Can I Be Your Spiritual Mom? Mary’s Story

Dannah Gresh: Women everywhere know what it’s like to long for the input of other women.

Mary McKee: I had this desire to be around other women.

Susan Sager: I am in my sixties now but had never been mentored myself. I just really had that longing to find a woman who could speak into my life and answer questions that I had and just walk beside me.

Dannah: And other women are asking the Lord how He wants to use them as they go through different seasons of life.

Judy Barnett: My husband and I both turned seventy this year. We wanted it to be very relational, but also we totally wanted it to be very intentional.

Dannah: We’re about to hear that when women like this get together, it can be very powerful! This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Adorned: Living Out the Beauty of the Gospel Together. It’s September 13, 2024. I’m Dannah Gresh.

This week we’ve been hearing some amazing messages from a conference Revive Our Hearts hosted called Adorned. The conference was all about women encouraging other women in community.

We’re about to hear from three women who attended that event. It had a profound effect on them and the women of their church. These three women are the subject of a new video from Revive Our Hearts. It’s narrated by my friend, Staci Rudolph, and she’s going to tell us the story here on Revive Our Hearts. Take it away, Staci!

Staci Rudolph: When Mary McKee thinks back to her days of playing soccer as a young girl, one thing stands out. It’s the support she got from her father.

Mary: My dad would always be there for soccer practices and games as much as he could.

Staci: Around Mother’s Day, the members of the soccer team would give flowers to their moms, and that made it hard for Mary, because her mom wasn’t there.

Mary: I’d love for her to be there and watching these things and supporting me, but it wasn’t the case.

Staci: She was sad that her mom wasn’t part of soccer games and practices, but Mary wanted to give her dad a flower. She felt like he deserved some recognition for all he was doing. 

Mary: My dad was a single dad of three girls—imagine that! Yet, he was very much trying to fill a role of being a parent to us as dad and mom—as much as he could—but he knew that he couldn’t be the mom. That’s not how God had designed that role for him. And so, he actually was intentional about setting us up around other mothers.

Staci: Mary remembers hearing about the early days of her parents' marriage.

Mary: Up until I was born, or my middle sister was born, they had a really good marriage. Then something started to just deteriorate.

Staci: Mary’s mom was abusing alcohol and causing chaos in the family. Her dad eventually felt like he needed to separate and protect his daughters. When Mary was five, she and her sisters and her dad moved from their home in Florida to Indiana.

Mary: My dad thought it would be best for him to take on the primary custody, and my mom did, too. He never remarried; my mom did, multiple times. During my teenage years I had good experiences, because I was with school and activities and church at that point. 

I was already saved, so I definitely could see the Lord working in and through my life with community and with friendships. I would say the hard part of my teenage years was specifically with my mom. 

There was not that bond there as a mother and daughter. There was a desire for that bonding, but I didn’t receive it in the way that I expected I would receive it growing up as a child. I did know that she loved me. I did know that she was a nurturer and that’s how God created her.

The alcoholism distorted that and her sin distorted that, and so I just stopped talking with her. When she called, I didn’t want to engage with her, and there was bitterness. It was hard, because I was starting to become more aware of how her sin was affecting us.

Staci: When Mary was still a teenager, she got some urgent news about her mom.

Mary: We got a phone call from her employer saying she was in a coma, and she wasn’t going to live through the night. She was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver in March 2007, and then she was given about six months to live at that point. 

The Lord was so kind to grant that time. I only wanted it to be more, but I also know in God’s sovereignty and His Providence that that was the number of days ordained for her. My last time seeing her in person was that spring. I had spring break for school, and so I had the opportunity to go for a week to visit her. 

I’d like to say every single moment of that was sweet. Unfortunately, she was still drinking, and so there was anger and frustration there still towards her for making that continued choice. We felt hurt, as her daughters, that she wouldn’t take care of herself more, and that was hard.

Staci: After this disappointing visit, Mary started emailing her mom. For a few months they got to know each other better. Mary’s mom came to faith in Jesus and asked her daughters to forgive her. Mary was fifteen years old when her mom died.

Mary: From fifteen on, whether I knew how to explain it or not, I had this desire to be around other women.

Susan Sager: My name is Susan Sager, and I’m from Evansville, Indiana.

Staci: Susan also knew what it was like to need community and to need the input of older women.

