Don’t Forget the Magic

It Just Happened

As I’ve said many times, the life of a Christian is not always easy. Despite the rhetoric coming out of prosperity gospel churches, God’s plans don’t always look particularly appealing from our perspective. No doubt God wants the best for us but His process is sometimes, well, painful. Thank goodness for the magic. It’s the only thing that kept me sane during my last year in prison.

I’ve mentioned before that the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) kept me in prison ten months too long. And trust me, that’s not some exaggerated story designed to garner sympathy. Mostly it's a testament to a broken organization but before I personally experienced it I would have been belligerently skeptical if you’d tried to convince me that it could happen in America. In order to make sense of it, and the magic, you need to know a little about the Bureau of Prisons. 

If I was in prison today and all other factors remained equal, the BOP would grant me one year off my sentence because of my activities in prison and my status as someone with the lowest possible risk of re-offending. But during those wonderful vacation (not) years in prison they maintained that since I had a state charge relating to my federal charge, I could accumulate the credits that would allow me the year off, but I couldn’t apply them until the state charges were settled. Naturally the state wouldn’t let me settle the charges until I was released from federal prison. Talk about making you scratch your head. I could accumulate credits that would reduce my sentence but couldn’t apply them against my sentence until I was out of prison, at which point I would have absolutely no use for them. Huh? I remember trying to explain this to an officer in the BOP and they stared at me like the cow in this picture. In truth, they had no power to do anything anyway. All important decisions were made at the mysterious headquarters and apparent center of galactic power called Region. Yea, who knew!

Before going to prison, I didn’t know much about federal institutions other than that supersized train wreck we call congress. But now, having seen the BOP up close and personal, I shudder to think what the others look like from the inside. The sheer waste is amazing. The food waste is really evident when pallets of milk are left outside and ruined and one thousand breakfasts are prepared every day despite only three hundred people consistently showing up to eat it. The rest is thrown away. The family of raccoons who live behind the chow hall are billionaires in the raccoon world.

I tell you this to try and make you see that the BOP, like most federal institutions, is a world of its own and they have a history of doing things their way, regardless of instruction. And when you’ve done things the same way for a very long time, change becomes the boogie man in the closet.

I suppose it’s not all the BOP’s fault. If you put people completely and solely in charge of other people, history has proven that it never goes well. Tyranny and callousness seems to be a natural by-product of complete control. The only people who seem to have any chance at combating the tendencies are Christians and not many of those. I only met one corrections officer who claimed to be a Christian and actually lived it. It’s hard to blame them considering what they have to deal with. The hard core career criminals they deal with on a daily basis will absolutely test anyone’s patience. Not to mention they know absolutely everything there is to know about everything. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met (lots of sarcasm). So yea, I understand the attitude of officers but if you're a Christian, God didn’t say anything about exempting criminals from being your neighbors.

I had a lot going on during that last year. When the BOP initially told me they weren’t going to let me utilize my credits, I immediately filed a writ of Habeas Corpus. It’s simply a motion to the court that stated my continued incarceration was unlawful. It was an agonizing time because every single thing that could go wrong, went wrong. I struggled with God’s reasoning behind this unjust treatment and I pleaded like the widow in Luke 18. Remember how I said God’s process is sometimes painful! 

The court sent back an order that I needed to try the administrative remedy process within the BOP before the court would consider my motion. The administrative process is a series of queries starting with the warden of your institution and going all the way up to BOP headquarters in Washington. In other words, I needed to ask increasingly higher authorities if they agreed with the BOP’s accumulate-but-not-apply interpretation of my credits. The entire process took about six months. I only had 12 months left so it set my teeth to grinding when they told me. Naturally the BOP turned me down all the way up to Washington since no employee was going to publicly oppose their employer’s position. Finally, after six months of rejection, I was ready to resume my appeals to the court. 

Let me tell you, if you’ve never had dealings with the court system, they are fingernails-on-a-chalkboard slow! Months seven and eight were spent waiting on the court to answer my re-filing of the motion. I was pretty aggravated at this point and couldn’t understand why the courts wouldn’t quickly answer a motion pertaining to unlawful incarceration. “Are they that callous about someone’s freedom?” I wondered. Or is it that inmates really don’t matter that much?

Regardless, I knew that no matter what happened, I only had four months left. But every day that you don’t have to be in prison is worth the fight so I kept on trying. In month nine the court responded by requesting the BOP send the court their reasoning behind my continued incarceration. All my jailhouse lawyer friends said this was great news because it meant the court had looked at the law and they agreed with my motion, but before they would rule on it they wanted to hear the BOP’s reasoning behind their stance. Really? Three months left on my sentence and the court wants to hear the BOP’s song and dance before letting me go. Plus the court gave them sixty days to respond and the BOP always waited until the last possible day. At this point, I figure I’m stuck till the final day. When the BOP responds in sixty days there is literally no chance of the court ruling in the thirty days left of my sentence. So I settle in and month ten rolls around. 

Out of the blue, I’m at work one day and someone says they’re paging me compound wide. I’d never been paged! For forty six months I’d kept my head down and mouth shut. I seriously doubt that ten officers on the compound knew my name. So for me to be paged compound wide was………slightly frightening. I get to the office and my case manager tells me that the BOP has changed their mind on my situation and I’m free to go. For all my negative comments on the BOP, I will say they don’t waste any time processing you out after they decide your times up.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about God’s purposes for that year and what it meant to my growth as a follower. There is something about being a follower of Jesus that defies easy explanations. When I try to articulate exactly why I choose Jesus day after day, it all sounds……inadequate and cumbersome, like I have amnesia and can’t find my words.

It’s clear that following hasn’t necessarily make my path easier and many of my friends undoubtedly see me in a different light. But when I drill down past that top layer of doctrines and sound bite salvation, I hear other people say the same sort of thing, like: it just happened, my heart suddenly changed, I felt alive, the Bible just suddenly made sense, I don’t understand how I changed, I was an atheist and I’m not sure what happened, I can’t explain my trust, I have no real reason for it. And they keep on getting up, day after day and following, even though it’s often a perilous journey and the sacrifice’s monumental. But there’s that something they just can’t put their finger on.

In those ten months I learned, it's not something, it’s someone. 

And this someone brings with Him a river of peace when you feel ragged and torn inside, a spring of affection that flows from head to heart in the precise moment you feel completely unlovable, and a cascade of grace when our struggles are above us and our strength is below. It’s always seemed like magic to me.

I ended up spending ten long months unlawfully imprisoned. Please though, don’t feel sorry for me, that’s when I learned that magic is real!

I pray that God will give you your own magic show!