I have my Bible, my journal and a bottle of water. I step into the pitch-black sanctuary and stand still for a few seconds waiting for my eyes to adjust. I am alone in the spacious room and as the door closes quietly behind me, I take a deep breath and let my shoulders fall and relax.
Sometimes I find a seat near the back. Other times I walk through the darkness and sit cross-legged on the floor right in front of the church platform. The darkness envelopes me and I tell myself to leave all concerns and worries outside. I remind myself that this is my special moment to be alone with my God and not to clutter it up with problems, at least not just yet.
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I was raised in the church, my family attended services twice on Sundays, every Wednesday night and sometimes every night for a week. Our church was like a wonderful extended family and I loved the way it became a warm and comfortable social circle for me.
The center of that circle was the shared desire to serve God in all areas of our lives. We were taught to read our Bibles everyday, attend church as much as possible and spend time in prayer everyday. As a teen I can remember starting one Bible-reading system after another, marking my calendar with my assigned Bible passage to read that day.
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He wants to go play with those best-ever-friends, again. It’s only been a day. “Can we please go play with them again, Mom? Please?”
And I heard myself saying something about ‘too much of a good thing’ and ‘not wearing out our welcome’ and maybe even something like ‘we’ll get tired of each other if we hang out too often’.
Seriously?
I should have retraced my steps, balancing out my words with just a bit of optimism, but I didn’t. The negative words hung in the air — suspended for a moment in time — then evaporated as the kids ran off to find something else to do.
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I don’t know what I was expecting. World peace? The end of poverty?
But when I asked the six felons at the table around me what they wanted for Christmas, they responded in unison. “Papers!”
“Papers?” I naively asked.
“Yeah. Parole papers,” the one closest to me explained. “We want to be home for Christmas.”
Half of the men at my table were in the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary prison ministry degree program. (Yeah, I know. It’s a mouth-full.) I questioned those three again. “But what about your degree? If you got out on parole-” They stopped me before I could continue.
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