Seeing Jesus at the Parole Hearing

By Sara Shallenberger

This book contains the powerful story of one woman’s quest to be radically healed from a violent assault that happened in her home at age 20. After the pastors, counselors and experts all said it was impossible to be healed this side of heaven, Jesus said otherwise. Find out what miracle took place after Jesus told her look at His record of what He did every time someone asked Him to heal them. Find that same open door of faith into the supernatural power of God for your situation!
Hear how the miracles continued as the Lord gave her an open-eyed encounter with Him as she shared the good news of the gospel and invitation of salvation to the assailant at his parole hearing twenty-five years later. What was the Lord doing at that hearing? You will not want to miss it!
This book shares the simple and powerful truth of the gospel that Jesus can deliver us from the most impossible situations and heal us as if the trauma never happened. If your situation is truly impossible – Jesus can do something about it! This book includes gospel principles as well as common pitfalls women face on the road of recovery. It is written for every person who has faced devastation, tragedy, and trauma and who needs the miracle power of Jesus, as well as for all those who are hungry to encounter our soon coming King in whatever situation they are in.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9798385022434

Sara Shallenberger

Sara Shallenberger is a minister, teacher, author, and host of Victory in the Word which airs on radio and TV networks worldwide. She is founder of H2:2 Ministries and teaches on the authority of the believer, our covenant of healing, provision, and protection as well as the power of the Holy Spirit and the justice of God. Her mandate is to write many books that help the body of Christ grow in God’s purpose, plan, and power for their life. She ministers across denominational lines at home and abroad. She lives in Texas with her husband and two adult daughters.

Book preview

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SEEING

JESUS

AT THE

PAROLE HEARING

Sara Shallenberger

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Copyright © 2024 Sara Shallenberger.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

844-714-3454

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 979-8-3850-2237-3 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-3850-2238-0 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-3850-2243-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024906310

WestBow Press rev. date: 05/31/2024

Contents

Preface: Before the Before

Introduction

CHAPTER 1:THE SUCKER PUNCH

CHAPTER 2:THE FALLOUT

CHAPTER 3:CHALLENGES TO RECOVERY: ERROR AND RE-INJURY

CHAPTER 4:BUILDING BLOCKS FOR HEALING

CHAPTER 5:THE MIRACLE ANOINTING BREAKS THE YOKE - THE ANOINTING OF JOY

CHAPTER 6:THE POWER OF GOD TO KEEP US HEALED

CHAPTER 7:THE MIRACLE PAROLE HEARING

CHAPTER 8:SEEING JESUS AT THE PAROLE HEARING

CHAPTER 9:SEEING JESUS AT YOUR PAROLE HEARING

CHAPTER 10:GOD FINISHES THE BOOK

Appendix A: Do you know Jesus as Savior?

Appendix B: Open Letter to Incarcerated Offenders Seeking Early Release

Appendix C: If You are Dealing with the Aftermath of an Assault

Appendix D: Common Questions People Ask

About the Author

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the Lord Jesus who will not allow anything to stop His destiny for me. It is written for my two daughters, Megan and Amanda as well as the many other kingdom daughters around the globe, whom He has empowered to overcome whatever evil came against them, and walk in their destiny in Him. Special thanks to my faithful husband, Grant, who has supported me from the beginning.

Epigraph

Whoever knows and obeys my commandments is the person who

loves me. Those who love me will have my Father’s love, and I,

too, will love them and show myself to them. John 14:21 GW

If anyone comes to attack you, I will not have sent them. You will

win against anyone who tries to attack you. Isaiah 54:15 EASY

Do not be overcome and conquered by evil but

overcome evil with good. Romans 12:21 AMP

No weapon made will prevail against you. In court you

will refute every accusation. Isaiah 54:17CJB

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on

you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea

and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Acts 1:8 CSB

And they went out and preached everywhere, while

the Lord was working with them and confirming the

word by the signs that followed. Mark 16:20 AMP

So, the Lord’s message spread and became even

more powerful. CEV Acts 19:20

List of Translations Used

LSC

NASB

GNT

DRA

GW

DLGT

NIV

AMP

AMPC

CSB

BRG

NLT

TPT

Sara Shallenberger

H2:2 Ministries: Write what you see and send it.

