Parent Compass Radio

Ron: Depression is the number one malady in the world. I could just veer over and nobody would know the difference.

Deb: How do you do a marriage in a rage?

Guest (Female): I really love God. Probably the only thing that's kept me alive and sane.

Guest (Male): You're going to go crazy just like your mama. After what happened to us, why not?

Ron: Lord, I don't know what you're doing, but I'm going to praise you.

Guest (Female): Blended families are a mix of different people from different backgrounds coming together, trying to live under one roof or trying to have a family together. It's pretty cool, honestly. Nothing's perfect, obviously. There's maybe a bump in the road you can move past it and still know that that's your family at the end of the day.

Brother-in-law, step-dad, step-mom, sister-in-law. You can still move forward even though they're not blood-related to you. My immediate family is just me and my mom. So to add on to that and have a blended family is pretty cool in my opinion. Ron is outgoing as well, just like my mom. He's kind of like the male version of my mom in my opinion.

Ron: It's like he's a male version of me, maybe? And I'm like a female version of him. They complement each other well. Him and my mom are a really cute couple. He cares about our family, we care about him and his family. A nice blended family environment.

We dedicated our marriage to the Lord. Here we are, late in life, and we've been offered this incredible gift, an incredible marriage with a person who has the same goals. We just want him to be served through our marriage and our family. That is exactly what has happened. It has been utterly amazing.

Guest (Female): I graduated high school when I was 16, but I did the alternative school. I was modeling at the time as well. I went to New York Fashion Week and different things like that for modeling agencies. I was bullied a little bit throughout high school, so I just wanted to get out of school early.

I went from modeling to culinary school, which is kind of a contradiction. Right now, I work in finance. I'm just trying out everything right now, figuring out what to do next. Right now, I think God is definitely calling me to help people, first my family.

My journey with Christ started right off the bat with my mom raising her kids in the church. It's been awesome. I really love God and I love Jesus. I love reading my Bible and praying. Probably the only thing that's kept me alive and sane to this day was God. It's gotten more in-depth as I've gotten older as well. My perspective is more about what the Bible says and how that can help you with your life.

Deb: This is the kind of marriage we want. We want the stability of getting up in the morning and doing our devotional together and reading the Bible together and praying together.

Ron: When you're reading the word, you're listening to the unadulterated voice of God if you listen. This is the breath I breathe. This is the bread I eat to draw us together.

Deb: If you don't have a plan, you're not going to read it. And even if you do have a plan, you're probably going to have a million things that come against you in spiritual warfare to stop you from reading it.

Ron: And I write devotional books, so I'm not against devotional books. But they're just an appetizer. Go out onto the off-beat paths of Scripture and it's amazing the nuggets that you'll find.

Deb: That's when the Lord talks to us. The Holy Spirit is there when we're reading the Bible. That's why one of my favorite ways to read the Bible is verbally out loud.

Ron: If I don't read my Bible every few days, I get a little cranky. Wait a minute, why am I cranky? Oh, I need to read my Bible. Even with prayer, if I start getting a little agitated, I need to pray. It has a soul-soothing effect on me.

I've gone through prayer book after prayer book. I write down my children's names and I write down what they're going through and I ask the Lord to give them a better victory. Not the plan that Satan wants for their lives, but God's plan for their lives. That is where I get the strength that I need from the Lord, through prayer.

Prayer is absolutely what just plugs us into the power of the Holy Spirit. Prayer begins to open our eyes as to who we are in Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit whom we possess. And we go out that door each day knowing that greater is he who's in me than he who's in the world. Watch out hell. When we know who we are in Jesus, we know the weapons of our warfare.

Deb: One of the neatest things that Ron says to me that makes me love him more is when he says, "You know, I prayed for all of my children and all of your children. I prayed for all the children today." And I'm like, that's so sweet.

We pray spiritual protections over our families. We pray Psalm 91 protection over our families. We just keep that central focus for our blended family. A praying family is something to contend with. There's about 6,000 people on his Facebook that he's ministered to throughout the years.

