160 From Shame to Strength: A Single Mom’s Journey to Healing and Hope

Episode Transcript

Season 7, Episode 160: From Shame to Strength: A Single Mom’s Journey to Healing and Hope

Guest: Jennifer Maggio
Air Date: March 24, 2025

Jennifer: So I had been a single mom for about ten years, and so I had convinced myself that no good Christian man would ever want me. With my ready-made family and all the baggage of my past and the complications of my relationship with the children’s father, that what good Christian man would actually want to have to deal with all of that. And Satan was a master manipulator who did a good job of convincing me that I was not worthy of moving into a healthy marriage.
Ron: Welcome to the FamilyLife Blended podcast. I’m Ron Deal. We help blended families, and those who love them, pursue the relationships that matter most. And why do we do that? Well, because we think there’s great joy in loving God and loving others, and it makes the world a better place.
We are just two weeks away from our next Blended and Blessed® livestream, Saturday, April 5th, 2025. And since it’s online, it is not too late for you to register. You can attend the live event in Franklin, Tennessee; or you can attend the virtual event from anywhere in the world, and you might just host a group of couples in your home so you can watch it together. Your church can host a lot of couples, and you can experience it together.
This year we’re going to be focusing on key themes from Nan and my newest book The Mindful Marriage. We want to try to help you discover how to overcome reactivity in your marriage and in your family. It sure gets in the way of love and trust, so we want to help you with that. The book is out and we’re going to try to help you in 2025. “Out with the Old and In with the New;” that’s the theme of this year’s Blended and Blessed.
By the way, if you’re not familiar with it, it’s a very affordable event. We have donors who come alongside and make it possible for us to offer that at a very low rate. It’s very easy for you to access and we would love for you to get involved so check the show notes for a link to some more information.
We heard from a listener on Apple Podcasts who said “The FamilyLife Blended podcast is a ‘must listen’ for single parents and future blended families.”
She goes on and says, “I went through a divorce five years ago. When I started dating my now fiancé, I thought I had a pretty good idea of how stepfamilies worked because I had grown up in two different households after my parents divorced. Not the case,” she says, “Every child, every parent and every relationship is different. This podcast highlights that, which can be daunting, but it also draws out principles, biblical concepts, and practical wisdom for all different kinds of unique stepfamily relationships.”
Well, I just want to thank that listener for her review. And by the way, if you’ve never given us a rating or a review, please do that. That helps other people find us and learn what you’re learning. That comment highlights the topic that we have today. Blended families start with single parents. I’ve long said that single parent ministry and blended family ministry are close cousins. I mean close cousins. So today’s guest is going to help us with that.
She majors in single parent ministry and herself has walked the journey from being a single parent to being part of a blended family. Jennifer Maggio is an award-winning author and speaker. At age 19, Jennifer was raising two children while living in government housing on food stamps and welfare. She ultimately became 11 times Circle of Excellence winner in corporate America; then left corporate America to launch a global initiative to single moms. You can learn more about the life of a single mom in that ministry. Just look in the show notes for a link. Jennifer, thank you so very much for joining me today.
Jennifer: Hey, so glad to be with you.
Ron: I got to start with this. I want to thank you for stepping into hard places. Single parent ministry is a thankless job. There’s no money in it, there’s no glamor in it, as you already know, and yet you have made a dent in the world, and I really appreciate that. Thank you.
Jennifer: That’s my great honor.
Ron: As of today, the life of a single mom has thousands of single moms around the country connected into small groups. You’re putting on live events. You have thousands of moms going through your online program called Single Mom University, and how cool is that for a name: Single Mom University. I’m pretty sure that all of this was inspired by the challenges you faced when you were a single mom. I’m not sure I’m right about that, but I’d love to hear the story. Is that how you got started?
Jennifer: Yeah, like so many other nonprofits, founders really see a need based on our own life experiences. I can remember being a young single mom and not having a lot of resources, and so it just kind of morphed over time. I don’t know that I set out to be a national ministry. I think I set out to start a small single mom’s Bible study in my church and it just kind of grew. We now have over 2000 single mom support groups, and we crested over a million single mothers served at the end of 2023. And so it’s been really exciting to see what has been a hard place in years past, morph into something that can be a blessing to others.