Preface

Before the Before

Twenty-five years before I saw Jesus at a parole hearing in San Quentin, I had an assault in my home in 1986. The event was so traumatic that it became a turning point in my life, separating my life into two parts: life before the assault and life after the assault.

Before any trial we go through, there is always a before. There were the days and months before the person died; or before the house flooded or burned, before the company went bankrupt. Maybe our life was great before the trial came, maybe our daily life needed improvement. But there is always a time we can point to in our own lives before things got really bad and really sad.

God had a before for each of us, even before your days before the trauma! And God’s before is the most important before! God’s plans existed for you before the first day started on planet earth. Your life was not an accident, it was not a mistake. Even if your first day on earth was filled with trauma - maybe being born into a situation riddled with war, poverty, or abuse – God had designed great plans for you! And no matter what has gone wrong along the way, God can and will still bring His plans for you to pass.

God is a God of detail. He has written a book for each of us, each page detailing His plans for us. And nowhere in this book was, or ever will be, recorded a trauma or crime done against you.

¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you

when I was made in the secret place,

when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.

¹⁶ Your eyes saw my unformed body;

all the days ordained for me were written in your book

before one of them came to be. Psalm 139:13-16 NIV

What is written in these books? The plans God the Father authored. Places you will go, schools you will attend, people you meet, businesses you will own as well as thousands of thoughts and details more plentiful than sand on the beach. God is good and good only. No person can rightfully accuse God of planning, authoring, or orchestrating anything hurtful towards humanity. You and I can imagine the days before we were born, with God excitedly writing our Psalm 139 books.

Did God know that despite the good plans He wrote in our books, none of us would be born into families that were perfect? Yes. So, God sent His Son ahead of us to redeem us from the impact of the enemy’s plans and deliver us from anything that was not in His book for us. God has a plan for each person on the earth to come to know Jesus, receive Him as Savior, as Healer and Deliverer when things have gone wrong. Because of the finished work of redemption, and God’s power and ability through His Holy Spirit, the Word, the Name of Jesus and the angelic, God can still bring His destiny plans to pass in any person’s life no matter what has gone wrong along the way.

63322.jpg Assign Evil to the Devil, Not to the Lord

When we write stories about our lives we write them according to the Bible. John 10:10 tells us that God sent His Son Jesus to give us life in abundance. This eternal life is so powerful and exuberant that it swallows up the effects of the Fall in our lives and allows us to live a super victorious life in Christ while we are here on planet earth! Even if the adversary has gotten into our lives in our childhood or somewhere along the way, God’s abundant life will overwhelm our lives, completely ridding them of what came through the adversary’s attack. Therefore, as I tell parts of my story, I am careful to assign evil to the devil and healing and recovery to Jesus. I stay Biblical and do not mix the two up.

63322.jpg Give the Devil No Glory in Your Life

I am also careful to tell my story in a way that gives God all of the glory and the devil none. My focus is sharing what God healed me from and His greatest and glory! Not what He healed me of. Sharing what God has done and His supernatural power helps us demonstrate the defeat of the adversary over and over. A key to walking in victory in our lives is to keep our focus on God, His Word and power and not the trial we did or are walking through.

We do not rehearse the trial we went through or are going through; we rehearse the victory! Rehearsing the victory keeps the devil defeated! Even while walking through a trial, we are called to keep our eyes, ears and mouth on the Word, His promises and praise and worship! This is our stand of faith. This is our powerful life of faith! We are not trying to get the victory; we already were given the victory even before the problem occurred! We are using our faith to tap into that victory, standing on the Word all day long and resisting and insisting that the enemy move back! The truth of God about the victory we have in Christ is given to us to change the facts.