Susan: I became a Christian at sixteen. I just really kind of went through my Christian walk by myself. I was really rejected from the friends that I had prior to becoming a Christian, so I lived out my last two high school years by myself . . . and with my Bible.

I am in my sixties now, but had never been mentored myself. I just really had that longing to find a woman who could speak into my life and answer questions that I had and who could just walk beside me. So I began praying, asking the Lord who might fulfill that role in my life.

Judy Barnett: I’m Judy Barnett from Evansville, Indiana. My husband and I both turned seventy this year. We knew this was going to be the “last chapter in our lives,” we call it. We wanted it to be very relational, but also we totally wanted it to be very intentional. 

Staci: Judy met Susan when their husbands both served on the Elder Board at church.

Judy: I just fell in love with her! 

Staci: Judy knew the pressures of being an elder’s wife and wanted to help Susan in this new role.

Judy:I started praying about it. I didn’t ask her, I just started praying about it.

Susan: One day we got together, and I just asked her if she would consider discipling me. She teared up and said, “I don’t need to pray about this, because I’ve already been praying that the Lord would bring someone into my life that I could mentor . . . and you are the one.”

Judy is always there when there are issues that I’m trying to deal with in my own personal life, and I feel the freedom just to talk with her about it. 

Judy:And honestly, she’s mentoring me just as much as I’m mentoring her. Sometimes I wonder, Who’s the mentor here? We have both been seeking God for what He wants to do with us in this chapter of our life, and we are both hearing Him say, “Relational . . . one on one.”

Susan: I was praying that God would bring someone into my life that I could now mentor.

Mary: One of Susan’s sons, Christopher, and I were friends in high school and college. One day he said, “I think you and my mom would really get along. You’re a lot alike.”

Staci: Well, Susan and Mary did get along, and they met quite a few times! 

Susan: One day at lunch I just asked her if I could be her spiritual momma.

Mary: I said, “Susan, I already look at you as a mom, so why are you asking this? But absolutely without hesitation, you can be my spiritual mom!” Our meetings primarily consisted of meeting at her house, so being in a home together, life-on-life. We were talking about ministry together, we were talking about personal life together. 

Susan: I tell you another need that was really met is that I’ve always loved being a mom. So now that our three kids are grown and gone, I feel like having Mary in my life is filling that void—what was missing once my kids were gone and out of the house.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth (at the Revive conference): God’s grace in your life, spiritual growth in your life, fruitful ministry through your life will be best experienced in the context of community.

Staci: Judy, Susan, and Mary all attended Revive ’17, a conference hosted by Revive Our Hearts. All the conference messages that year were based on a book by Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth called Adorned: Living Out the Beauty of the Gospel Together.

Nancy: God has given us women and friends within the body of Christ to help us grow and serve. There shouldn’t be anyone among us or in our churches who is suffering through affliction or walking through unfamiliar or trying circumstances struggling to make it on their own!

Staci: By now Mary led the women’s ministry at Susan and Judy’s church.

Mary: It was life-giving to go back to my women’s ministry role after that conference and to have content that I could bring to our women. I felt so refreshed by that because it is hard to find good content.

Nancy: You need spiritual mothers, you need spiritual daughters, and you need spiritual sisters in your life!

Staci: After Revive ’17, Judy, Susan, and Mary wanted to share what they’d learned at the conference with the women of their church.

Mary: We had the opportunity afterRevive ’17 to actually lead the Adorned study. We selected a small group of women, and we broke up into three different groups. Susan led one, Judy led one, and I led one. We would go through part of the book and the study guide, and also through the videos. 

Judy: So I’m excited to keep learning as a seventy-year-old! 

Mary: And to this day, I would say out of all the conferences, for me personally, that was the most significant one. I’m actually using the Adorned book now in a small group and a discipleship relationship.

Dannah: This is Revive Our Hearts, I’m Dannah Gresh. We’re listening to the story of Mary McKee and two generations of her mentors: Susan Sager and Judy Barnett. You won’t want to miss the next chapter in this story, but let’s pause, because I want to let you know how to get a copy of the book that these three women have used to invest in groups of women in their church.

The book is called Adorned: Living Out the Beauty of the Gospel Together. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wrote it based on Titus chapter 2, and it will give you a vision for making the kinds of investments in other women you’ve been hearing about.