Ron: I don’t think you know this, but our journeys sort of parallel one another. I don’t live in a blended family, but my journey started doing single parent ministry and stepfamily ministry as a part of a much larger marriage and family ministry that I oversaw. What I found my heart drawn to was the single parent stuff and the stepfamily stuff, and I didn’t set out to build anything. I just was doing it in a small location, region of the country, and it just sort of grew on its own.
And that I think is how you know the Lord is in something, right, when it goes far beyond what you ever dreamed of or thought about or envisioned. And it just seems to keep going. I know it’s kingdom work that you’re involved in, and I just want to repeat that. I mean, single parent ministry is hard.
When I first started doing just local ministry with single parents, 31, 32 years ago, I looked out and tried to find anybody who was doing stepfamily stuff and single parent ministry, and I found a few people, found a couple of organizations. They have all died off. They’ve all gone away. It’s hard to sustain it over time. You know how important it’s to have donors, people who come alongside you, people who are passionate about the cause, otherwise it just sort of fizzles. Yeah, I’m just wondering, does that meet your experience as well?
Jennifer: Oh yes, certainly. The ministry is very messy, the sustainability component. I’ve been doing single moms ministry now for 21 years, and you’re always looking for creative ways, strategic ways to meet the needs of those you serve and really raise awareness with donors about why the needs are so important to be met. And so yeah, it is that.
And then let’s not even get into the component of just the weariness and we know the Bible says, “Do not grow weary in the doing of good,” but continuing to have a rhythm where you can sustain, where you have a healthy rhythm of rest and sabbatical. And frankly, recognizing that you are not the Holy Spirit and you’re not trying to fix anybody, I think has been part of the journey of learning for me.
Ron: I just want to connect the relevance to this conversation to our viewer, our listener right now, and then I want to continue with your story. I said earlier, so many blended families started with a single parent somewhere, one or both of you was and when you met and came together and became a family. And so I often find, Jennifer, that people in blended families who get married, and they’ve moved on, and they sort of sometimes forget how hard it was when they were in their single parent years. I don’t know what it is. It’s sort of like they’re glad they’re not in that space anymore and so they’re sort of moving away from that.
I just want to call people to remember so that they can look out for the single parents in their church, in their community, in their neighborhood, so that they can maybe try to encourage their church leadership to be on the watch and look out for other single parents who may be struggling and having difficulty with co-parenting issues or custody stuff, court stuff, financial stuff. It’s all one big ball of wax there. And so I just want to remind people of that.
Jennifer: Yeah, I think you’re bringing up a valid point. There’s nothing wrong with celebrating a new season obviously. We celebrate that the Lord has brought us a spouse and that we’re in a new season of life, but one of the things that I find to be so important is that the experiences the Lord has brought us through are the very things He uses for us to be able to serve others. And so I mentioned we had over 2000 single moms’ ministries. Almost all of those ministries are led by a current or former single mom. So many folks have moved into a marriage, but they see the need and they step in at their church to launch that group.
And I would say just even as kind of an asterisk there, how many listeners are out there today, who had you had an effective single moms ministry or single parents ministry in your church, how much more prepared would you have been to move into your marriage if you had maybe dealt with some of the things that became issues later? And so that’s one of the other things with our single moms’ ministries is we really focus on making sure that moms are marriage ready; that they are dealing with trauma and past abuse and things that maybe would hinder a new season of life.
Ron: Yeah. Well, I know dating in the single parent one of my books was kind of helpful for some in your ministry. That’s how I got connected to you guys, so I know that you want to help people get ready. I love the way you said that: marriage ready. Whether you’re dating the single parent, you are the single parent, whatever the story is, yes, that’s really important. That’s why I said your ministry and ours are cousins, like, one leads into the other. And I love that vision you have of now blended family, formerly single moms who are feeding back into the single moms in their local community. I love that.
You were in poverty at one season of your life, if I understand the story right. Tell us a little bit about how hard that season was for you as a single mom. I’m wondering how many single moms you guys are experiencing that that’s their life?
Jennifer: Yeah. Well, I would say that my poverty experience really started long before I became a single mom. I was really raised in poverty and so raised with my dad was a single dad. My mother was killed when I was very young. And so my dad was a single dad for a season and didn’t know how to really process all of the pain that my mother’s death left. And so he married six times. So I am well versed in the blended family because we blended over and over and over again.
