One Teen Mom’s Journey to Making a Difference

Female Announcer: The following program is sponsored by Focus on the Family and is made possible by the heartfelt support of listeners like you.
John Fuller: This is John Fuller, and please remember to let us know how you're listening to these programs on a podcast, app, or website.
Lisa Steven: People need to know that God still does miracles, not just across the ocean or back in the Bible. He does miracles today in our own backyard, and it's incredible to be a part of watching him do that.
John Fuller: Lisa Steven is here with us today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly to talk about the hope that teens and young adults have in their fear and uncertainty of unexpected pregnancy. She has a miraculous story, and thanks for joining us. I'm John Fuller.
Jim Daly: John, I'm actually looking forward to this discussion. Focus on the Family, we do take hits from time to time because we're discussing hard topics. But if we can't talk about hard things within the church, within the community of believers, where do you talk about them? In the world, you get the world's impression and the world's influence. Today, the tough topic is teen pregnancy. It happens. I think the testimony of our guest, along with how she has turned that pain into passion and what she does now to help teen moms, is incredible. I'm looking forward to sharing that with everybody. Also, how this is an example of "What about me, Lord?" stepping up from obscurity. You're just a person waking up every day doing the day-to-day things, and then you make yourself available to the Lord. He says, "You don't even know what I'm going to do with you, but here we go."
John Fuller: Lisa Steven was a teen mom, and she's spent the past 25 years or so supporting women through Hope House, which is a residential facility for young moms here in Colorado. She's turned her experiences and captured those in a book called *A Place to Belong*. The subtitle is *The True Story of a Teen Mom, a Humbling Leadership Journey, and a House Called Hope*.
Jim Daly: Lisa, it is great to have you here. Welcome.
Lisa Steven: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here with you guys today.
Jim Daly: I want to start with something heart-wrenching. As I read through the material and read the book, you said that when you were a young child, you said, "God didn't live at our house." As a parent, that brings me to tears just thinking that my child would even feel that. But many of us kids, I grew up in a similar household, and it gripped me because I thought to myself that's something I could have said for myself, but I never put it in that context. Tell us what you meant by that and why you said that.
Lisa Steven: Thank you for asking. I grew up in a household that I described as often walking on eggshells. Everybody was just waiting for a big fight to happen between my parents. My dad was an alcoholic and worked sometimes and didn't work sometimes. There was just a lot of tension in our household, a lot of fights between my parents, so it was very chaotic. When we would go visit my grandma and she would take us to church, she went to this little Lutheran church in Colorado Springs. She would take us to church, and everything was so orderly. Everything happened in an order in the service. It was so peaceful. I thought, "God must live at my grandma's church. I really wish God would come live at my house and make it peaceful and orderly and not chaotic." As a six-year-old kiddo, I thought God only lived in certain places where there were peace and order.
Jim Daly: I think that's exactly why Jesus said, "Don't get in the way of kids coming to me," because children have a way of feeling it, of expressing it, often with greater clarity than adults. The older we get, the more obscure it gets for us, but a child saying, "God doesn't live at my house," it meant the presence of the Lord was not in your home. That's a good definition of being far away from God. You are the teen mom. Let's get into that. I appreciate that vulnerability. I can remember being in high school, and I knew friends that were in that situation, both men and women. We're going to concentrate on the girls. Obviously, it takes two, and we're not ignoring the boy or the man's role in this. We get that. Let's talk about that teen girl, which you were, who feels isolated, separated, desperate, maybe especially in your home. It created greater dysfunction now. Describe the setting. How old were you? What was happening in your life?
