Melanie Shankle: The thing that I began to realize is—as I got older and I looked at my family history—there’s a constant reminder that ultimately the best way we’re going to live is in surrender to Jesus, and to what He has for us. And to know that He will take care of everything. I feel like that has been my mantra over the last six or seven years, like, “Jesus, you’ve got it. You can take care of everything.”

Healing Old Wounds and Breaking Generational Cycles: Melanie Shankle & Lisa Steven – Episode #449

Narrator: Welcome to the Jesus Calling Podcast. This week, we’re delighted to welcome back author and speaker Melanie Shankle. Through her reflections on overcoming a challenging childhood and breaking generational cycles of dysfunction, Melanie shares profound insights on motherhood, the power of faith, and how to turn painful histories into lasting legacies of hope and resilience.

Later in the episode, we’ll hear from Lisa Steven, founder of Hope House Colorado, a nonprofit dedicated to uplifting and empowering teen moms. Lisa recounts her beginnings with a difficult childhood and teen motherhood, all the way to leading an organization that helps young moms rewrite their stories and find stability through faith. 

Let’s begin with Melanie’s story.

Melanie Shankle: I am Melanie Shankle. I am an author and a speaker based in San Antonio, Texas. I’ve been married to my husband, Perry, for twenty-eight years. We have a daughter, Caroline, who’s a senior in college at Texas A&M. And I’m just happy to be here today.

Looking Back Through Older Eyes 

I think the thing about childhood is what you grow up in, you really don’t know isn’t normal until you get further out in life and go, Oh, that was not normal. 

My parents got divorced when I was in third grade, six months later, [my mom] remarried another man. It was a very volatile relationship. It only lasted about four months. After that, there became a cycle of a lot of prescription drug use on her part that kind of got out of hand. I remember that I would leave for school and my mom would be in bed and I would get home from school and my mom would be in bed. And I thought moms just stay in bed all day. That’s what they do.

Later in life, my mom was officially diagnosed as bipolar. But at the time, I didn’t know. And so I could come home from a date in high school at eleven o ‘clock at night, and she would say, “Let’s go eat at Denny’s and then come home and paint the kitchen!” And I would be like, “Oh, that’s so fun. Let’s do that!” And then she would have low lows where she wouldn’t get out of bed and she would turn on you in a heartbeat. And there just always felt like there was this ongoing dance of just jealousy and bitterness and competition between us that I didn’t realize wasn’t a normal dynamic until really when I got to college.

I began to realize that things were not what they had been portrayed to me to be. I think that the picture my mom had painted of my dad post-divorce turned out to be… she had basically lied to us about the reasons why they had gotten a divorce. And so it had created this animosity towards my dad that ultimately I found out later on wasn’t true.

I look at my mom and I look at some other family members and you see there is this thread of various mental illnesses. There was a lot of substance abuse that you realize was in response to trying to deal with those at a time when nobody was going to a therapist. You didn’t really go to the doctor and get put on medications. You didn’t have the resources that we have now. 

Ending Generational Cycles

Having a daughter of my own made me realize I don’t want to have those same dynamics with my daughter. I want to do what I need to do to be spiritually and emotionally healthy, to be able to raise her to be everything that God created her to be.

“Having a daughter of my own made me realize I want to do what I need to do to be spiritually and emotionally healthy, to be able to raise her to be everything that God created her to be.” – Melanie Shankle

I think becoming a parent really highlights it, because you start to recognize things, like, I don’t want to pass this down. I don’t want my child to take this thing on. You start to try to do stuff on your own strength where it’s like, I am going to be the perfect mother. I’m going to do everything perfect. It’s going to be wonderful. It’s going to be fantastic. I’m going to give her everything. I’m going to make sure that she never needs anything or wants for anything or hurts or is sad. And here’s the thing: that is not realistic in any stretch of the imagination, because I’m a very flawed person trying to raise a flawed person. That’s just life. 

What I realized was I’ve got to depend on God if I’m going to do this in a healthy way. And He’s going to give me the wisdom and discernment I need to know how to be the best mom. 

