Anchored by Grace: A Journey Through Adversity

Mel Langston

Jan Johnson

Mar 22, 2025

If you prefer to watch, the YouTube episode is below.

Have you ever been around someone who always seems joyful?

Who you can’t imagine has ever had pain in their life? For sure, not the kind of pain you might have experienced.

How can anyone smile, or praise God so freely? And maybe, just maybe, you’d like to know the secret to that.

Today’s guest is Mel Langston.

She is a licensed professional counselor with over 25 years experience as a psychotherapist. She provides services for adults, couples, and adolescents in an environment of mutual trust, openness and honesty.

She specialized in stress effects on physical health of mothers of sexually abused children and specialized in sexual abuse and sex offender counseling. She works with childhood abuse and trauma, domestic violence and other adult trauma, anger management and domestic violence treatment.

1×

0:00

-0:24

Listen to the trailer

I think that my testimony actually began before I was born. Because I consider myself a miracle that I was born.

My mother and father, sort of a post-World War II, kind of a story from Arkansas. And my mother's first husband was off at war. And my father, who was 50, probably 58 years old at that point, and my mother was probably about 34 at that point, fell in love.

And when her husband came back from the war and when my mother, my father's wife, found out about it, there was a big explosion in a little town called Blytheville, Arkansas.

And my father was very well known. And so they left town and they went and got married. They went and got married, spent time in Florida.

And then they came back to Memphis, and they bought a house. And I was born when my dad turned 60.

And during the time that I was in my mother's womb, her cancer metastasized. She'd had melanoma five years before and had her postpartum checkup. When I was six weeks old, it had metastasized to her stomach, and that gave her six months to live.

She died when I was roughly five and a half months old. But at that time, because my biological father, my two sisters who were 10 and 12, half-sisters, went back to live with their dad and their grandparents in Arkansas.

And I was left with the nanny and my father, and he found somebody before I was a year old to take care of me, to be his wife, stepmother. I never was close to her. They never told me that my stepmother wasn't my mother.

At ten years old, I found my mom’s birth certificate in the back of an album and I showed it to my step-sisters. I asked them who it was. I hadn’t see my maternal grandparents or my two sisters wince my mom died. And no one told me that was my birth mom.

By 11, I was running away from home.

I lived in downtown Memphis. I would wander around in Overton Park and walk down in the bayou. And I’d get picked up by the police. And by 12, I was smoking and drinking and running away.

I was in juvie. I was engaged at 14. I got in lots and lots of trouble, and my father kicked me out periodically. I went to ninth grade. He sent me to a residential school in Georgia.

I ran away again.

Police picked me up, brought me back to Memphis. The next year, he sent me off to Blackrock, Arkansas, to my maternal grandmother. But by then, that was the first time I'd ever met her and my two sisters. But by then my grandfather had died, so I never got to meet him. And then I lasted that year.

But I could see God's hand all the way through.

When I was a little girl, my dad didn't go to church, but he would drop me off at the Baptist church. And I memorized scripture. I can still remember it.

And then he dropped me off at the Methodist Church because I went to Brownies there. He never took me to church.

But I did go until he didn't want to take me anymore. So I had some rudimentary understanding of Christ. And then they sent me off to a camp in Arkansas, Hardy, Arkansas, for about three years.

And I can still remember a chapel on a Sunday morning when somebody was presenting Jesus. It was the first time I'd ever really understood the gospel.

I remember weeping. I remember hearing about the cross, hearing about his death and crying. I can remember that up right up to where I was sitting. I can still recall that. I knew I had a desire for God, but I was so broken.

When he sent me off to my sisters and when I was 15, my stepsisters in Vermont, had accepted Christ just a few, three or four years before then.

We didn't grow up together. She was older than me. She had accepted Christ and she had three little girls, and she was like this amazing mother and wife. It wasn’t what I was used to seeing.

Oh, no side note. I was raised in Memphis, Tennessee. If you ever saw the movie The Help. That was me. I was raised by a maid. So I was completely isolated.

I mean, I was alone. I was the only child in a home that didn't have love. My father never recovered from my mother's death.

I felt rejected from earliest, earliest, earliest. I really believe I was rejected in the womb because his older children completely rejected my mother. They wouldn't have anything to do with him until she died and then they came back in his life.

I got married and it was a miserable situation.I was trying to just do what God wanted me to do and to be a good wife and to do what God wanted me to do.

It's interesting when I look at this whole trajectory of my life and the way I've lived it, and somebody would look at it and say, well, that's crazy.

How could you be a Christian when you were doing those crazy things and you were still walking with God? But I learned really, really, really early, like in that Christian school that I went to where we memorized tons of scriptures to have a quiet time every morning, to spend time in the Word, to stand on the promises of God, you know, loved worship from the very beginning.

I loved Bible study and that's why I kept going to Bible college. I taught Bible classes. This was back in my 20s. I was teaching Sunday school from like 19 forward in children's church and Sunday school superintendents and all that kind of stuff with a man that was not a good man.

I'm still living the effects of having lived with him.

The residual effects are my kids have suffered so badly and the effects on their relationship with me because I was married to him.

I always tell people, it's like when you have a husband and a wife, even if it's only one of them that's doing something, kids see them as one. And it's not like a divisible thing. They see them as one and therefore they blame both.

At one point, my husband left me and four children while camping in Glacier National Park. The youngest was six months. He just walked off into the woods and didn’t come back for three days.

The forest rangers brought food to me and diapers, and I sat there. I wouldn't leave because I thought he was going to come back out.

But I was never afraid. I had a couple of Christian books in my Bible. We had lots of toys in the big Dodge van.

We had everything that we needed. And it rained and we'd walk to the bathroom. I can still see it and feel it. But I wasn't afraid ever.

But I wouldn't call anybody to ask for help because I didn't want anybody in my family to know how bad my husband was.

So I kept that secret for a long time. Wasn't the first time he'd gone off and done something crazy at all. But I remember I didn't call until the day that I really felt like I was getting paranoid.

There was something in my brain that was sort of like. And I could tell. And so I went up there and I called and he came back that afternoon.

But I had called my stepmother and my older half-sister. They were going to come out and get me. So now the whole family knew a little bit of the story.

If this resonates with you feel free to share it.

There's opportunities to learn and change and grow. And I learned myself that adversity. There's so many verses in the Bible that says adversity, adversity.

Where would Joseph be, where would David be if he hadn't gone through the bad stuff, learned how to trust in God, you know.

Get the character of God and then you get the personal experience, that experiential knowledge of God. That's what causes you to be able to trust no matter what.

I just didn't have any fear because he had implanted in me a knowledge of who he was and how he'd always taken care of me up to then and how I'd always shown up every time I needed him, every time through thick and thin, through bad stuff, he always showed up.

And he directed my path. I've had a very diverse career, but I believe that he has orchestrated circumstances every step of the way to get me to where I am now, which is where I am now.

So all things are going to work together if we trust him with all of our hearts. So of course I'm imperfect. I know that.

I'm aware I'm weak, frail and sinb it. We all are, but lots of times people don't really recognize or acknowledge it. I've just had so many opportunities in my life to see how weak I am and how frail I am and how bent to go the other direction I am.

But he always straightens me back out, you know, always when I've gone like that, he just gets me right back on the path where he wants me to be.