Do you realize that right around you there are women just like Susan, just like Mary? Maybe God wants to use you to meet a deep need in someone’s life. Nancy’s book will help you begin to do that. We’ll send you Nancy’s book Adorned when you support Revive Our Hearts with a gift of any amount.

The support of our listeners allows Revive Our Hearts to provide the kind of ministry you’ve been hearing about: conferences, videos, resources . . . and this program. Visit ReviveOurHearts.com to donate, and get a copy of Adorned, or call 1-800-569-5959.

Let’s get back to the story of Mary McKee. Here’s my friend, Staci Rudolph.

Staci: So now, Mary was teaching and leading other women, but she still needed Susan and Judy’s input, especially when it came to relationships.

Mary: They saw that I had a pattern. I would be interested in someone, in a godly person, and get excited about it, and then just a few moments later—however long that may have been, it could have been weeks, it could have been a month—I would start becoming fearful, and then I would just abruptly end it.

I truly was uncertain if I desired marriage. I do believe there was a significant part of that as a result of my parents’ divorce, and also with some family history of divorce and affairs. And so the thought of marriage was overwhelming to me, because it felt like it was already being set up for failure rather than for success.

It showed my lack of trust in what God may have in store for me. It also showed that I was living in those fears and anxieties instead of trusting the Lord for what He may have in store . . . and also knowing there is healing and forgiveness and redemption, even in my own family’s legacy.

Staci: Mary’s mentors prayed with her about the future, whether that involved ministry or missions. They encouraged her to trust God in spite of her fear, and to move forward if God led her to marriage.

Mary: So there was a friend in ministry, Katie. She set me up with her brother-in-law, Matthew. So I actually reached out to Susan initially and said, “What do you think? There’s this man in Texas. I’m interested in him.” 

And she said, “Mary, we’ve been praying about this. It’s a green light!”

We connected for the first time over the phone on June 14, 2021 and talked for almost three-and-a-half hours!

Matthew McKee: Our closest people—Mary’s mentors, my mentors, my family—when they got to see us interact, we would ask, “What do y’all think?” And they said, “This is a good thing!”

Staci: As Matthew, Mary, and their mentors continued this process, they sensed the Lord leading them into marriage. As Mary prepared for her wedding day, she was so grateful for Susan, who filled the role as mother of the bride.

Mary: Susan, of course, being my mentor and spiritual mom, it was not even a second thought for me to ask her to be the mother of the bride. She also hosted a bridal brunch for me the day of our wedding. A friend of hers did the same for her on her wedding day. They would speak words of life to me and of encouragement. It was so precious. They prayed for me, so I’m very thankful for that! [tears fill her voice]

Matthew: For her to have other motherly figures come into her life just shows how the Lord is in the business of redemption!

Mary: My dad had a name for my mom, “The Black Rose.” There’s a whole story behind it, but he wanted Susan to be able to hold a black rose in memory, in honor, of my mom. And Susan, without even a hesitation, wanted to make sure to represent her well.

Although she never knew my biological mom, she always held her in the highest regard, even in the midst of my mom’s past. I have never heard Susan once talk badly about my biological mom.

And so that honor and that respect meant a lot to me and to my sisters. I’m very thankful for how she took on that role, not only as a spiritual mother, but in addition, to honoring my biological mother. I’m very thankful!

Staci: And as Matthew and Mary said, “I do!” Susan was sitting on the front row! Despite the painful relationship Mary had with her own mom, she told us she was open to God’s will, if He wanted her to have children.

Mary: When I got married, I know that was one of the first questions that Matthew had asked me, “Do you have a desire to be a mom?” And the answer was “yes.” In that, though, I had the opportunity to share with him the complexity of my relationship with my mom and how that played influence to the fears and the anxieties of being a mom one day.

He was so gracious and compassionate, and still is, in listening to those fears and those anxieties. Yet now, since being married, I’ve had such a gift of having other married women around me who are younger and watching them become moms.

I would say I would want to be a mom who fears the Lord first and foremost, a mom who loves her children sacrificially, and (I think the part where I’m tearing up is) a mom who’s present, because I didn’t have that.

There are fears and anxieties in that, knowing I’m going to fall short as a mom, also knowing I can model in my weakness well. I want to continue to stay faithful to my children.

