It is said that we live life forward, but understand it backwards. A year later I have more appreciation for the shock, sorrow, and struggle that God was allowing me to experience on my knees and face in that cold, stark, gray cement encasement. He wanted me to experience for, if not the first, certainly the most significant time in my life, what it means to have trust without worry, faith without doubt, and hope without despair.
In all of my 45 years I've never been left with nothing except trust, faith and hope as my only stabilizing forces. I've lived such a blessed life in which not only has God richly and continually looked out for me and my needs, but He also gifted me with enough knowledge, intuition, and instincts to enjoy the security of meaningful relationships, children, employment, travel, ministry and the abundance of a life lived well.
Being figuratively stripped of family, children, work, and the comforts and amenities of life was difficult. Being literally stripped, several times, shaved bald, deloused and treated as sub-human was degrading. Satan tried his very best to devoid me of every last vestige of the life I had; like the biblical Job, I found myself being renounced by my wife. Like Esau, I discovered even my own mothering Rebekah was being used by Satan to attempt to bring condemnation through retribution. Like King David I was betrayed by my own prodigal Absalom in an attempt to gain an inheritance before its time.
AW Tozer said that “It is doubtful that God can use a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply”. It is from this deepest hurt, I dare say the deepest of my life, that God has allowed the seeds of trust, faith and hope planted by the Holy Spirit through multiple generations of grandparents to be watered and grown into the full blown virtues that they are meant to be.
While I recognize that I have had previous experience with trust and faith, these past 500 days have given new revelations on what it means to experience hope to combat despair. I don’t know if I could have experienced a singular reliance on hope without first finding myself on the coronal edge of white hot despair; and I don’t know if there is a any greater despair than seeing and talking to the ones you love and desire to be with through an inch thick sheet of tear etched plexiglass: wanting to so badly hold, hug and kiss them. Being restrained by the invisible pane of that painful barrier is such a desperately hopeless feeling of defeat and disillusion. Out of that brokenness the Holy Spirit gave birth to hope. After that small gracious glimmer of hope was in place it bolstered my faith and trust which watered and gave nourishment to that very same glimmer, fostering its growth into the hope that brings reassurance, restoration, resolution, and eventually reconciliation and restitution.
These past 500 days have also given me deeper insight into the lives of those who have not known God, or worse, known and turned their backs on God. I’ve seen the rawness of pain of those incarcerated because of so many reasons. And, frankly, those reasons don’t even matter. What does matter is how I respond to them and their pain. So many of those men that I now find myself in a forced brotherhood of bondage with are just looking for that same hope: some kind word, or affirmation, some indication that they matter; that they are loved, not just by other men, other creatures of humanity, but more importantly by their Creator. It is in this cause that Christ has reinforced His message of loving others as a way to reveal God’s own love for us: to express unconditional regard despite a person's unconscionable behavior; to walk and talk as an expression of God’s love on this gray, prison yard, but also beyond this yard.
As God uses this time as an opportunity to turn surrender and sanctification into His service, the challenge is to remember the lessons of the pasta 500 days long after restoration is bestowed and I am home, reconciled with those I love and found myself so desperate to be with and living a life of abundant restitution; to remember to show the unconditional love of god that points to His grace to those caught up in life’s hurts, habits, and hang ups; to remember to advocate for those families caught up in similar circumstances, transitions, and upheavals as they are faced with a parents incarceration.
On day 500 I find myself more blessed and thankful than I could have imagined possible 365 days ago. After 500 days of transformation I increasingly find myself grateful for the experience and ready to push forward into day 501 sharing this story, giving Him the glory, while gratefully giving glimmers of hope.
