Gospel legend, Kirk Franklin, and his family are going through it right now. He recently announced that his sister has just been sentenced to 30 years in prison. Her current sentence comes shortly after she’d already served 10 years in the pen’ for a separate drug related crime.
In an emotional online post, Franklin revealed the latest heartbreaking news to his fans:
“My sister was just sentenced to 30 years in prison…I now feel the weight of wondering if I could have done more,” Franklin said in his post on Sunday, with the caption “rough week,” added.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BkG7Y1dnlZ_/?hl=en&taken-by=kirkfranklin
Although there isn’t much info on Franklin’s sister, he did give a few clues into what she was going through in 2015, when he revealed that she struggled with drug addiction and more:
“For over ten years, my younger sister was incarcerated in a facility here in Texas. She was in love with a young man who was [a] drug dealer,” Franklin stated in his 2015 statement. “He introduced her to not only selling drugs, but using as well. When he was arrested for drug trafficking, she was arrested along with him. After she served her time, she was brought before the review board who determined she was ready to be released and brought back into society. The documents were signed and she was set free… but only on paper.”
He continued, with his revelation that his sister had relapsed at that time, just months after her prior prison release:
“After a few months back into the free world, it became obvious to me rather quickly that my sister was still in prison. It’s what they call being institutionalized. She quickly started using again, becoming very reckless with her body, which turned into her using it as a means to pay for her habit,” he said.
A few weeks before his latest announcement about his sister’s 30 year bid, Kirk Franklin dropped some hints that someone in his family is currently dealing with mental health issues. On June 8, 2018, when celebrity chef, Anthony Bourdain, committed suicide, days after fashion designer Kate Spade did, Franklin took to social media to share his story about his own family’s struggles.
“We’ve had two individuals, high profile people that committed suicide this week, in one week. And even though I didn’t know them that can be very traumatic and I wanted to be very honest with you to maybe help someone. I personally know what it is to have a family member with either issues with depression or mental illness and we’re still going through it as a family,” he said, adding a plea to his fans to “Get help.”
In addition to sharing his story, Franklin also advised Christians and religious leaders not to minimize mental illness as something that can simply be prayed out of an individual:
“In the church sometimes you think you can just shout everything away or speak in tongues everything away or sometimes drink and smoke everything away but you can’t. This is real. It’s a disease. And you’ve got to treat it like a disease. God is faithful but faith without works is dead, so you’ve gotta put in the work. You’re too important. You’re too valuable. We need you,” stated Franklin.
Sending uplifting energy to Kirk Franklin’s sister and whatever internal issues are plaguing her at this time.
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