He needed to introduce his wife. He put me on his Facebook page and we did a little sit-down talk to introduce Deborah. That was pretty neat. Let's put her on there again. But we really didn't know that there was going to be this on-air chemistry. Let's do a Sunday night show, Ron and Deb Unplugged, a show about something.

We take a lot of different topics, talk about them from a biblical standpoint, and always have a lot of fun doing the newlywed thing. And the children help us with the filming of our show. We'll have one of them doing the camera and one of them doing the song.

We discuss things that were important to us like sex in the single Christian or church hurt. How do you do a marriage in a rage? Or how do you do a blended family? We deal with a lot of issues that the church won't talk about.

Ron: God wants us to deal with them. I've made such grave mistakes that people just can't believe I've been that honest. "Oh my gosh, you shouldn't tell that stuff out there." He's like, "I made a lot of mistakes." I'm like, "I made more." And he's like, "It's not possible." I'm like, "Trust me."

But hey, I'm free. And Jesus set me free. And so we need to be honest. It's not going to freak God out. He already knows what you're going through. Man, we just got to get real. I think the world sees us acting like we've got it all together, and yet they see that we don't. It does not advance the Gospel when we put on this facade.

Deb: When I was living in Saint Mary's group home in Mobile, Alabama as a teenager, my cousin said, "You need to get in touch with your dad. You've got a dad out there." Only thing I know about my dad is he lives in Philadelphia. That's all I know.

She put an ad in a Philadelphia paper that said, "Alan Zezowitz's daughter is trying to get in touch with him. If you know him, please have him contact her." One of his friends responded to the ad and said, "Look, your daughter's trying to get in touch with you." Well, apparently he had been trying to get in touch with me too.

He came and visited me and then I started going to visit him. And we literally restored our relationship. It was such a blessing to me. That really was pivotal to him, that I wasn't still holding something against my father.

Ron: Because one of the first questions I'd ask her, "Did you feel unconditionally loved and accepted by your dad?" And no, she didn't, but she told me how she dealt with it, which is something that's just key.

When a girl does not grow up unconditionally loved and accepted by her dad, typically, unless it's dealt with before the Lord with some counseling, they'll go through guy after guy after guy trying to find that father's love. We can't love them like a daddy can.

Deb: My mom was tragically mentally ill and homeless. My relatives in California would see her. She knew where they lived and she would go to them for help. She would be so out of it mentally they couldn't help her. And because they didn't really believe in any kind of mental health issue, she was out. She was out on the street.

My grandmother told me and my brother, "You're going to go crazy just like your mama." And it wasn't quite that nice. We really believed that we would go crazy. We really believed that at any moment we could spontaneously erupt in crazy. After what happened to us, why not?

When I was going to college in Mobile, Alabama, my mother just suddenly appeared. She knocked on my door. "I'm here." I'm like, "You're here. Wow. Okay." And I still didn't know what to think about it, but she seemed innocuous enough. My mother came and lived with me.

Since I was a starving college student, there wasn't a lot of groceries in the house. She complained about that and I said, "Look, mom. I'll try to get more groceries in here, but it's kind of tight right now. I'm in college." So anyway, she just disappeared.

And then I hear she's in California somewhere. So she was homeless mindset, homeless person. About 30 years ago, she approached my brother and my uncle and said, "They're telling me I'm dying." She started going to Searcy Hospital again, the mental health place.

They would come and get her on the weekends. They would take her out to eat and she would spend the night at their house. They'd sit her on the front porch in the rocking chairs and they'd talk to her and be kind to her. God was so merciful to us for her last days to be spent with family.

Guest (Female): I think what may have happened with my mom's mom is she experienced horrific abuse from her mom. So whatever mental illness she was suffering from was brought on from a traumatic childhood in my opinion.

With me being raised in a single-parent household, it's ups and downs, but nothing super traumatic like what she went through. Being brought up in a different environment and being raised a different way, I'm not concerned about me experiencing anything like that because we were loved by our mom.

Deb: Depression is the number one malady for human beings in the world. But the Lord does have solutions. A lot of divorces are due to mental health issues. Even if your spouse dies, there's still a lot of emotional baggage that comes with that.

