring it everywhere you go. I promise you that the Lord is going to work in ways that you cannot imagine.

Inseong J Kim: Absolutely. I think we are undermining the power of God through the scripture and we might enter the spiritual realm, that it's a spiritual war through reciting our scripture and prayer that we can see what God can do.

Debbie McNinch: Yes, absolutely. His Word never fails. When you don't have words to pray, pray His Word. Pray His Word back to Him. You can never go wrong by praying the Word.

Inseong J Kim: It is a very powerful testimony that you shared with us. Often when things happen like that we're in the victim mentality, that we stay there, but you are stepping out, have a courage and not just for your story but to try to help other family. I think God for that. I really appreciate where you're at. We're in the different time so we need very different kinds of ministry.

Debbie McNinch: Yes, absolutely. I never would have guessed if you would have told me even 10 years ago that I would be talking about this. It was not on my radar and I would have never guessed that this would be what the Lord would have me talk about. You know, we don't know what our tomorrow brings, but we know the One that holds tomorrow.

When we say yes to the Lord, we always pray, "Here I am Lord, send me," but we usually pray "send me to the shiny things, to the sparkly things, to the ministries of people that everybody loves." Don't send me to the pit. Don't send me to the hard things. I never knew that somebody I loved would be someone the church hates. I had to reconcile how to get past that, the hurt of knowing how much that the church hates someone like my child, but I was going to love them still. God's working, just keep our eyes on Him.

Inseong J Kim: That's right. Thank you so much for your courage and we'll pray together of this new battle that we're as a parents have experiencing. Thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you so much for being with us and listening to our program, and *Battle Cry*, Miss Deborah McNinch sharing with us. Go to her website and be encouraged and share this message. Thank you for listening Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. We'll be back next week. Thank you.

Voiceover: You've been listening to Yesterday Today and Tomorrow with Inseong Kim. You can also find more from Inseong Kim at inseongkim.org. That's i-n-s-e-o-n-g-k-i-m.o-r-g. Thank you for listening to the show.