We will talk a little later in the book about practical things we can do, and how to use God’s power to break a sub-conscious thinking pattern about our safety or loss or whatever the facet of the trauma is that we might find ourselves stuck in. But for now, living healed means that we give the adversary no glory, effort or time talking about the about the trauma. We sow our emotional energy, mental effort and speech into God’s Word and His purpose, plan, and power for our lives.

63322.jpg Give God All of the Glory

To glory in something means to take great pride or pleasure in something - to rejoice in something and exult and lift it high in our lives. When we glory in God, His glory, drives out the impact of what we have been through. Do you have something you need to overcome – good! God’s Word promises complete healing, deliverance, and recompense! Genesis 50:20 promises that God will rework the attack against you to serve His purpose for your life, and to bring great blessings to you and to thousands!

You meant to do me harm, but God meant it for good — so that it would come about as it is today, with many people’s lives being saved. Genesis 50:20 CJB

So, let us keep our eyes on the Lord, and our mouths giving Him glory for what He has done and promises to do! My job as author, and yours as reader, is the same - to keep our attention and heart affection on Jesus! To glorify Him and to believe God at the level of His Word. I have made my best effort to tell this story keeping Jesus in the front, middle and back, and I ask you the reader to do the same. This story is about Jesus and His great plans for me that no devil from Hell can every undo. We will decide together that Jesus is who we talk about. Jesus is who we worship and magnify, and give great glory to! Let us keep Jesus the Author and Finisher of this book! After all, that is the best way, to be able to see Him at your parole hearing.

Introduction

This is not the first book I have written, but it is one of the most unique. My other books are on foundational topics such as the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of our words, our identity in Christ, how to build strong faith, healing, encounters with Jesus, the rapture, and the justice of God. This is the book I had no intention or desire to write. But it is the only book to date that the Lord gave a specific command to complete. He said that He would use this book to open doors in the United States and internationally to minister God’s deliverance to His people. God delivers from disasters. No one wants to deal with trauma. I certainly did not.

To the contrary, I had dreams of a charmed life, after when at nine years old, the Lord pulled me into heaven in a vision in the night. He showed me a room filled with the angelic, and speaking over me purpose, purpose, purpose and belonging, belonging, belonging. Since that encounter, which I write about in The Strategy Room of Heaven, I carried a sense of great purpose in my spirit.

However, before I could discover what that purpose was, I found myself dealing with the traumatic aftermath of an assault that happened in my apartment at the age of twenty. It proved a difficult challenge to overcome. Twenty years after the assault, the Lord gave me a miracle, also in my home, which I describe in this book, completely healing me of the assault as if it had never happened. I was ecstatic, and a few weeks after being healed, was filled with the Holy Spirit, and heard my mandate to write many books. I was so hungry for the supernatural power of God! I spent the next ten years chasing after God, ministering in jails, hospitals, nursing homes and the street, and writing roughly twenty books on healing and the power of God, recompense, and prosperity and seeing God do a multitude of signs, wonders, and miracles.

But in 2018, California passed a bill giving many violent offenders the opportunity to have a parole hearing for early release. God was writing this book before I ever considered authoring it! I had no inkling He would use this parole hearing for another miracle as supernatural as when He first healed me. This book tells Jesus’s story of how He miraculously healed me, and then gave me a supernatural encounter with Him, while giving the invitation of salvation to the assailant. This book is about the miraculous victory power of God, His power to perform miracles when we need them, and His ability to keep us in that victory, even when it is challenged.

My prayer is that every broken heart finds Jesus whose testimony is in this book, the Author and Finisher of this book from beginning to end. My prayer is that through my story, your heart finds a place of rest - a place of understanding. But more than that, that your heart finds divine healing and the miracle power of Jesus. Jesus really did see what you and I have gone through. No matter how broken your life, Jesus can and will heal it. And He really has borne the pain and sin of what you have gone through so that you can be healed and live as if the event did not happen.

May Jesus, the humble King, the great Comforter and Counselor, the One with all-surpassing power reveal Himself to you on the pages of this book.

