Today is April 4th and it is Easter Sunday. This past Friday was Good Friday. But in prison every day feels the same. We are stuck in one place and have the same unchanged view. We wear the same colorless clothes and are always surrounded by the unending concrete walls. It feels like we are stuck in a perpetual Black Saturday.
When I was first arrested and went to jail, a few hours in the jail was enough for me to say, “Yup, I am not coming to this place again.” But shockingly, since my incarceration, I have seen countless men who keep coming back to jail after getting out. I met this one guy who came back in jail and got out six times in only 11 months. Let me tell you, they don’t come back because they love this place. But still they keep coming back to a place they hate. It all just sounds like a hopeless Black Saturday.
I have heard the saying “Time heals” countless times, but I would gently like to disagree with that. If the saying was true then the percentage of recidivism would be low. There are people who have spent decades in prison but come back to this place after a month of freedom. I have met men who are in their fifties who have spent more time in prison than in the free world, and are still coming back to prison for the 8th time. Seems like time itself is incomplete in bringing healing.
For what I have experienced, time itself doesn’t eternally heal anybody. It can bring fleeting contentment but not long-term. The only way time can heal is if it is spent with Someone who is Himself the Healer. We cannot expect eternal restoration to come through time if it’s not spent with Jesus, both in prison and in the free world.
If I was doing my time in prison without Jesus, then no matter how much of my life I spend here, I will still be lost. That’s where most of the prison population is right now. They have neither experience the death of Jesus on a Friday nor have the hope for a resurrected King on a Sunday. They are just stuck in a colorless and hopeless Saturday.
Instead, I know a Christian man here who says, ‘I am free, I am just waiting for them to release me.’ He has been in prison for 30 years. He became a Christian when an officer shared the Gospel with him and since then he has been spiritually free. I can tell you about how so many people have wasted their lives here, but I’d rather tell you about how Jesus uses our hopeless and defeated Saturdays to usher us into the Glorious and Victorious Sunday.
Psalm 88 is one of the most dismal chapters in the Bible, and it is also one of my most cherished ones. In this chapter, the author is going through a challenging phase and is deserted. It’s a gloomy chapter with a despondent conclusion. But through the dark times, the author cries out to the Lord three times. The darkness does not drive us away from God, rather it makes us desperate for Him.
“Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.”
2 Coronthians 7:10
Jesus uses our Saturdays “to show that this all-surpassing power is from God.” Only Jesus can turn our arrest into a rescue mission.
I wrote this on the day of my sentencing: “Thank you for reminding me of how Great of a God You are. Even in the day of dread and shame, you walked with me. While I confessed and asked for forgiveness for my sins out loud in the court, you set a table for me. How amazing are you that even in the day of my suffering, You brought Yourself Glory. You brought a smile instead of shame. I once was blind but now I see. Where You go, I’ll go and where You stay, I’ll stay.”
The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.
To bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes,
the oil of joy instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.
Isaiah 61:1,3