And then also the poverty component. New marriages often resulted in relocations to a new community, new job changes. And so we were probably always below the poverty line. Of course, as a child you don’t necessarily recognize that, but as an adult looking back, and so when I became a young single mom and was living in government housing on food stamps and welfare, certainly was not how I thought that my life was going to go.
I had actually graduated high school valedictorian and had all these scholarships to go to colleges all over the country and yet here I was an 18-year-old single mom living in government housing. I can remember, Ron, very clearly busting open a pink piggy bank that we had been putting change in with a hammer to get gas money—and this is of course back when you could afford to get gas with nickels and dimes—but literally going and or opening the fridge and not having anything and making the decision that I would feed my children instead of myself.
So I am well versed with poverty. I actually had a season where I was, before I moved into the government housing where I was living in the back of a car. And so when you think about the least of these and you think about those that have nothing, I am well familiar with having to dig yourself out of a difficult financial hole.
Ron: I’m thinking about your dad being married six times. I’m thinking about the desperation that that level of poverty brings to people. I want to connect something for our listeners, especially those who are in ministry. Poverty and choices about re-partnering, whether that be cohabitation or getting married again, definitely go hand in hand. So many people see marriage as they’re out to their poverty situation, that they’re willing to partner with somebody who maybe it’s not the best choice in the world, maybe it’s not the best relationship in the world, but at least I can feed my children if I’m in this relationship or family situation.
And so there’s quite a bit of the in and the out and the in and out of relationships that takes place when socioeconomic things are not working in your favor. And so when a church comes alongside people and says, “We want to help you with this or that,” or “We want to cover this expense,” “We want to take care of your car,” you’re liberating them toward relationship decisions that are going to be more life-giving for them and their children. I imagine you have some thoughts about that as well.
Jennifer: Yeah. One of the things that our ministry does is we believe that a mom, regardless of her arrival to the journey and really where she is socioeconomically, the truth is she’s going to struggle in four major areas: parenting, finances, spiritual health and emotional mental health. Those four areas, many churches miss one component or another. And so they may say, “Hey, we’re going to do a parenting class to help parents raise those babies up in the way that they should go,” or “Hey, we’re going to do a financial education class for 12 weeks.”
And the truth is that the holistic approach to addressing all of those things is going to make people more healthy to move into a future marriage. And so whether we’re talking parental challenges where moms are raising teen boys and they’re just exhausted and feel like they need a man in the home, or whether we’re talking about financial issues, and frankly two incomes in the home, it is better than one. And so you can see the temptation there of maybe getting ahead of the Lord. And so all of those issues are going to be really important to the looking at the whole ministry.
Ron: Oh man, that is so good. Seeing it as a holistic something to address rather than just pieces of the pie. I had not thought about that. I think that’s a really good perspective.
I’ve heard you talk a little bit about the shame you felt as a single parent. Do you mind talking around that for us?
Jennifer: Yeah. I think that shame was something that was familiar with very young. I was sexually assaulted for many years as a young child by many abusers, and so shame was just kind of a normal Tuesday for me. And so of course that really birthed what later became my single parenting journey.
I had two children by the time I was 19 years old, and it was not a healthy relationship. I was with their father for almost ten years and very unhealthy in every way. And shame was, number one, the thing that catapulted me into the relationship in the first place. Number two, it was the thing that kept me in the relationship for as long as I did, and it also kept me out of the local church for as long as I stayed out.
My dad was actually a deacon in the local Baptist church for 20 years before my mother was killed and so I don’t remember a time when I was not in a church from a very young age. And so when I began having children, had those two babies, by the time I was 19, I did not feel that the church was a welcoming place. And I’ll also say this, it didn’t matter that the church may actually be a welcoming place. My perception was that it wasn’t welcoming.
And so I felt like I would be judged. I felt like there was no greater sin than to have two children outside of marriage. It was a very public outward sin. And then you add on top that I was undereducated, and I had no money, and I was living in the projects, and I just don’t know that there wasn’t a facet of my story that did not begin to mount shame.
Ron: Gosh, what a barrier to you walking in the doors of a local church. Was there anything churches did that was helpful? Did they reach to you? Was there a connection? Is there a ray of light in this story?
