By: Sir

Sir — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:59:05 +0000

Thanks, Morf.
Thank you for listening and for sharing what you’ve learned.

By: Wayne Bays

Wayne Bays — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:40:08 +0000

I am sure you know this, but you write in such a way as to make reading pleasurable, learning easy, and relating smooth.
I am able to identify with the inmates because I have spent some time behind bars myself. The one stark reality of the experience is missing one of the most basic of human needs…freedom.
However, as Paul says, being a bondservant of Christ is not so dissimilar as one would at first think. Prison makes being good easier because the freedom to do bad is almost removed. Their are those whose soul is so far removed from good that every thought of every day is wrapped in evil. But for most, that is not the case.
When you said, “every aspect of being human was nullified” I felt as though you might be exaggerating a bit. I believe that every aspect of being human in prison is intensified and broken down into its most base paradigm. I am not sure most of the inmates would agree that they are “an ancient, tottering, gigantic multi-legged insect making its way to extinction in its awkward, clanging clumsiness.”
Yes, they are “sinners in need” but having “fewer options” to sin helps move individuals closer to the holiness of Yahweh, wherein they may find it much easier to attain the hope of Yeshua.
Chuck Colson says that prisoners find God easier than those of us with all our freedoms to follow the miriad of temptations to sin, because they no longer are yoked with such a burden.
You said that “there was purpose for all this, that there was a God, a God who mattered; a God in whose eyes we mattered” and I think Mr. Colson would agree and say that is why he has devoted his life to prison ministries.
Prison ministry helps to give inmates a “framework to make sense of their lives” without being bombarded by those “purveyors of doctrine and shrill religion” those seekers of a “paranoid apocalypse” or those jihadist extremists (although prison has become, through “freedom of religion,” a breeding ground for their cause).
What I wouldn’t give for more of a “bare bones, take-no-prisoners, confrontation with any kind of truth that mattered.” Instead of the trivial pursuit of “feel-good theology:” the “safe and smug self-congratulatory religion” of most of the evangelical mainstream.
I understand completely the dread you feel towards trying to function within modern day religion’s “easy answers, well-rehearsed canned slogans”, and smug and arrogant hypocrisy. May we somehow get people thinking outside of those bars of the “brutal grace” of God, instead of the fatalist jargon and passivity at the core of todays evengelical.
May we tap into the Holy “unknown language” of the Spirit of Yeshua.

By: garrett

garrett — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 05:36:15 +0000

thanks for sharing… not only to us but to those in a terrible situation. you speak the truth.

By: diana frick

diana frick — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 05:26:23 +0000

Vivid. Important. Thank you.

Comments on: What Question Would You Ask of God?

By: Sir

By: Wayne Bays

By: garrett

By: diana frick