“I’m a very flawed person trying to raise a flawed person. That’s just life. What I realized was I’ve got to depend on God if I’m going to do this in a healthy way. And He’s going to give me the wisdom and discernment I need to know how to be the best mom.” – Melanie Shankle 

And also, I had to give myself grace, because when you’re in the thick of parenting, you’re going to get mad too easily. You’re going to take things personally. You’re going to make decisions in haste that later you realize was the wrong thing to say or the wrong thing to do in that moment. So there’s got to be this balance of, Yes, I want to be a good mother and I want to be emotionally healthy and spiritually healthy and raise a daughter that is the same. But the only way I’m going to be able to do that is with God, because in my own strength, it’s never going to be enough. 

And so to me, prayer is just my lifeline to know that I can go to God. And here’s the thing, don’t we all wish that He would just give us this audible, “Here is what you should do”? But I do think it gives you this peace or this sense of uneasiness, where if I’m doing the wrong thing, all of a sudden in my spirit, I’ll be like, I don’t think that’s right. I’ve gotta backtrack. Sometimes that looked like in the mornings, just taking the time to be like, “God, help me today.” Like, that’s it. “God, help me. I need your help. I need your wisdom.” God tells us to pray continually, and for a long time, I was like, “What does that even mean?” It’s just to keep Him at the forefront of our mind. 

Where True Restoration Comes From

I’ve gone through Jesus Calling a million times. I try to read a Psalm every single day. I’ll have different books that I’ll decide to go through. But I think there’s something about a devotional sometimes, in reading somebody else’s perspective on what they’ve learned or what they’ve gleaned from a Scripture or from a passage in the Bible, that I think sometimes is all you need just to kind of shift your perspective a little bit. One of the things that I faithfully did for Caroline every morning as I would drive her to school, my prayer was, “God protect her emotionally, spiritually, and physically today.” It just gave me the peace of knowing and remembering God is in control. 

The things that we want to protect our kids from as parents are the very things that God is putting in their lives to give them that grit and that resilience and that strength that they’re going to need. And so what I didn’t realize is I prayed, like, “I want her to be strong. I want her to be a leader. I want her to be fierce. I want her to be brave.” The thing is, she has to go through some things for those characteristics to be forged. They don’t just happen. And so that can be hard as a parent, to then watch your kid go through trials, even knowing that these are the very things God is using to shape her into all these things that I prayed that she would be. 

“The things that we want to protect our kids from as parents are the very things that God is putting in their lives to give them that grit and that resilience and that strength that they’re going to need.” – Melanie Shankle 

If you find yourself healing from your own generational trauma, if you’re trying to create a healthier legacy for your family, what I will tell you and what I have found in my own life is that it is hard. And there are times that you feel like you’re not going to get through it, but I will tell you that number one, everything is going to be all right. And number two, Jesus is the thing that will carry you through, and He will give you the strength to fight what you have to fight. He will give you the wisdom to know how to deal with different situations. He will give you the discernment that you need, and He will always love you back to emotional health. And so just continue to hold on to Him. Trust Him with your child. Trust Him with your life. Trust Him with creating a healthy generational legacy, and watch what He does, because there is true healing power in what He will offer you. 

“Jesus is the thing that will carry you through, and He will give you the strength to fight what you have to fight. He will give you the wisdom to know how to deal with different situations. He will give you the discernment that you need, and He will always love you back to emotional health.” – Melanie Shankle 

Narrator: To learn more about Melanie Shankle, visit www.thebigmamablog.com, and be sure to check out her new book, Here Be Dragons: Treading the Deep Waters of Motherhood, Mean Girls, and Generational Trauma, available at your favorite retailer.

Stay tuned to Lisa Steven’s story after a brief message.

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Our next guest is Lisa Steven, the founder of Hope House Colorado. When Lisa found herself pregnant at just seventeen years old, she was scared—but she found support and love through a Mothers of Preschoolers group, known as MOPS. Eventually, Lisa became part of the leadership team, and saw an opportunity to say yes to God in opening Hope House Colorado, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering teen moms and equipping them for life. 

Lisa Steven: Hello everybody, my name is Lisa Steven. I’m the founder and executive director at Hope House Colorado, a non-profit ministry that serves parenting teenage moms and their little ones. I love and feel very blessed to get to do the work that I do. 

I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional home. I had parents who were just really hard on each other. There was a lot of hollering, a lot of fighting in our home. I was the oldest of four, and sort of generally felt like it was my job to take care of my younger siblings and sort of protect them or shield them from some of the fighting and chaos that happened in our home on a pretty regular basis. I grew up really fast and didn’t have a chance to really be a kiddo, to just be a child, and have only the responsibilities of a child.  