Jennifer: Yeah. Well, I want to say this; that there are going to be parents that are listening today and you’re in maybe the midst of raising a prodigal or you’re raising a child that’s very difficult in this season. I was that child. My dad, for all of the complications of the loss of his wife, and he was an alcoholic and all of the abuse and all of the poor decisions he made, he always laid the foundation that the Lord was important. So even when I couldn’t connect the dots on the complications of his walk with the Lord, it was always there as a foundation.
I actually remember distinctly when I made the decision to go back to church, I had been out of church for a number of years, had no money. I had very few friends and got to a place where I lost hope, and I was huddled on a bathroom floor. I had been physically assaulted by my boyfriend. He had trashed my apartment and so I was at the end of my rope. I was on that bathroom floor contemplating taking my own life. And the reason that I didn’t take my life that night was because I knew what it was like to be raised without a mother, and I did not want my children to experience that same end result.
And so instead of taking my life, I made the decision to go to church the next morning, which happened to be a Sunday morning, and I loaded the babies up. It was difficult in every way. It was difficult logistically. It was difficult emotionally, spiritually, but I kind of wobbled into the back and fell onto the back pew. And really what happened over the next year was not necessarily anything the church did. Not that they did anything wrong, I just don’t know that there was anything specific.
It was more of a personal decision that no matter how hard it was, no matter how much shame I felt, no matter how I felt I didn’t belong, that I needed to be there, that maybe the church folks could help me. Maybe they would be serving dinner on a Sunday night and that would help me with my bills or maybe emotionally I would get a hug from someone when I hadn’t been hugged for a long time. And so it became a resource for me before I reignited my walk with the Lord. It was a practical resource, and then it became a spiritual resource as I grew, and the pastor gave the message, and it began to resonate with my spirit.
Ron: So it sounds like it was you. It was you that pushed you into that space.
Jennifer: Well, of course the prompting of the Holy Spirit was always there long before I knew, and I think that foundation of raising me in church. So I just want to say that as an encouragement to those who don’t see any fruit of the labors you’ve planted in your children in this hour.
Now, the ministry that I run, the entire foundation, our vision is no single mom would walk alone. And how we do that is working with the local church. So wow, what a catalyst that the church was to really change my life through, obviously the power of the Lord, and to be a place where I was no longer suicidal. I no longer lacked friendships, et cetera.
Ron: I want to hear a little bit more about your blended family story in just a minute, but for those that are unfamiliar with Single Mom University, especially church leaders who might be listening or somebody who you can point to your church to that resource, give us a snapshot of what it is, what it tries to accomplish.
Jennifer: So we have right now 175 classes. We’ll be putting another 25 classes in the platform next year. It’s trademarked. All the classes are unique. It is all taught by those who are working with single moms or who are current or former single moms. And so the content is really meeting you where you are. And there’s probably not a single mom topic you can’t think of that is not in the platform. I mean, we’ve got everything from sex and dating to blended families, being ready, raising adult children, raising toddlers, overcoming abuse. I just can’t think of a single mom’s topic that we’ve not at least broached.
Ron: Yeah, well, I’m vaguely familiar with the scope of it and it’s really impressive. And again, thank you for creating that resource. We certainly want churches to take advantage of that.
Okay, so when did you meet Jeff, your now husband?
Jennifer: So I met Jeff in 2001. I had been a single mom for about ten years, and I relocated into a job and Jeff happened to be a coworker. And so I had convinced myself that no good Christian man would ever want me. With my ready-made family and all the baggage of my past and the complications of my relationship with the children’s father, that what good Christian man would actually want to have to deal with all of that. And Satan was a master manipulator who did a good job of convincing me that I was not worthy of moving into a healthy marriage.
So there was healing that took place during that time. There was growth, and I had actually become okay with the fact that I would just be a single mom until my children were adults. I was at a healthy space of just resting and waiting on the Lord and met Jeff. Jeff actually became a great friend, a coworker that we had a great staff of employees we worked together.
And one of the things I think that first attracted me to him was I would bring my small children to work. Some evenings we had to work late after schools were closed and so I would bring the kiddos and bring toys and things for them to kind of play. And he became a big playmate for them. I just noticed what a natural bent he had to children and his love for children. And of course you work with someone and you’re able to observe their character, their work ethic and so many other things. And so it really became a very natural fit that wasn’t hard to move into that next season.
