 Friday, August 1, 2014
It’s something we seldom hear about. What happens to the kids if mom, or dad, is arrested and goes to jail? It’s happening more and more. The statistics are horrifying. In the U. S. 1.7 million children have at least one parents in prison. Include local jails and the number is 2.7 million. Some little ones are traumatized by witnessing the arrest of their parents. Other are immediately abandoned when a parent is marched away to a patrol car. A research study in California found that only 13% of arresting officers even thought about asking if the person they were taking to jail had children.
But it gets a lot worse, from my perspective. As a minister of deliverance, I’m always wary of ways that the devil can get legal access to a person’s life. As unfair as it may seem, this is one such way. The trauma of seeing an officer knock at the door, or worse yet break down the door, and enter with guns pointed at mom or dad can be just the open door the devil is seeking. Then, if the parent is arrested and the child is abandoned, even by a bad parent, because of the arrest, another door is opened. Granted, some of these kids might be better off with a violent or drug-dealing parent gone. What really concerns me is that the number of children with an imprisoned parent is likely to grow larger. That makes a bigger target area for Satan. As a nation, our only hope to stem this tide of children becoming at risk for demonization is to reverse the respect we’ve lost for the family; and restore the ideal of a two-parent home where love is present and crime is absent.
An encouraging word: THE PRICE YOU PAY FOR SIN “I am worn out from groaning; all night long I flood my bed with weeping.” That lament of David in Psalm 6:6 makes this one of the saddest Psalms. What was the source of David’s misery? His sin. He looked with lust on Bathsheba and paid for it the rest of his life. His emotional pain was deep and long-lasting. His sin took but a moment to conceive in his mind, but its consequences lasted a lifetime. The lesson to learn is that you can be sure of this: The price you will pay for disobeying God will last much longer, and be much more devastating, than you could ever imagine.
Bob Larson has trained healing and deliverance teams all over the world to set the captives free and Do What Jesus Did� (Luke 4:18). You can partner with Bob and support this vision to demonstrate God’s power in action by calling 303-980-1511 or clicking here to donate online. |
