Saturday morning I was in an inner-city elementary school in Washington, D.C., where a friend of my daughter is a teacher. What I saw and heard there broke my heart. Ninety percent of those kids lived in the projects, and despite the earnest efforts of teachers, many of them are reading far below grade level.
Eric will tell you it’s not his parents’ fault that he’s in prison. He started using drugs as a teenager and then, before long, he was selling them. When a drug deal went bad, he killed a would-be customer.
“I wasn’t raised like that,” he says.
Rushing through an airport to catch a recent flight, I was able to take advantage of a moving walkway that sped up my journey – and then another. I was about five steps onto the second one when I realized it wasn’t moving.
To say that I am a person who “hates” waiting would be a complete understatement. For me, waiting feels like a total waste of time, an empty void where nothing happens except impatience, frustration, and annoyance. Whether it involves waiting for a scheduled appointment with the doctor, it feels like they purposely make people wait; or waiting for an inattentive driver to respond to the traffic light that has already turned green for at least a second or more; or waiting for my wife to get ready so that we can get to church on time, it does not take much waiting time for me to become thoroughly impatient and irritable.
Washington Nationals’ all-star shortstop Ian Desmond was a major part of the team that returned playoff baseball to the District of Columbia for the first time in 79 years. Now, he is joining Prison Fellowship and Angel Tree to make sure that the children of incarcerated parents aren’t forgotten.
Through a partnership with the Fellowship of Fathers Foundation, 25,000 copies of a new bestselling book about fatherhood will be made available to Angel Tree dads this Christmas.
In the opening pages of Be a Better Dad Today! 10 Tools Every Father Needs, author Gregory Slayton writes, “I didn’t have much of a dad growing up.
Is your family considering participating in the Angel Tree program at your church this Christmas? If so, Prison Fellowship has a new resource available online that will help parents share with their kids the importance of serving families with a mother or a father in prison.
Every November, Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree recruits thousands of churches across the United States to join us in serving children and families. But, the need is great. Blogging about children with a parent in prison can be a simple but powerful way to raise awareness on behalf of the more than 2.7 million vulnerable and needy children in America with a parent in prison.
Due to prison overcrowding in his native Hawaii, Shane is serving his time in Arizona—3,000 miles away from his daughter and son.
In July, the Board of General Superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene announced a partnership with Prison Fellowship in an effort to increase the number of congregations participating in the Angel Tree Christmas program. A recent press release from the denomination reveals just how successful the campaign has been.
In prison ministry it’s easy to focus our attention on the most hardened cases. When a lifelong criminal (like the subject of this week’s feature story) turns to Jesus, it’s a real cause for celebration! But it’s also a miracle when God intervenes to turn a young person away from a hopeless lifestyle.
As Christmas approaches, Prison Fellowship will continue to update our list of the counties with the most underserved Angel Tree children. The following 50 counties are those with the largest number of children signed-up for the Angel Tree program that have not yet been assigned to a church (as of 10/23/12).
No Prison Fellowship program touches more lives than Angel Tree. Every gift presented with love to a prisoner’s child blesses not just that child, but also the caregiver, the incarcerated parent, and every volunteer who steps forward to make a phone call, take an Angel Tree tag, wrap a present, host a party, or make a delivery.
Live in southern California? Want a professional photographer to capture your family’s unique personality? Enter to win our CONTEST!
Please read the rules carefully before you enter:
To be eligible, your family must have been served by Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree program one or more times within the last four years.It is hard to believe, but my little girl has been married a month. The weekend of the wedding was fantastic. Family and friends came together to celebrate the joining of two people called by God to live as one.
The wedding day was almost surreal.
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