Months ago, I was sitting at a local dessert place with my family. The joint was new and thriving, packed with other mini-van driving family men like me—guys who’ve moved their tribe to safer and quieter neighborhoods. Then, just when I was about to bottle up my self-satisfying moment, a desperate void intercepted and startled me. No, I didn’t feel guilty for wanting to provide and protect for my family or eating gluttonous amounts of frozen yogurt with them from time to time. Okay, I did feel some guilt about downing the hot tub-sized yogurt, but that’s for another day. Instead, something seemed to be getting lost in me; a responsibility that usually drives me was misplaced somewhere in the blessings and comfort I was embracing.
An inward dissection of my life began right there beneath the IKEA light where I sat, and I concluded that I had unknowingly insulated myself from desperate and wayward stories. I’m not talking about third-world poverty or global disasters, but people in my own community who are absolutely falling apart. As a pastor, I have my own rock bottom tale and have helped many over the years find their way up again too, but those last several weeks I found myself delegating disaster to others, while I thought, wrote and spoke “deep thoughts” to crowds. Bottom line: I was in danger of quickly becoming an ivory tower sell-out who spoke about wounds and tragedy like black holes and string theory. But, a visit to prison stopped my crawl up the tower and helped me get back to earth again.
Here’s how it happened: A lady I hired for some construction found out I was also a local pastor. She insisted that I go see her friend in jail and encourage him, so I agreed to visit him. Before I knew it, a few days later I was ducking through a metal detector with some inmates at the regional jail. This was an unfamiliar world to me.
After the scan, I broke from the pack towards a sliding Star Wars door made entirely of bulletproof steel and glass. I seriously thought I was supposed to wait for a droid or alien humanoid to guide me further (other nerds know what I mean), but for the next leg of the journey, I had to go it alone. Then, on cue, the door hissed and rolled open. Now, it was a portal and the world inside was one of cinder block crypts inhabited by isolated spirits; men and women who had lost their way somehow and now must pay a debt to those walls. That’s when I started connecting the dots. I had been sent there to find what I was losing.
Once inside the compartment, the breach was automatically sealed shut behind me. My panic reflects kicked in, so I lunged to escape, but I regained my wits and surrendered. Soon, an opposing door opened and pointed me to an elevator, then up to the fourth floor and into a fathomless hallway of more doors. I was exhausted already. Every step seemed to represent an old life I had lived, one where I continued down hallways that locked me deeper in despair. In fact, the corridor seemed almost designed to vanquish my will to be free. As much as I wrestled to go deeper and stand tall with my head high, the more like a chained-up hound I became. Maybe this is how prisons are supposed to be.
Eventually, though, I got to my assigned visitation room, a cave lit by fluorescent tubes and furnished by four chairs against divided cubicles. A glass window divided the space in two and separated the guest from the prisoner. No one was there, yet, and a void rushed in to panic me again. I was in prison now, I thought. This must be what it’s like to be locked away and forgotten—a somewhat familiar feeling to me, born out of my own disastrous past.
For a couple minutes I stood and waited, just staring through the glass barrier for any hints that I was in the right spot. The surface was dirty. Oily smudges made a haze of hand prints—mementos of loved ones who longed to touch the person on the other side, but one inch of glass kept them a universe apart while still in the same room. Was that print a mother’s last touch before she said farewell to her convicted son? How long did she keep her hand there, weeping desperately and wanting to crawl through that glass and take home her boy? These questions tumbled around my head as I waited. What was it like for my own mother when I broke her heart?
Soon, a guard scanned the opposing window, opened the chamber behind the glass and a 40-something-year-old man in orange walked in. I concluded it was Jack, the man I was scheduled to see, and then we both sat down to face each other. Our introductions were swift and straight to the point.
Through a telephone speaker I asked, “What’s your story? Tell me how you got here.”
He seemed disarmed by my lack of pre-tense, pushed the talk button and opened right up by unfurling a story of how he lived completely self-indulgently and self-destructively most of his life. He worked hard, drank hard and was, not surprisingly, terrible at marriage. Both of his marriages ended nuclear, and the divorce papers and charges filed were signed by Wife Number Two’s same embittered hand. One millisecond of drunken domestic rage had put him on the other side of that glass—a defendant and second-time divorcee—and might keep him there for a very long time.
“So now, I’m waiting on sentencing,” he concluded.
Then, I asked a risky question.
“How are you doing?” I said.
I was dumbfounded by his answer.
“I’m better than I’ve ever been,” he replied. “I feel more free now than all my life combined.”
I asked him to explain, so out came a story of honest redemption. He rested his hand on a Bible and started to describe how a pastor, like me, came to visit him months before. This man shared a different road for his life, and how it began with him getting honest about his junk, seeking forgiveness and deciding to change the entire way he thought about and acted towards himself and the world.
“I’m not the same man I was six months ago,” he added. “That man hit his rock bottom, ended up here and finally died. Who you see right now is a resurrected person.”
He thumbed through his Bible, read me passages and pointed them back to his own story. There was no doubt Jack had been turned right side up by what he now believed, and none of those guards and bars and steel doors seemed to imprison his heart. He couldn’t stop telling other about the revolution going on inside of him, and now I was just one more to hear his proclamation.
The more he spoke, the more I recognized I was not there to encourage him at all, but instead, there to have my own life reset by his. Slowly and unconsciously, I had stopped believing that my own healing and blessing carried a responsibility to help others do likewise, not from a computer screen or a stage, but eye-to-eye behind prison bars. And, ironically, I had buried my own story of once being a lost cause, hitting rock bottom and coming back from the dead, only to find it through Jack’s redemption story.
Before I left, I offered to pray for him and he accepted without hesitation, but did so by putting his palm against the glass. He wanted me to touch the glass too, so I reached out and put my hand where his was. Right then, we became brothers in a struggle to never forget what changed us and never stop going to the bottom to help others come back to life, too.
