Sometimes, we feel God moves at a snail’s pace. We pray a prayer. Get up, shower, and go about our day. We go to bed and get up the next day and pray for the same issue. Our God is not bound by time. He works from an eternal perspective while our thoughts and actions have been conditioned around time. Peter wrote, “Beloved, do not let this one thing escape your notice: With the Lord a day is like a…
After my son was sent to the state penitentiary, I read in Jeremiah 29 how the Lord allowed His people to be taken into captivity. The Lord allowed it because the people refused to humble themselves before the Lord and live according to His ways. My son admitted that his lifestyle was not pleasing to the Lord and the Lord allowed him to be taken into captivity in order to get his attention. In the early days of his incarceration,…
In a previous blog post, Freedom from Despair, I shared how we can fall into despair if we expect to have a fair life. Sadly, life is not fair. For families of inmates, we expect our loved ones to receive a fair trial, and when that does not happen, it has the potential to lead us into despair. In Acts 16, when Paul and Silas were wrongfully convicted and thrown into prison, how did they respond? Paul and Silas did…
“… always pray and never give up” (Luke 18:1 NLT). That phrase from the NLT version in the first verse of Luke 18 became seared in my mind after my son’s arrest. While my oldest son sat in a county jail awaiting trial, I cried out, “Lord our life is not supposed to look like this!” I prayed for my son to love the Lord his God with all his heart, soul, and mind. Now we faced a tragic situation…
With the holiday season quickly approaching, many families with incarcerated loved ones begin to experience the tug of negative emotions. The empty place at the table and in family pictures is a reminder of not only who is missing but why. When we turn to the word of God, we find many comforting passages that remind us that we have hope in Him. “The Lord is my strength and my shield, my heart trusts in Him and I am helped:…