In Christ,

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CHAPTER 1

The Sucker Punch

63322.jpg Before

Adults will ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. Children will say, the President, an astronaut, a police officer, or perhaps a fireman. When asked, none of us responds by saying ‘‘When I grow up, I want to be assaulted, I want my life destroyed by crime." As children, the sky is the limit, and we are invincible! This is the great faith of a child’s heart – and I was no different.

I grew up in a fairly uneventful home, perhaps a little off the beaten track- but as far as I was concerned, life was pretty normal. My parents were raised in small Kansas communities. My dad grew up on a farm, working a full day on the farm and then at school by age eleven. My mom was raised with a similar work ethic, excelling in school, leading worship in her home church and helping her parents manage a few small family businesses. After they married, they relocated and raised us four siblings in the comparatively much more liberal San Francisco Bay area.

I loved growing up in Northern California! I loved the weather, the proximity to San Fransisco, Yosemite, the Redwoods, Napa Valley, and Los Angeles. My dad, having graduated top of his engineering class in college, had a job offer at Lawrence Livermore National laboratory, where he spent his career in national defense projects. I found that exciting and loved touring the labs on family day, and hearing stories of atom bombs and nuclear power and how the best defense is a good offense. Our family was one of five families that helped plant and lead a small Lutheran church. I loved this church, which occupied most of my mother’s extra time and talents, leading worship and running the Christian education, starting a weekly Bible school for the church, and later helping develop a Christian school on the campus. Anything my mom did, I made sure to tag-along, and made myself mom’s little helper.

Other families watched television, we did not. My parents loved making things, building things, designing things, cooking, and sewing things and did everything they could to instill that in us. They built a car together just for fun. By the time I left my parent’s house I was an accomplished cook, baker, seamstress, painter, furniture builder, gardener, and graphic designer.

My career goal growing up was to be President of the United States. I filled my mind with books about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as well as biographies of heroes of the faith like William Carey, Corrie Ten Boom, David Livingstone, and George Washington Carver. As I approached high school, I realized the First Lady position would be a better choice, as I could enjoy the lifestyle of public service and diplomacy but would not have the fate of the Western world on my shoulders. Plus, how could I guarantee the person I married would win the election? So, at some point, had to abandon that goal and search for another. I knew I had a call of God on my life, but did not know what it was, nor how to find it. So, I focused on preparing myself for greatness according to what I knew, which was not much.

I loved church and school. Although far too shy to be considered popular, I served as president of our high school’s service club, as school representative for the Junior Asilomar Girl’s Leadership Club, captain of my soccer team and youth president for the California, Nevada, and Hawaii Lutheran youth organization. I enjoyed soccer, tennis, swimming, biking, hiking and long-distance running in the beautiful hills of Northern California. Being studious and intense about academics, I graduated with a 4.0 and the Helen Varden award honoring the outstanding senior leader. Those awards were a direct byproduct of the encounter in heaven as a child, my parents’ strong work ethic and blood, sweat and tears on my part.

I did everything I knew to do to hear the call on my life before I graduated high school. I had a severe void of Bible knowledge in how to hear God, outside of reading the Bible. I sought out multiple pastors and visited many churches asking, how can I hear God’s call on my life? But because I could not find anyone to help me answer that, I had not heard the specific call God had for me.

So, I struggle with what to do after graduation. I knew I was called to do something but did not know it was. The Lord had given me an encounter in heaven at the age of nine, which I write about in The Strategy Room of God. The best I knew to do was to take interest tests - and that was confusing! All my interest tests all came back tied between law and ministry. At that time, the only ministers I knew were pastors. And every pastor I knew was male - so I was really puzzled about what kind of ministry I was exactly designed to do! I crossed ministry off my list, and decided upon being an attorney. I began college at the University of California, Berkeley, with plans to go to law school.

I was excited to be on this historic campus, however, the school was a poor fit. There was no basic level of Bible knowledge on campus and little presence of God in the town. I had