Dannah: Well, I have some news. Mary and Matthew are expecting a child, a boy, in just a few months! I am so grateful for the women who have invested in Mary so she can be the kind of mom God has called her to be.

Make sure you see the video version of this story. You can watch it at ReviveOurHearts.com. Can you think of someone who would enjoy this story? You can probably think of a lot! I hope you’ll share it by visiting ReviveOurHearts.com and forwarding the link. 

Another thing I hope is that you’ll be on the lookout for someone who needs a friend when you’re at church this weekend. Then, of course, please be back with us Monday here on Revive Our Hearts. 

To close our time, here’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth teaching from Titus 2. This is just a taste of the life-giving truths you’ll encounter when you get a copy of her book Adorned.

Nancy: The older women in the church need to get involved in training these new moms, these younger wives, how to live self-controlled, wise lives, and what that looks like in every area of life . . . how to fulfill their duty to God and their husband and their children and others, and how to juggle those things.

Can you remember back when you were at this season and it seemed so overwhelming? How many of you would have given a lot just to have some woman come alongside you and put her arm around you and encourage you and help you? Maybe you did have that.

So as a body of Christ, a community of faith, we need to come around these women and take them by the hand and encourage them and instruct and help. I think about so many of these younger women today who are in the child-bearing and child-rearing season of life, and they are just exhausted! Life feels like one major constant pressure! 

That’s a difficult season of life. Now, every season of life has its challenges, but I don’t know any season of life that is more challenging in certain respects than this season of being a young wife and mother and trying to keep it all together!

It’s an easy time for bitterness to creep in and resentment, wrong thinking, depression . . . this whole thing of postpartum depression. I think one of the reasons for this is that younger women are feeling very “on their own” today. They’ve got all these children and all this responsibility, and they just need the encouragement and the infrastructure of the whole community of faith to come alongside of them. Now, they don’t need, necessarily, ten women in their lives, but they need a few who will come alongside and be helpful to them, help them keep their spiritual and emotional equilibrium.

The Scripture doesn’t specifically tell us this, but I think this is probably what happened when Mary of Nazareth found out that she was going to have a child. She was probably fourteen years of age or thereabouts, a young teenager. This was not the way she had written the script, but it was the way God had written the script. 

And remember what she did as soon as she got this word? Where did she go? She went to her older cousin Elizabeth’s home and spent months there with this older woman. The Scripture doesn’t tell us what they talked about, but we do know that when Mary got to her house, Elizabeth encouraged her.

Elizabeth praised the Lord with Mary for the gift that God had given to her, and for God’s choice in her life (see Luke 1:35–45). And what a blessing this must have been to Mary over those months as she was around this older woman who could mentor her, who could nurture her. 

Now, Elizabeth didn’t have a lot of experience as a mother, but she had a lot of experience with the Lord, a lot of experience in life. She had learned to wait on the Lord, to trust the Lord, and I believe it was during this season that Elizabeth was investing in Mary’s life so that Mary could be prepared for the season of her life of being a wife and a mother.

There are so many areas where younger women need the input of older women. There’s a lot of false teaching out there today! You can walk into your Christian bookstore today and you can pick up books and Christian women’s magazines that have erroneous thinking, teaching that is not rooted in the Scripture.

And sometimes it’s not really clear that it’s wrong. That’s what makes it deceptive. It looks good but it’s not true, and women are easily deceived and are buying into the world’s philosophies that are so destructive. So the role of the older women is to lovingly instruct and teach what is good—to teach God’s ways.

Now, that kind of mentoring involves discipline. It’s not easy. It requires the willingness to have an ongoing relationship. It requires patience, the willingness to be honest as an older woman and to open up your own life and to share out of your failures.

It takes time and, much like child training, you seldom see dramatic results overnight. It’s not just, “Come take my six-week class on how to be a woman of God.” It’s get next to them in life, come alongside of them, and that takes time. It takes time maybe on the phone or maybe together, just life to life. It may be having them into your home, just communicating from life to life, that takes time. 

And so, what is the challenge here? First of all, to older women, God’s design for you is that you be intentional at this season of your life about being involved, engaged, in the lives of younger women around you, about bringing them to spiritual maturity.

Don’t look around and say, “Who’s teaching these women!?” That’s a good question! You’re supposed to be doing this! Teach what is good. Train the young women!

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