Help! I'm Raising My Children Alone

A Guide for Single Parents
and Those Who Sometimes
Feel That Way

By T.D. Jakes
Creation House, $11.99

ISBN 0884194494

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Moms, Look Ahead for Help

Review by Mary Jane Harrison

T.D. Jakes begins his new book Help! I'm Raising my Children Alone with strong words from the Bible about the sanctity of marriage. He likens marriage to a blood covenant, and divorce to the savage ripping apart of something meant to be held together. "Divorce was never meant to be," he says with the scriptural backing of Matthew 19.

But he knows the statistics on broken marriages as well: more than 3,349,000 divorced single mothers and more than 664,000 divorced single fathers in this country. In the pages of Help! I'm Raising my Children Alone, he looks beyond the single mothers and fathers to the approximate 18,600,000 children living in a home with a single parent.

As you read his sharp words and figures on the tragedy of broken homes, you know Jakes is going to lay it out straight. He has lived through the pain of growing up in a single-parent home himself, and in no uncertain terms he calls parents back to the obligation of raising their children. You see, Jakes loves children. He knows our dreams about marriage seldom come true, but he urges us to keep the vision. "Children are a vision. They speak to our future," he reminds us. "If you lose your children, you cut off your future."

In the 11 chapters of this book, Jakes speaks from a caring heart, as he relies on the clear mandates of Scripture about raising children as a single parent. (Several chapters are directed to the unmarried single parent and several to the remarried parent.) Regardless of how parents, most often the mothers, arrived in the situation, Jakes offers encouragement and help at the same time he tells them they must not sidestep their responsibilities. "Am I stepping on some toes?" he asks. "Good! We are in a battle to save the seed."

Jakes's power as a speaker translates to the written page in moving word pictures and phrases. He has a special gift for relating the people and actions in Scripture to today's situations. His description of a woman without a husband just after delivery of her child is unforgettable.

Though these children are nearly always loved by their mothers, they, like Hagar's child by Abram (see Gen. 16ff.) may be cast to the shrubs, more likely in our day to the wasteland of television or neighborhood gangs. Using the life experiences of Hagar, Jakes gives single mothers points for meditation and action. Other biblical models, positive and negative, are Rahab, Jephthah, Elijah, Boaz and Ruth.

Jakes has addressed other special audiences in his previous books Daddy Loves His Girls; Woman, Thou Art Loosed! and Loose That Man and Let Him Go! Readers may also know him from his Manpower video series. His ministry is at the Potter's House in Dallas, Texas.

"Take it from a woman who knows: whatever you deposit today will be your only withdrawal tomorrow," says his mother Odith Jakes in her Foreword to the book Help! I'm Raising my Children Alone. Jakes uses the same words in a later chapter as he guides single parents, saying, "Remember, joy comes in the morning." His mama raised him right!

Mary Jane Harrison is a single mother in Odessa, TX.