Lisa Steven: My parents divorced when I was 13, which was a good thing. I was not that kid that wanted their parents to get back together because they needed to not be together. I lived primarily with my mom. We didn't see our dad a lot. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I met John, my boyfriend and now husband for almost the last 40 years. We met cruising the mall. There was a mall in Westminster called Westminster Mall, and it was square. All the kids would drive around the mall in opposite circles. If you liked someone, you'd wave at them and tell them to pull over. Here I am in this giant sea green Buick with my friend Liz. We would beg her mom to let us borrow this car, and we were not cool. A very cool car went by the other direction. My soon-to-be boyfriend had a 1974 Chevy Nova that was rust-colored and souped up, pushed up in the back, and it just roared. It drove by, and we waved. I was elbowing my friend Liz and saying, "If they stop, I get to talk to the driver," because she always got the cute boys. We were making a deal. They pulled over, much to my surprise, and I met John. He was kind and sweet. We started dating, and he took me to meet his family. His family home was so very different from mine. They ate dinner together as a family. His mom had a kidney disease and required dialysis. She did dialysis at home, and his father would do the dialysis. He would put the needle in and start the machine, and they would sit together, and he cared for her. She cared for her family so well and introduced me to the Lord in a different way than I had known the Lord before. Being in their home was like, "This is what I want. This is what I think family is supposed to look like." It was like my grandma's house.
Jim Daly: A year later, almost to the date, you're sitting in that same Chevy Nova outside of a clinic, having just gotten the test results that you were pregnant. You were 17 years old.
Lisa Steven: John's response, to his credit, was to turn to look at me in the seat of the car and say, "Well, what are you doing two weeks from Friday?" That was my marriage proposal. We, of course, had to then go home and tell our parents that we were pregnant. I wasn't too worried about telling mine.
Jim Daly: I want to get into that because we've had people on the program talk about that experience from both a parent's side and the teen girl's side. How did that go when you went and told your mom? You must have had a separate discussion with your dad.
Lisa Steven: Separate conversations. Primarily with my parents, I didn't have much of a relationship with either one of them by that point. I did a lot of caring for my younger siblings and lived pretty independently from them. My mom worked all the time because my dad didn't pay child support. Not that I wanted to tell her this, but she wasn't terribly interested. Really, the big deal was telling his parents because I did not want them to be disappointed in me. I respected them and looked up to them, and I didn't want them to be disappointed in John. Telling them was much harder. My soon-to-be husband, in his infinite 17-year-old wisdom, decided that we should tell them while my future mother-in-law was doing dialysis. We're standing there in the basement of their home watching a movie, and she's doing dialysis. Her blood's going through a machine next to her. I'm thinking, "Can this kill her if we tell her this news?" I will say that their reaction was probably the single greatest act of parenting that I had experienced to date. They could have been, and maybe were, but they didn't express it to us, angry or shouting or super disappointed. I'm sure later there were probably tears and conversations. It's not something any parent really wants for their child. But their response was to say, "All right, let's sit down and have a conversation about this. Let's talk about what marriage looks like." Not in a judgmental way like a shotgun marriage, but supportive. They'd been married for many years at that point and just imparted some wisdom on what this was going to look like.
Jim Daly: In the book, you talk about situational poverty and generational poverty, the distinction between those two. Tell us what you meant by that.
Lisa Steven: I did not know until we started Hope House that there was such a thing as situational or generational poverty. I kind of learned along the way in our journey of opening a nonprofit. Situational poverty, essentially, we were a middle-class family with a middle-class background, even though my dad had a situation, alcoholism, that caused us to be in poverty a lot of the time. What I mean by middle-class values, we still valued education. In the middle class, we value saving money. We value getting an education and completing further education and having a career, eventually owning a home, and at some point in your life, retiring. When you grow up in generational poverty, which is about 95% of the moms we work with, their value system is different than that. They've never experienced family members typically not even graduating from high school, certainly not graduating from college. They've often experienced domestic violence and abuse in their homes. Almost all of our moms have experienced some form of abuse, whether that's physical abuse or emotional abuse or sexual abuse. Unfortunately, their homes are, like mine, highly chaotic, but it's a given that highly chaotic is the norm. It's been the norm for generations. In my family, we knew it was not the norm; our grandparents hadn't lived that way. One of the primary things we do at Hope House is model for our mamas what it looks like to live a healthy, stable life in connection with God. They've never experienced that. It's really hard to do something you've never seen done. Small example, if you've never been read to as a child and you have no idea that reading to your children will help them to prepare for school, you just don't read to them. As soon as we let them know that reading to their children helps them, they're like, "Where do I get books?" because they've never been inside of a library. They don't even know how to get books.