Ron: Yeah. Did he come with children as well?
Jennifer: He did not. That was interesting as well, because of course there were patterns and boundaries and behaviors that had already been established in my home before he got there. So as a mother learning to submit to my husband and learning how to give him the authority to be able to operate and giving him the margin and grace to be able to learn that was also very important as we became a newlywed couple.
Ron: Okay, we’re going to come back to that because I know listeners want to hear more about it because they’re asking the same questions. But one of the things I want to do is back up for a second. I want to go with that shame thing. You were shaming yourself: “No man will want what I’ve got.” And then Jeff comes into the picture, and you said there was some healing there that took place. What did you do with the shame thoughts? Because we all know that just because you move out of one relationship into another doesn’t mean that those lies simply fade away. It’s sort of like we have to renew our minds. We have to do something with those lies or they remain. I’m curious how that evolved for you.
Jennifer: Yeah. So one of the topics that I teach on a lot is on navigating shame and specifically as it pertains to how to renew the mind. Because we read in Romans 12:2 about the necessity of renewing our mind and yet I’m not certain that we have been taught extensively in our local bodies of Christ how to do that.
So we know that there are thoughts there, whether it’s shame or fear or overwhelm or stress or whatever those things may be and yet we do not know how to bring our mind and our thoughts into captivity that they would submit under the word of God. And so one of the things that we teach is number one, identifying the thoughts that you have and identifying whether or not they’re congruent to scripture. Because I think a lot of times people have thoughts that they don’t even recognize aren’t what the word of God says about them.
So that’s part of it is first identifying. And then secondarily, we are rebuking thoughts when Satan is sending thoughts that are not according to the word of God in my identity in Christ, we’re rebuking. I teach people the power of what’s coming out of your mouth. So rebuking out loud: “You lying thought; I am not shameful. I am not. This is what the Lord says about me.” So opening your mouth. We have no problem opening our mouth for anything except for rebuking the enemy, and it’s really a problem in the body of Christ.
And so once we rebuke—so we’ve identified the thought, we’ve rebuked the thought—the final component is the replacing. And that is a piece that I think a lot of people miss because I hear a lot of people saying, “Oh, well, I rebuked the thought. I knew it wasn’t of God,” but did you actually replace it with God’s word?
So if you know it wasn’t of God, what does God say about you? And it’s the process of receiving that, Ron. And I’ll tell you, it is intentional. We cannot be lazy about this process and expect to experience the freedom of God. We have to be intentional to say, “I’m going to tear down every thought, every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God. I’m tearing it down so that I can walk in the freedom that Christ paid for me to have.”
Ron: Oh, it’s so beautiful, and you have no idea how in keeping that is with the new book that I just talked about, The Mindful Marriage that Nan and I have—that has just come out and that we’re going to be focusing on some of those themes at Blended and Blessed this year. So if you’re listening or watching, we would love for you to be a part of that.
The one little thing that I would add. I’d love that process in what you were just saying. Here’s the thing that I’ve come to understand better through this journey, Jennifer, for your benefit, The Mindful Marriage is all about the gap between our painful past, our old self and our new self that Jesus is trying to help us put on and how the brain even holds on to those shameful stories in the case of what we’re talking about now and how difficult it is for your brain to let go of that in order to adopt God’s voice for your life.
But let me just add one little thought there. What I’ve learned is it’s not enough to know what God’s voice is. Our voice has to align with God’s voice. That’s when change happens. That’s when we renew our minds. It’s not just knowing truth, it’s incorporating truth. It’s making truth my voice. My voice shames me for a past I can’t change. God says, “Oh, you’re worth more than that.” Well, but if I just stop there and I just hear God’s voice and I don’t let my voice fall into alignment with God’s voice, then I don’t really renew my mind. And that is, as you said, very difficult to do, which is why there’s a lot of Christians walking around today who still are reacting out of their old self rather than really pouring into the kingdom self that Jesus has in mind for them and that He’s hoping for them.
That’s huge. I think that transition just from single parent to blended family, with every one of those family transitions, there’s an opportunity to move forward, to move us forward into more and more light, God’s light and letting Him be the source for us. Because obviously that has implications for our children, what we’re teaching them and showing and demonstrating for them and how they’re learning from that.
