Bishop T.D Jakes has opened up about how he and his family felt when they discovered that their daughter was pregnant at the age of 13.
Bishop T.D Jakes who recently released a book gave an in-depth interview to promote it in which he revealed some of the most crushing times in his life and what finding out about his daughter’s pregnancy at 13 did to him.
According to the Bishop, it was a worst experience because as a pastor, his life has always been under the microscope.
“You mean, other than being born in between two dead babies and my father getting sick when I was 10 and dying when I was 16, or my mother dying in my arms at 40 of Alzheimer’s and living in my house until she died? You mean, my daughter getting pregnant at 13 — and the daughter of a minister? And she’s such a great example of my book. She should have written the book. She probably could have written it better than me. I thought that [the pregnancy] was just the worst thing in the world that could possibly happen to me. And now that same daughter is ministering all over the world.”
He went on to state that crushing times are meant to be strengthen who we are
“It is the struggle that makes you strong. It’s resistance, weight-training. If you don’t have the resistance, you won’t build the muscle. And so I wrote ‘Crushing’ to help people make sense out of the parts of their lives that are not working or didn’t work or didn’t turn out the way they thought, and to make them look for the gift in it and try to have a more positive attitude about it and wait for that gift to ferment. And sometimes the wisdom of the aged only comes through the failures of the youth.”