Jim Daly: Your mother-in-law also got you engaged with MOPS, which is a wonderful organization, Mothers of Preschoolers. They've been on the broadcast many times, and they're right here in Colorado as well. Describe that MOPS connection and then Teen MOPS. I didn't even know that existed.
Lisa Steven: My mother-in-law was in the very first group that was the first MOPS group ever. They were called the Fenton Street Gang. They all lived on Fenton Street in Wheat Ridge, and they started meeting at a little Baptist church there in Wheat Ridge on eight little Sunday school chairs. It was revolutionary to have their children in MOPPETS or childcare learning about Jesus while they got to finish a whole entire adult sentence. Needless to say, MOPS, or now MomCo, went viral. They're all over the world now. I, however, as a teenage mom, my husband and I had gotten married. I didn't have a lot of, well, I had no friends. I was very isolated. I was home with my baby, and my husband was working. My mother-in-law said, "You need to go to MOPS." The last thing I wanted to do was walk into a room full of women who all did it right. They got married before they got pregnant. The one thing that does not change throughout the years in terms of teen pregnancy is there is always, 100% of the time, shame attached to being a teen mom. It's everything from you walk into the grocery store with a baby on your hip and people are looking at you funny like, "Are you the babysitter or is that your baby?" all the way to being in a doctor's office and being truly shamed or treated very poorly or having a call made to social services when one was not warranted. Lots of really hard stories of judgment and shame that teen moms face. I was pretty sure if I walked into a room full of women who all got married and did it the right way in my mind, that that would be what I would experience. But I was no way going to say no to my mother-in-law, who was my greatest influence in my life and still is. So I went to MOPS, and those women just welcomed me with open arms and treated me like I was any other mom and treated my son like he was worthy, and they valued him and they valued me. It was a wonderful experience. Within about a year and a half, they asked if I wanted to help with volunteering with the MOPPETS, which was what they called the children's ministry in those days. I was stunned. I was like, "Maybe they want to check my driver's license." I was maybe 20 at that point. I'm like, "You want me to be in a leadership role?" I didn't even know what that meant and had never been in a meeting, had never seen an agenda. I didn't have any clue what leadership meant, and they gave me an opportunity that really led to where we are today.
John Fuller: Our guest today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly is Lisa Steven, and we're really enjoying the conversation with her about her story. That's captured in the book *A Place to Belong: The True Story of a Teen Mom, a Humbling Leadership Journey, and a House Called Hope*. Get a copy of the book from us here. The link is at focusonthefamily.com/broadcast.
Jim Daly: Hope House, to dig a little deeper there, it had a very difficult start. You mention in the book someone named Tracy. Tell us that story and the origin of Hope House.
Lisa Steven: My involvement in MOPS, my experience in MOPS led to me being a part of Teen MOPS, which at the time was groups that MOPS had started for teenage mothers. We started the very second Teen MOPS group at Arvada Covenant Church. One of the young ladies who attended that group, Tracy, was just so dear. She had twin one-year-old girls when she joined our MOPS group. She came to a Bible study that we did on the off weeks. She ended up accepting Christ. Sadly, about a year into her time with us, she was killed by her boyfriend. She had tried to separate from him, and it did not go well, and he beat her to death, frankly. It was a terrible thing for all of us, of course, her family. But honestly, she just had nowhere to go. She had no relief, and there were no resources for a young teen parent who already had children. At that point in time, in 1997-ish, we had several maternity homes in the Denver metro area where you could go if you were pregnant and trying to make a birth decision, but there was no home where you could go if you were a teenager with a child. All of the transitional housing and shelters were for 18-year-olds and up, oftentimes 21-year-olds and up. If you were 16, 17 years old and had a child, there was literally no resource for you. Many of our teen moms in the Teen MOPS group were coming to us asking us, "Can I stay at your house?" One of our leadership members tried that. It was not a great idea. Teen moms are absolutely amazing, but they come with a lot of not amazing folks in their life that are around them. It wasn't a great idea for one of them to move into one of our private homes. We just started looking for what's out there. What is available to these girls? When we found that nothing was, someone in that leadership group had the idea, it wasn't me, that said, "We should open a home for teen moms." I was like, "Well, that sounds super exciting, and I really want to be a part of it." I also had plans for my life. We'd had two more children. Now my husband and I had been married for a number of years, had three kids. My kids are finally all in elementary school. I'm planning to go to college and get a degree. I thought I maybe wanted to be a teacher. Saying yes to God, being a part of this thing that he was calling into being, was exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time. It meant setting aside my own plans for my life, and I knew that. It meant jumping into something that I had no experience doing. I still today have never been to college, don't know how to type, type with three fingers. I have no business degree or business background, no social work background, but I was willing to say yes to God. I think that's part of the point of the book. What can happen when you are willing to say yes to something that's too big for you, and then God gets to do it, and you get to go along and be a part of the adventure? It's pretty incredible.