Okay, so back to transition with Jeff. You were a single mom and I’m mindful that you had six stepmoms when you were growing up. So I’m wanting to put those two things together. What did you have to learn as a single mom to make space for Jeff to move into the rhythms and rituals and ways of doing life in your household? And I’m wondering how your six-stepmom journey as a child informed you as the biological mom trying to help stepdad move into the family. That’s a hard question. I don’t know if that even made sense.
Jennifer: Well, I would say that, so one of the things with the evolution of my dad’s remarriages is I observed a lot of dysfunction. I mean, there’s abuse, there’s alcoholism, there’s poverty, there’s all of these things. So I think one of the things off the top was just recognizing all the things that didn’t work and recognizing what an unhealthy relationship looks like. And I think I had an awareness of that.
I mean, I can remember vividly at about 13 being very aware that I was being raised in extreme dysfunction, now not having the ability to do anything about it but being aware that my friends and those in my church family did not understand the scope of my pain. So I think that was one thing.
Now, I think the other thing is that my husband, his parents divorced when he was about 15. So he had a stepdad for many years, still does for upwards of 30 years now, who has been a critical role model, man of God in his life, mentor. And so I think my husband brought in number one, just good character. He brought in good character, a love for the Lord, a love for his own stepfather and a love for children. So those things are all real wins when you come in and have that.
I think one of the biggest things that single moms specifically struggle with, and I think far more than single dads, is many single moms’ stories are wrought with disappointment and heartache. And it doesn’t matter if they’ve experienced death, divorce, unwed pregnancy, they’re raising a grandchild that they didn’t expect, the truth is that most of the single mothers that we minister to have brought a lot of pain into the relationship.
And so what that does very often is it creates a defense mechanism that you’re just going to take care of everything yourself. You’re going to control everything. If you get it done, you can depend on yourself, et cetera. And it creates a lot of boss babes, which I believe is certainly not the heart of God. It’s not scriptural. I believe that it is a spirit that’s rampant in the church, but I’ll not digress there. And so women’s empowerment is about understanding your role, understanding who the Lord created you to be, understanding that you can submit as a helpmate and still be valuable in the kingdom and still have great things to contribute in your marriage.
So it’s really in teaching women how to be good help mates. Now, certainly there’s a role for men as well, but you asked me specifically how did Jeff prepare and how did we assimilate as a family? We did so because I learned my role and I stopped trying to be the dominant person in the home.
Ron: That’s a major shift when that’s all you’ve ever known. In your case, you got to be large and in charge because it’s all on you.
Jennifer: Yeah. And I will say the first couple of years of our marriage struggled because I did not do that well and did not recognize how dishonoring I was being with just kind of usurping his authority constantly or just in so many small ways. But they added up and I had—of course, we were always in church, and we were always walking with the Lord. And so I think just part of that was the Holy Spirit teaching me. The Holy Spirit is a guider, a comforter. The more that I leaned into trusting him, that he was indeed trustworthy, that he was not going to abandon, that he was a man of his word that would do what he said, then I was able to allow him to step in the role that the Lord had for him.
Ron: Yeah. I want to unpack that just for a second because I think that’s so very important. You as a listener, viewer, may not be in a situation where you’re transitioning out of single parent into blended family. You may be years into your blended family home, and what you’re still holding onto is the refusal to take risks, the refusal to allow yourself to trust somebody else because of the pain of the past that has led you to a place where you are your best defender. You’re the one who gets things done. You’re the one who takes care of the kids. You’re the one who’s responsible with money. And to be able to release that, to release yourself into the care of another person is risky. And it is. I’m not belittling that at all. I’m actually acknowledging that’s a very significant thing to do, to trust somebody when life has taught you, you can’t trust others, they won’t remain in covenant with you. They’re going to whatever that story is.
So to confront that story within yourself and say, “How do I lean into their trustworthiness, what they’re proving to me about their character? How do I lean in and how do I lean into God in making myself vulnerable in this relationship? I don’t want to be misunderstood.” There are some people in relationships that you shouldn’t be vulnerable to the other person because they’re not trustworthy. I’m not saying just be a wet blanket for anybody and everybody, then you get walked on. But I am saying in situations where you can see that trustworthiness, but you just are having a hard time releasing the control, that’s a really hard thing to do, but valid and important thing to do in order to move yourself and the relationship forward. What are your thoughts about that?
