Reverse the Curse: After her world crashes, Kim Cash journeys to new identity in Christ
By Tony Nochim | Southeast Outlook Writer | March 5, 2020
Photos by Stephen Powell
Kim Cash didn’t see it coming. After work one day in November 2013, Cash came home to an abandoned house— her husband and most of her possessions were gone.
“My ex-husband was the provider of the home for the last 20 years, so when he left, everything I knew left,” said Cash, a Southeast Christian Church member. “When I came home, the money was gone. I couldn’t find the retirement anywhere. I was 55 years old. I was thinking, ‘Oh God, what am I going to do?’”
But when stripped of everything on which she based her identity—money and her mate—Cash cried out to God on the floor of her home.
“I wasn’t sure how to pray really,” added Cash, 61. “At that time, the only thing I knew were ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary’ and stuff like that. I remember walking down the hall seeing everything gone, crying and falling on my knees. I just remember begging God to help me. I was so lost and so broken. I was seeking something all my life, and I never knew it was God.”
Cash and her ex-husband had struggles throughout their marriage, but she never thought he would rent a truck and load it up with whatever he wanted from the house. He also cleaned out their bank accounts.
“I remember him calling me at 5 o’clock in the evening and saying, ‘I moved out,’” she said. “I was like, ‘What?’ He said, ‘I just don’t love you like you want me to.’”
As Cash reflected, she realized that day was a cakewalk compared to never knowing God.
“This is the importance of really digging into Scripture,” Cash said, “All the turmoil and things we go through are a vacation compared to eternal separation from God.”
Wine, Wealth, and ‘War Room’
Cash grew up in Jacksonville, Florida.
Her family traveled a lot because her father worked in the motion picture business for TriStar Pictures.
“I grew up Catholic,” Cash said. “I don’t really ever remember growing up in church. I didn’t know you could have a relationship with Jesus.”
Kim Cash grateful God found her and set her free
“I just knew when I prayed, I could be thinking about a thousand things, but all I needed to do were 10 ‘Hail Marys’ and 10 ‘Our Fathers’ and go to confession and my sins were forgiven. I never opened the Bible, and when I finally did, it was like a foreign language to me.”
Without much of a resume after her husband left, Cash found a new job in digital marketing and began working her way up the corporate ladder and making more money. The drinking problem that started during her marriage snowballed.
“I was working toward a six-figure income,” she said. “That was my goal because my ex-husband made well over six figures. How he viewed me as worthy was by how much money I made. I kind of consumed my life with working. My drinking started at 10 a.m. with two large bottles of wine that I drank throughout the day. I was trying to cover up the misery I was in, and it was an addiction. I didn’t realize it was a problem until people would say to me, ‘Do you remember talking to me last night?’”
She also gained 44 pounds toward the end of the marriage and underwent treatment for skin cancer.
In August 2015, a friend named Laura invited her to Southeast’s Blankenbaker Campus.
“Laura did a simple invitation to church that changed my life,” Cash said.
“I heard the Gospel for the first time in a way that made sense to me. Kyle’s gift of storytelling just reached me. I was weeping and then the music is playing and I’m like, ‘Where has this been all my life?’ I remember thinking, ‘I am so grateful I found Southeast and that God found me.’”
Laura also invited Cash to see “War Room,” a movie starring Priscilla Shirer that explores the power of prayer. She ended up seeing it in theaters 14 times.
“It was my life,” Cash added. “I was Priscilla Shirer on steroids before she was discipled by Miss Clara. He was my ex-husband in the way he treated her and had eyes for other women. I related to this movie in a big way. Two quotes were profound impacts on my life: ‘It’s not your job to fix your husband’ and ‘I would rather have a man chasing Jesus than a house full of stuff.’ I remember becoming unglued. That became my mantra because I had the house full of stuff, and I was miserable.”
Cash accepted Christ at a Southeast service, and Laura baptized her Nov. 15, 2015.
Finding Freedom
Cash began attending Great Adventure Weekend Group, where she met her future spouse, Tony Cash. They married Sept. 2, 2017.
She was still working 60-plus hours a week and hiding her drinking habits.
Tony eventually found out.
“I said, ‘I’m ready to quit,’” Cash said. “I’ll never forget it. Tony leaned over to me and said, ‘Kim, leave it at the cross. God didn’t save you for your to keep falling. By His stripes you are healed.’ I was carrying a bag of rocks and when I would go up and ask God to take it away, I would leave with that bag of rocks. This time I visually left it, walked away and have not looked back since.”
In January 2018, Tony, who had given his life to Christ while serving time in prison, quit his job to become a missionary to former inmates through Team Expansion, a missionary agency working to multiply disciples and churches among unreached people groups worldwide.
The job with Team Expansion required the Cashes to raise their own support.
After ignoring God’s prompting for six month, Cash made the difficult decision to quit her well-paying job to serve with her husband’s ministry.
“That’s when I heard God say to me, ‘You’re not serving an almighty dollar; you’re serving an Almighty God,’” Cash said.
Tony remembers the day Kim made that decision.
“She now wants to use all her tools in the digital marketing world for Him,” he said. “It was like the wrestling match between God and Jacob. I told her, ‘You’re just going to have to listen to Him. You’re turning down our only permanent income, but our focus needs to be on what God wants us to do.’ She began to use her skills to amplify what we were doing with Team Expansion. That day, I knew she was all in by leaving her work. It was hard, but it was obedience.”
The Cashes go to a halfway house each Saturday evening for the sole purpose of “making disciples who make disciples,” and Tony leads a 3/3rds Bible study.
Since September 2018, Tony has baptized 141 men. Of those 141, they have baptized 36 more men. Those 36 men have baptized 20 others, and the chain has continued.
The Southeast Outlook, March 5, 2020 Edition