Very unfortunately, tragically, my younger brother died when he was seven in a backyard accident in our backyard. I mean, honestly, my parents were not doing well before that, but that certainly was sort of the thing that they could not overcome, losing my little brother. My dad was drinking a lot. We did have an incident where he brought a shotgun into the house and kind of hid it in the closet. And at that point, my mom was like, “All right, we’re going to leave.” So she packed my two younger sisters and I up, and we moved back to Colorado to live with my grandparents for a period of time.  

Lisa Becomes a Teen Mom

I was probably sixteen when I met the—I shouldn’t say man, because he was a boy at that point… that would become my husband. 

And back in the day, so this was like 1985, the way that lots of young people met each other was cruising the mall. And we were out cruising the mall in my girlfriend’s mother’s car, which was like this huge Buick boat that was olive green. And here comes this car that’s like the most amazing, souped up, 1974 Chevy Nova with the back end kind of all jacked up. It was the coolest car and it made the coolest sound and the driver was so cute. So we waved them over and I’m surprised they stopped, considering the car we were in. But they pulled over and we chatted with them and ended up making a date to go to the mall the next weekend and meet up again. And that was sort of the beginning of me hanging out with John.  

He was, first of all, so cute. But also just such a quiet, sweet, kind person that just listened. And I was just taken with that. He seemed older than his years as well. About one year into our relationship, we were seventeen years old, and found out we were pregnant.  

And literally, I joke that my marriage proposal was sitting outside of the clinic where we had just gotten the news that we were pregnant. And he just kind of looked at me and said, “Well, what are you doing a week from Friday?” Because we both had school off. It’s funny now, it was not funny then, certainly. 

And the next step, of course, was to tell our parents. Honestly, telling my parents, I didn’t have an in-depth relationship with either one of them by that point. I was not that concerned about telling them because I didn’t care that much whether they were upset about it. But I was very nervous and scared of telling his parents. His parents were everything that I thought that married life and healthy family life should look like. My mother-in-law was one of the women who was in the first little group of ladies who started MOPS International. I was just really concerned that they would be so, so disappointed in us and in him. But to their credit, their response was pretty much immediately to talk about what marriage looks like. And we probably spent about an hour talking about marriage, and that marriage is hard. And they gave us incredible advice about how you do marriage. They handled it with so much grace. And as I look back now, such humbleness and forgiveness, really, because in my experience, in my family, everything was judgment and being mad and being mean. And so it was beautiful, even though it was hard. It was still a beautiful introduction to what marriage should look like. 

Overcoming the Shame of “Not Doing It Right”

One of the universal truths of being a teenage mom, no matter when in our history you became a teenage mom, is that you face just sort of this overwhelming judgment and stigma and shame, honestly.  

And my mother-in-law insisted that I needed to go to MOPS when my son was about two, and I was just like, “No way am I walking into a group of women who all did it right, they got married and then had children. They’re not like me and they’re going to judge me.” I was afraid to go to that MOPS group and meet these other moms. And it turned out I was afraid for no reason. From the minute I walked through the door, the women there were so kind and welcoming and warm and wanted to know me and wanted to know my son and ultimately gave me an opportunity to even become a part of the leadership team at a really young age, like twenty-one years old. They asked if I wanted to co-lead the children’s program. The fact that they would trust me to do that and then come alongside me to help me do that was incredible. 

A Vision to Help Other Teenage Moms

So eventually, my kids got to the age where you sort of had to graduate from MOPS because my kids were now becoming school age. And right about the same time, MOPS International introduced a new program for teenage moms called Teen MOPS. And I had the privilege of getting to volunteer on the leadership group. And so we were literally kind of at the ground level, figuring out how to build a support group for teenage moms.

We’re hearing these stories where it’s like, “Hey, me and my little one are not safe in the home we’re living in.” And so that led to this kind of group of leaders in this Teen MOPS group saying, “What else is out there? There’s got to be a home for teen moms, right?” So we’re calling all over the Denver metro area, trying to find who houses teenage moms, because we have all these girls who don’t have a safe home. And come to find out we had probably more than a dozen maternity homes where you could go if you were pregnant and trying to make a birth decision, but you typically could only stay until the baby was like three to six months old. And then you’re going right back into that situation that I just described. 