Jennifer: Yeah, so many of us sabotage what the Lord has brought to us because we’re unwilling to do that. And so being aware of what you’re bringing to the table, and that can be past hurt, trauma, et cetera, how much work you’ve done in your healing process and receiving the healing that the great physician wants to abundantly give you.
And then the other piece of that that’s so important as you begin to move into this new marriage and really time is not a factor. Like you said, Ron, they could be in a marriage ten years and still have not done this process.
I was reminded as you were speaking about the scripture that says, “The prayers of the righteous availeth much.” And I think that even if you’re in a marriage with someone who has not proven trustworthy or there’s been difficulties in the marriage and there’s been difficulties in navigating co-parenting children with ex-spouses, et cetera, there is power in your prayer life that I think is underutilized in the body of Christ. There is so much that can shift spiritually just by being willing to pray and trust the Lord to change our spouses or to change our children, that I don’t know that we give adequate conversation to that piece of our marriages. And what does your prayer life look like? And do you believe that God can actually heal those broken places?
Ron: That’s so, so good. Jennifer, I’m thinking as we’re wrapping up, let’s pull this thing full circle. I’m wondering from your own journey and the journey you’ve had as a leader working with an organization, working with lots of single moms, what perspective do you offer the single moms when they ask questions about getting married again, about blended family living, what in general are the things that you encourage them with?
Jennifer: Gosh, there’s lots. My kiddos are now grown and I’m a grandmother, and so I’ve really kind of been through all these life seasons. I’ve seen the good, bad and ugly. I’ve learned to be content whether there was much in my belly or not. So there’s lots I could say.
I would say one is the learning to be content in every season is critical. I find that too many mothers, too many people, not just mothers, focus on the next season: “If I can just get them potty trained,” “If I can just find the man of my dreams,” “If I can just get my teens driving,” “If I can just get them to college,” that we haven’t learned how to be content in the season we’re in. And we look up and 20 years has passed, and we missed it. We missed the season. So I think that’s one good piece of advice to really consider.
I think the other thing is what I touched on earlier in the broadcast, which is about what’s coming out of your mouth. I have the great joy of traveling all over the country and I hear many women that have been hurt in relationships, multiple relationships or perhaps multiple marriages. And the pain is so great that what comes from their mouth is that there are no good Christian men out there, that men aren’t willing to uphold Christian standards, et cetera. And what comes out of your mouth has power. And so we cannot emasculate men and demoralize men and then expect them to be good husbands.
And so edifying, encouraging, speaking blessings, speaking the word of the Lord about our situations and about a future partner or one that we’re in partnership with now matters. So if I could only give two and I could give like twenty-five, Ron, but I’ll honor our time today.
Ron: Those are good ones, and I imagine the next 23 are just as good. Jennifer, thank you so much for being with me today. I appreciate it.
Jennifer: Thank you.
Ron: To our listener, viewer, you want to learn more about this ministry, check the show notes. We’ll get you connected, the life of a single mom. I have a heart for single parent ministry. This is something every church should consider. And if you have a blended family ministry, consider expanding it to include some options for single parents. You certainly, if nothing else, want to help them get ready. If they’re dating and or engaged, you want to help them, and their children get ready for life as a blended family. Keep in mind our resource Dating and the Single Parent and then the book Preparing to Blend, which takes couples from engagement to the wedding day.
Well, if you don’t know, FamilyLife is a donor supported ministry, and we can’t do this without you. All gifts to FamilyLife are tax deductible, and I appreciate your support in advance.
Now’s the time to register for Blended and Blessed livestreams coming up soon. Check the show notes for more information.
Let me just tell you what’s going to happen next time. Next time on this podcast, I’m talking with Jenny and Robert Lord about growing up in their respective blended families and then marrying each other and forming their own blended family. That’s next time on FamilyLife Blended.
I’m Ron Deal. Thanks for listening or watching. And thank you to our production team and donors who make this podcast possible.
FamilyLife Blended is part of the FamilyLife Podcast Network. Helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.

We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you’ve benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?

Copyright © 2025 FamilyLife. All rights reserved.

www.FamilyLife.com