Jim Daly: Describe some of those things that you knew you were right where you needed to be because God showed up to deliver a miracle.
Lisa Steven: I often will look back because now we're in a different financial position than we were in for the many years that we were building Hope House. But when we first started Hope House, it was just a group of people who had a heart and a passion and not a background in doing this type of work. We were offered the opportunity to move into a home that was at 69th and Sheridan. The folks who owned the home were going to develop housing there, townhomes. They offered to give us the house with the provision that we pick it up and move it off their property so they could develop the property. Subsequently, a church literally four blocks down and one block over donated land for us to put the house on. I marched down to the city with my program director at the time and went to the city planning office and asked them how does one go about subdividing a piece of land from this church who's very generously going to donate this piece of property. They just laughed at us and said, "This is not going to happen. The folks who are doing their development have two months until they start digging. It's going to take you a whole year to rezone that property." I just stood there and argued with God and said, "Really, God? You'd give us a house and land, but we can't put it together?" My sweet program director just said, "Can you just check what the zoning is?" We needed an RL zoning. The planner rolls her eyes, goes back to this file cabinet in the back, pulls out this huge plat map. Right down in the corner was a big green stamp, RL. Well, it turns out that that church 25 years prior had zoned just that one little portion of their land for a maternity home and then never put ministry on that land. So long before I was ever a teenage mom, God knew what he was going to do in my life. He knew what he was going to do with that land. He moved through a group of people at a church, many of whom had passed on by that point. They did the ministry with that land in the end. Thank the Lord they zoned it that way. It was a miracle that still gives me goosebumps and one of the reasons that I felt like we needed to write the book. People need to know that God still does miracles, not just across the ocean or back in the Bible. He does miracles today in our own backyard, and it's incredible to be a part of watching him do that. That house, literally from the basement to the roof, once it was moved, was completed all through donation. I didn't even know what a capital campaign was at that point. It was so sweet, so innocent the way you approached it. You were helping maybe dozens of girls at the time, but now you're helping 280 teenage moms this year and about 340 kids.
John Fuller: You have so many stories, Lisa, about what God has done through Hope House in the lives of the people you serve. One or two stories that come to mind.
Lisa Steven: I just got off the phone with Alondra yesterday, one of our mamas who is an alumni. She's now in her early 30s and is moving to North Carolina. She came to us completely, truly homeless when she was 17 years old with a one-year-old little boy and moved into our residential program. She had a big dream of being a nurse, which is a stretch when you're a single teenage mom, and going to nursing school is very difficult. She lived in the residential program for about a year. She came to know Christ while she was in the program, joined a church, earned her GED through Hope House, and we were able to help her move on to college. It took about six years, but I got to sit in the auditorium as she it was the pinning ceremony where nurses get pinned. She had her then at that point eight-year-old son come across the stage to pin her nursing pin on her. I talk about in the book how no single biological family member was there present at that ceremony, but an entire row full of Hope House family was there jumping up and down and cheering and shouting for her when she got pinned. I often say what I hope that people can hear is that when you're so brave to say yes to God and then you get to experience what he does through that, it's incredible to see the fruits. To get to watch Alondra walk across that stage was a celebration for her, and it was a celebration for me. It was a miracle.
