Don’t Give Up on Your Kids

A Guest Post by Karen L

Mother’s Day is complicated for a lot of people. Maybe it is for you too.

Somewhere in our culture, estrangement became almost fashionable. Adult children cut off parents at alarming rates. Mothers who gave everything sit by silent phones on the second Sunday of May, wondering what went wrong. And on the other side, grown kids carry wounds they don’t quite know what to do with.

I’ve been on both sides of that distance. I want to talk about it.

Where I Came From

I grew up in a world most people only read about. My early childhood was shaped inside a cult, David Terrell’s ministry, where my family lived on a commune, gave away everything they owned, and prepared for a judgment day that never came. My mother was one of the most devoted women I have ever known. She read her Bible for hours each day, raised us on Scripture, and loved God with everything in her.

Then she got free of it. Almost overnight, the woman who had warned me about every sin became someone I didn’t recognize. She cut her hair, drank too much, moved in with a man she’d known for weeks. The rules she’d built our world around just disappeared. Freedom looked thrilling on her. On me, it looked like confusion.

I didn’t understand then what I understand now: she was a wounded woman doing the best she could with what she had. She’d lived under fear for so long that when it broke, she swung hard in the other direction. That’s not an excuse. It’s just the truth.

By the time I graduated high school and moved out, something had shifted in her. She’d been with my stepfather for six years by then. They’d committed to each other, and somewhere in that stability, she found her way back to Jesus. The woman who had swung so hard away from everything she’d known came back around, quietly and for real this time.

I didn’t. Not yet.

I spent years carrying the weight of that childhood. I made messes. I hurt people. I didn’t know who I was or what I believed.

But my mother never gave up on me. Never stopped praying.

What’s Happening in Our Families

Something is fracturing families right now, and we’re being told it’s healthy. Young adults are encouraged to “set boundaries” that look less like fences and more like walls. Mothers and fathers who raised their children, who weren’t perfect but who showed up, are being cast as villains in stories they don’t even recognize.

I believe this is a spiritual attack on the family. Not every estrangement is unjust. There are real situations of abuse that require real distance. But turning away wholesale from imperfect parents who loved imperfectly? That’s a tragedy dressed up as healing.

God created us for relationship. First with Him, then with each other. If the enemy can fracture families, he fractures the most basic picture we have of God’s love on this earth.

“Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:12)

That commandment doesn’t come with a footnote that says “only if they were perfect.” It comes with a promise.

To the Moms

If you’re sitting with a broken heart this Mother’s Day, if you have a child who won’t return your calls, who has rewritten your story, who seems unreachable, I want you to hear this:

Do not give up.
Your child is not gone. They are lost. And lost things get found.

My mother’s faith in me outlasted every bad choice I made. She prayed. She stayed available. She didn’t chase me down or demand I see things her way, but she never closed the door. Years of chaos, bad decisions, survival mode. She was still there.

And God was still working, even when neither of us could see it.

“The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9)

He is patient with your child too. That patience is not weakness. It’s love holding the door open.

There was an ordinary afternoon when everything changed for me. I was six months pregnant, painting my daughter’s bedroom, practicing a song for church. When I got to the part about mercy and grace, something cracked open inside me. Thirty-two years of fear, striving, hiding, all of it came loose at once. I dropped to my knees on a paint-splattered tarp and finally let God in. Not the mask. Not the performance. Me.

That moment happened in the quiet, when nobody was watching, in the middle of a regular Tuesday. Not at an altar call. Not in a revival tent. Just God and me and grace, in a half-painted room.

My mother didn’t engineer that moment. She couldn’t have. But her faithfulness was part of the soil it grew in.

Keep praying. Keep the door open. You don’t know what God is doing in the quiet of your child’s ordinary Tuesday.

“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” (Galatians 6:9)

To the Kids

If you’re the one who pulled away, if you’re carrying wounds from your childhood and distance feels like the only way to breathe, I understand more than you might think.

I know what it is to feel like the family you came from broke something in you. I know what it is to spend years trying to outrun a past that keeps catching up.

But the story isn’t over. God is not finished with your family. He’s not finished with your mother. He’s not finished with you.

Wounds are real. Pain is real. But estrangement built on the belief that your parent is beyond redemption leaves no room for the God who specializes in redemption. The same grace that found me on that paint-splattered floor is available to every person in your story, including the ones who hurt you.
I’m not asking you to excuse anything. I’m asking you to leave a door open that God can walk through.

“Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” (Colossians 3:13)

There Is Hope for Your Family

God sees every silent phone. Every unanswered text. Every holiday that passes with an empty chair. He is not indifferent to your pain. He’s the God who restores what the locusts have eaten, who makes roads through deserts, who works behind the scenes in the years that look like nothing is happening.

“I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten.” (Joel 2:25)

That’s a promise. Claim it for your family.

Mother’s Day doesn’t have to be a reminder of what is broken. It can be the day you decide, again or maybe for the first time, to trust God with the people you love most. To pray with expectation instead of resignation. To believe that the God who found me in a half-painted bedroom can find your child wherever they are.

He is still working. He has not forgotten your family. And the door that looks closed to you is never closed to Him.

Don’t give up. The harvest is coming.

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28)
All things. Even this.

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Has God restored a relationship in your family? Are you still in the waiting and need someone to pray with you? I’d love to hear your story. Email Linda and her team at info@yourrefreshedlife.com. They pray for every story shared.