I had this whole plan for my life. I was going to finally get to go to college. My kids were in school. I thought that I would become a teacher or an administrator. And so when we started kind of down this path of somebody should open a home for teen moms, I kind of raised my hand and said “Well, I’d be willing to volunteer on that committee.” And I went home and talked to my husband about it, and he actually is the one who came to me probably two or three weeks later and he said, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about this whole home for teen moms. I think we really are supposed to be a part of opening a home for teen moms.” And that at that point I kind of had to make the decision, “Are we going to be all in on this? Am I willing to say yes to God in a way that means saying no to things that I thought were for me?” And that was a big decision.

There is something so incredibly powerful about being willing to say yes to God when you are the least equipped person, and then watching to see what He does with that. For me, it was saying yes I want this, I want to be a part of starting this home that we named Hope House.  

“There is something so incredibly powerful about being willing to say yes to God when you are the least equipped person, and then watching to see what He does with that.” – Lisa Steven 

Hope House Colorado

Today, Hope House is a campus in Arvada, Colorado. We serve about 160 moms. Our moms come into our programs between the ages of fifteen and twenty, and we serve them until they turn twenty-five. These are young women who’ve grown up with generations of domestic violence and generations of addiction and generations of homelessness. And so they don’t know anybody in their life who’s married. They’ve never gone to school in one place from kindergarten to high school. Our average age of our dropping out for a teenage mom is ninth grade, and they’ve typically been in seven to nine schools by the time they do drop out. There’s no structure and stability in their life. But where the change point happens and why it is so important to be an advocate for a teenage mom as she becomes a parent is that you don’t have a grasp yet of what it’s like to have that baby placed in your arms, and suddenly become responsible for this little human life. And so what happens for our teenage moms is that that moment is truly such an incredible moment of just a total lens change, a world view change for them where they’re looking at this little one and going, I will literally do anything to build a better life for you than what I experienced. 

I think it is so incredibly important to connect with God daily. The first time I ever was given a copy of Jesus Calling, I remember opening that book and just being like, “Oh my gosh, it’s like God Himself is speaking right to my heart.” It was so powerful to me that we ended up giving a copy to everyone on our board, and made the commitment to read Jesus Calling every single day because we wanted to make sure we were all hearing the same message every day from God.

And from there, we began giving a Jesus Calling copy to every single one of our staff members and we also make it available to every teen mom who wants one, because for our moms, the Bible is really overwhelming and the language can be really overwhelming. Jesus Calling is very, very relational and simple to read and very readable, so it’s such an easy way for them to bump into Jesus. It’s beautiful to watch and it’s beautiful to get to be a part of.

This story of Hope House is one long story of getting to see how God moves and how He works. And it’s a story of how God just takes the least equipped and equips them to do the things that He calls them to do. He can take all of the things that are hardest and the most hurt in our lives and use them for His good and glory, and for our good as well.

Jesus Listens, September 24th:

Beloved Lord Jesus, 

Please infuse Your Peace into my innermost being. As I sit quietly in the Light of Your Presence, I long to sense Your Peace growing within me. This isn’t something I can accomplish through self-discipline and willpower; it’s a matter of opening up myself to receive Your blessing. 

You’ve been teaching me to thank You for hard times and difficult journeys—trusting that, through them, You accomplish Your best work. And I’m learning that needing You is the key to knowing You intimately, which is the gift above all gifts! 

In Your incomparable Name, 

Amen

Narrator: To learn more about Lisa and her work, please visit www.hopehousecolorado.org, and be sure to check out her book, A Place to Belong, available at your favorite retailer. 

If you’d like to hear more stories about healing our past with God’s help, check out our interview with Dr. Sarita Lyons. 

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Next week: Ian Morgan Cron

Next time on the Jesus Calling Podcast, we’ll hear from author, speaker, Episcopal priest, and psychotherapist Ian Morgan Cron, best known for his work with the personality typing system, The Enneagram. Ian shares about his personal recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, and his insights on the twelve step recovery system as a transformative tool for healing and spiritual awakening. 

Ian Morgan Cron: I think for all addicts, it’s this search for an external solution to an internal problem. We’re trying to find some relief from the anxiety and the difficulties that we face internally. But I also see it as a spiritual search. I see it as a longing for God. It’s a disorganized plan that we come up with for ourselves to achieve happiness apart from God’s grace, power, and love.