Jim Daly: We talk a lot about grace in the church and the Lord's love. We use words like "unconditional love." Sometimes we don't see it in terms of how we, his creation, express it because it's hard to do. I think in this place of teen pregnancy, right from the parents through the friends, through the churches even, that struggle to express God's love for those people in trouble. What's the last word from you about that experience which you had as a 17-year-old? What can we learn from all of that and what you do day-to-day at Hope House to make sure these women and in some cases, the boys or men that are part of it, feel the love of Christ even though they're in a disaster?
Lisa Steven: If you ever have the pleasure of meeting a teenage mom, the best way to connect with her right off the bat is just ask her her little one's name and then tell her how cute that name is. She will open up and start to respond to you. I often say there, out there somewhere, is a new teenage mom curled up with a baby in a place where she doesn't feel safe, and she doesn't know how to get out of the situation she's in. Right there next to her is God whispering in her ear, "Just hold on. I'm sending my people." We are his people. If we say yes and we go, great miracles can happen, and she can be changed and saved, and so can her little one.
Jim Daly: That is the story. That is where the Lord moves and works and redeems and saves a life from disaster, which all of us could have been in that space of disaster. Your story's powerful, Lisa. Thank you for coming and sharing it with us and all the listeners and the viewers. It's really quite a story. Let me turn to the listeners because we know there are women listening and they're saying, "That's me. That was my situation." I hope you know Focus on the Family is here for you. We do have those caring Christian counselors available to hear your story, pray with you, and provide additional resources to help you heal and connect to resources near you. We received a letter from a woman named Kimberly who was kicked out of her house as a pregnant teen because she refused to get an abortion. Think of that. I know a lot of girls face that pressure. As she was attending college classes, Focus on the Family came on the radio, and she wrote this: "Well, lo and behold, Focus on the Family was on. I cried. I cried because I knew God had answered my prayer. He was telling me that I could raise a godly child, and here's how it's done. I was hooked. I even scheduled my classes so I could listen to Focus on the Family every day. That was in 1986. Over the next years, I would be encouraged by the broadcast, books, resources. Thank you for being hope to a single 18-year-old mother. My daughter is now a beautiful young woman who loves the Lord. Praise God." That is your story, and that's an amazing story and it reflects what ministries like Hope House and Focus on the Family are attempting to do every day, supporting struggling moms like Kimberly, strengthening marriages in crisis, and coming alongside families who need help today. This month, the month of July, we're asking for 1,200 people to step up and support the ministry of Focus on the Family on a monthly basis. This broadcast and every ministry effort by Focus on the Family exists because of generous donors like you. That's what makes it possible, either monthly or in a one-time gift. According to our research, a monthly gift of $15 puts biblical resources into the hands of six families each year. So you might not even think $15 is much, but when you add it together, it really goes a long way. Imagine what your monthly support could do to strengthen families, strengthen our communities, transform this country. That's exactly what we've been talking about today. So please consider making that monthly donation to help strengthen families and let's do ministry together.
John Fuller: Your support really does make a huge difference as we help families across the country and around the world. We're a phone call away. Our number is 800, the letter A, and the word FAMILY. Or, of course, you can donate online and get a copy of Lisa's book and find other Focus on the Family resources. They're all there at focusonthefamily.com/broadcast. And next time, Tim Shoemaker shares how small faith lessons can change your child's life in a big way.
Tim Shoemaker: There are worse things than our kids thinking learning about God is fun. I mean, when Jesus sent Peter to go get the temple tax, go fishing and look in the fish's mouth. Come on, he was having some fun with him, wasn't he? I would think so. He's messing with him a little bit, having fun, and Peter learned a lesson he never forgot. God can provide in ways we can't imagine.
John Fuller: On behalf of the team, thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller, inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ.
Guest (Female): Devona grew up in a dysfunctional family filled with abuse, but we gave her hope. I support Focus on the Family because I hope others will be impacted and grow in Christ just as I have, that they will see healing in their past and what they can do for their future.
Jim Daly: I'm Jim Daly. Let's transform our nation one family at a time with your monthly pledge at focusonthefamily.com/family. Thank you.