And your children are going to deal with it. Can that be dealt with? Yes, it can, but first it has to be addressed. It can be a demonic influence. It is a demonic influence, just like drugs and alcohol are demonic influences.

If someone has a mental health issue and then they have a dual diagnosis of addiction issue, then it all gets clouded and people don't know how it actually started. And how it actually started was a mental health issue. And where does that start? There's some sort of precipitating event like what I went through that causes a human being to be depressed, to give up hope, and to want to kill themselves.

Ron: I've had times of depression. Times I thought, man, I'm done. When I went through divorce, I remember driving from Oklahoma City down here thinking, you know, that third bridge abutment south of Norman, I could just veer over and nobody would know the difference.

Thank God I didn't. Now we don't have to have a life sentence because we have a mental health issue. There is support out there. Part of it is education. The more we become able to talk about mental health issues, the more we erase the stigma.

Christians did the first hospitals. Christians were the missionaries. Christians were the trendsetters. Christians need to be the trendsetters with this issue as well. The last time I was really bona fide depressed was about almost 16 years ago. I was up in Denver, Colorado helping my sister.

Somebody owed me money that they hadn't paid. When I had to bum five dollars from her for gasoline, I lost it. I lost it and just started going downhill. I was depressed and mad at God for two weeks. Finally then, and this has made such a difference since that time, just to mentally think I'd rather be in the camp of God rejoicing, praising God, not knowing what the sam hill God's up to, than outside the camp, bitter and angry saying, "Lord, what are you doing? I don't know what you're doing."

Lord, I don't know what you're doing, but I'm going to praise you. I'd rather be praising you, feeling the joy of you, than the anger and bitterness of depression. In those low times, understand that God sees you. He sees you in your deep, dark depression and negativity, and he's there.

Just like when Jesus was on the cross and he was in his deepest suffering, he was seen by his Father and he never left him. And he's always there for us too. We're not alone. I have Heavenly Father, Jesus, Holy Spirit here with me. I am not alone.

Deb: When a kid has lost a mom or a dad or even a sibling, it's really hard for a kid going through that. It's going to be hard for a little bit. It'll probably be hard for a while, but the pain will get easier going forward. Just always pray and read your Bible, have a good support system. God will bless you and help you take care of you going forward.

We have to lay our children down at the feet of Jesus from a very young age. Lord, this is your child now. Then they're on their own spiritual journey. But just because they're on their own spiritual journey doesn't mean they don't need you anymore.

Don't ever give up on your kids. Let them know that you love them no matter what happens to them. They need to be able to rely on you because they're not going to be able to rely on society. If your child has made mistakes, it is your job to forgive them. And it's their job to forgive you. That upside-down forgiveness of Christ is just so, so important.

Ron: If you've never really given your life to Jesus, there's no better time than today to just simply realize that what he paid for on the cross paid for your sin, all past, present, and future sin. The question is, are you going to receive that and make him the Lord of your life? Turn from your way of sin and self and say, "Lord, I want to follow you." Whatever you're going through, now's the time to just say, "Lord, come into my life. I receive what you did on the cross as payment full for my sin. I give you me."

Deb: Holy Spirit, as you just flow through this, I ask you to give them hope for the illness, for their mental illness, for their physical illness. And I say be healed in the name of Jesus. Whether it's a marriage problem, oh Lord Jesus, open their eyes that you are the answer. Those today that are just struggling. You are for them. You're not against them. And you love them like crazy.

Guest (Female): God is love, and love comes from God. In 1 John, the Bible tells us that God is not only all-loving but that he actually is love itself. The heart of the Parent Compass television show is to bring the transforming love of God to families everywhere.

In every Parent Compass episode, true stories reveal family struggles and how their lives were radically changed by the love of God. Parent Compass, an award-winning television series, is completely funded by people like you.

If you have been touched by God and you want to share God's love to others, would you please pass it on? Jesus tells us to go into all the world and to tell about him. With your donation, you allow us to take this television show into many different nations and in many different languages free of charge.

And a portion of your donation goes to Parent Compass outreach to feed starving children. Your gift does so much. To make your tax-deductible gift, go to parentcompass.tv/donate. That's parentcompass.tv/donate. And thank you for sending love and hope around the world.