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What do you do when you’re single daughter is pregnant? Sarah Jakes’ bestseller Lost and Found seeks to answers the questions WHY would a daughter raised in a loving Christian home allow herself to become pregnant at the age of 14? Or for that matter, at any age? HOW could they do that to their parents? And how should the parents respond?
For more than a year in the late sixties, I was chaplain at the William Booth Salvation Army home for unwed mothers in Oakland, California. I vividly remember my first night of ministering to these girls. Before I spoke in the chapel, the girls had thrown a protest in their dining hall. They didn’t want this man “preaching at them”. Most of them by far felt totally removed from the love of God. So all they could think was that I was going to bring condemnation too, just as their parents had when they found out about their pregnancy. I sit here realizing that happened almost fifty years ago!
Many of the girls in the home eventually came to Christ and it was remarkable to see their new joy. You could clearly see they had been born again. I thrill to the memory of it. But rather than the nightmare all these girls were going through at the home decreasing in the past fifty years, teenage pregnancy out of wedlock is today a nationwide epidemic Christian parents and all other parents need to know what to do about it. Shall they abandon the love of God and cast their daughter out, stone her? Or?
I also remember what I had thought before and after I first saw the unwed girls. Before I saw them, I expected to see a group of hard-bitten mob-type girls and was shocked to discover that almost all of them were just young frightened kids who looked like they lived next door. Their boyfriends had abandoned almost all of them. Their parents had abandoned almost all of them. And they believed God must have abandoned them too if they had had any relationship with Him before their pregnancy. I never condemned them or preached at them, instead I focused on sharing the love of Christ with all of them. Christ would never leave nor forsake them no matter what they did. We are ALL sinners saved by grace who become saints in His eyes (Galatians 2:20 – 21). God’s love is unconditional with no strings attached (John 3:16). Honestly asking Christ into your life to be your Savior (Romans 10:8–11) is to be set free. Sin has awful consequences in this world, but be of good cheer, Christ has overcome the world.
I highly commend Sarah Jake’s book to you. No matter how young we were saved by Christ we were just like the title of her book – Lost and Found. Because this is such a vital subject, I am going to take most of today to share her testimony with you. Sarah is honest and has the kind of answers Christians should know, not because this same situation will necessarily happen to them, but because they will have God’s answers, love and grace, to share with those parents and daughters who face it.
What is a parent to do who discovers their teenage daughter is pregnant?