Love Story

April 2008

Once a week for three years, I went to jail. I was not an inmate serving some kind of strange sentence. Instead, I went willingly—even eagerly—to teach God’s Word to women doing time.

It didn’t take me long to realize that, like me, most of my students had experienced some kind of abandonment. In my case, I thought my father had deserted me when he went away. The fact was, however, that he had become mentally ill and had to be institutionalized.

For a variety of reasons, some fathers of the women I met in jail took off and never returned; others were doing time themselves. During class discussions, Kendra and Tammie told me that their mothers introduced them to drugs when they were twelve or thirteen. Other inmates were mothers themselves who had been abandoned by a lover or husband, leaving them destitute.

Imagine your mom introduced you to drugs when you were twelve, then used you to make money to buy more. As a result, you grew up trusting no one. Now in jail or prison you learn that God does love you. He wants a personal relationship with you. You believed those words and became a reborn child of God by putting your faith in Jesus.

But making a fresh start is tough.

When you put yourself in their place, you’ll realize how desperately they need you to pray meditatively for them. In those prayers, ask God to “fill and empower their teachers and draw these troubled ones to yourself. Provide Christians to help them when they are released.” After all, except for God’s grace, you might have been one of them. .

Practice God’s love. Born again ex-convicts need to find a church home soon after they walk out the institution doors. Even when they do, they may feel as out-of-place as a penguin in the parlor. Rejection, after all, has become a way of life for them.

Since they won’t wear a sign around their necks, you probably won’t know who they are. So show God’s love to every stranger through your smile, your warm handshake and easy conversation. After all, you and I are the visible body of Christ that they do see.

How can you be sure that these people are sincere? You probably can’t at first. Even though you use caution, they may cause disruption and bring you disappointment. But if you welcomed them as though they were Jesus Christ Himself, you did what was right. For, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40).

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