Should Prison Be On Your Bucket List?

Snake Wrangling & Bellybuttons

Prison isn’t on anybody’s bucket list. In fact, it’s probably on most people's duck-it list. You know, those things you absolutely positively hope to avoid. Snake wrangling and sky diving come in towards the top of my duck-it list. But the truth is, if offered the choice between prison and my duck-it list, I’d start listening for rattles and checking my parachute. If it’s not obvious……I really didn’t like prison! Strangely, the Bible paints a different picture of prison and many of God's saints spend an inordinate amount of time incarcerated.

In the Chinese Christian church, leaders aren’t considered mature until they’ve spent time in prison for their faith. Right this minute, Wang Yi the pastor of the Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, China sits in prison serving a nine year sentence for failing to register his church with authorities and submit it to state regulations. This excerpt from his Declaration of Faithful Disobedience partially explains his position:

Those who lock me up will one day be locked up by angels. Those who interrogate me will finally be questioned and judged by Christ. When I think of this, the Lord fills me with a natural compassion and grief toward those who are attempting to and actively imprisoning me. Pray that the Lord would use me, that he would grant me patience and wisdom, that I might take the gospel to them. 

Separate me from my wife and children, ruin my reputation, destroy my life and my family - the authorities are capable of doing all these things. However, no one in this world can force me to renounce my faith; no one can make me change my life; and no one can raise me from the dead.

I firmly believe that Christ has called me to carry out this faithful disobedience through a life of service, under this regime that opposes the gospel and persecutes the church. This is the means by which I preach the gospel, and it is the mystery of the gospel which I preach.

When it fosters faith like that I can understand why God used it so frequently in the Bible. None of us can say what we would do when faced with such a choice but the Bible says that persecution is inevitable for Christians. We in the west aren’t faced with much persecution these days but who knows what the devil will get done in the future. But it’s no cause to be concerned because I’m here to tell you, prison could do you some good! 

I’ll admit it's not a traditional route to building faith but there’s a reason it’s in the Bible so much. It’s all about how you respond……

In my experience inmates are like belly buttons, there’s outies’ and there’s innies’. Outies’ look outward and blame others for their predicament, while innies’ look inward and blame themselves. Almost everybody is an outie in the beginning because nobody wants it to be their fault. But you have a lot of introspection time in prison and before they leave many end up with a distinct innie tilt. 

It never takes long to find an outie, they’ll stumble over themselves to tell you about the unfairness of just about everything. When you first get to prison, the welcome-to-the-neighborhood greeting goes something like this, “What are you in for?” It’s a prison thing. I always responded with "Odometer fraud…….you know, rolling back miles on cars," which always sparked lively conversations. One day, Steve, a lifelong drug dealer, expressed disbelief, questioning if it was even a crime. I shrugged and replied, "Here I sit..."

Steve muttered, "You can't trust the feds. They gave me ten years for some shotgun shells in the back of a closet. Can you believe that?"

I was shocked. "Ten years... for shotgun shells?"

"Yeah, man. They searched and found some old shotgun shells in a box I bought at a garage sale. I didn't even know they were there," Steve explained.

I asked, bewildered, "Can they do that?"

"You're a felon, and felons can't have guns or shells. Besides, the feds can do what they want," Steve replied.

Later, George, a former law enforcement officer, confirmed Steve's story. "You're a felon now, and you will always be a suspect to law enforcement."

I could only shake my head at such a grim forecast. Seeing my disheartenment, George smiled and reassured me, "Don't worry about what Steve says. He tells that story to everyone who will listen, but nobody believes it. They were searching his house for a reason. They charged him with those shotgun shells because they couldn't find his drugs. Don't do anything wrong, and you won’t have anything to worry about."

Steve was a card-carrying outie and never spent a second considering his own culpability. It’s hard to help an outie because they’re convinced either the justice system or circumstance has treated them unfairly. In their story there’s always a villain behind the curtain orchestrating their plight. Some are a product of their upbringing and some simply a product of their hubris. 

Although with the justice system, they may have a point. I never had any legal problems before this fiasco but I’ve gotten a real education since. All I’ll say is the system is very broken and some of the mistakes are heartbreaking. Big mistakes that forever affect a person's life. Just to be clear, I wasn’t one of those mistakes, I was lost and God put me in prison so I could be found.  

The overwhelming majority of inmates had a hand in their own incarceration whether they’re willing to face it or not. Some were outright criminals but many tiptoed around the edges of illegality or participated in activities with the naive belief that nothing could go wrong. Divided as the world is today there is absolutely no reason to believe such a lie.

But prison is a great place for the ones willing to turn the lens inward. God can begin a work in them if they’re willing to look at themselves with a critical and truthful eye. Honestly, if prison doesn’t make you take an inventory of your life, not much will. It’s interesting that taking a fearless moral inventory of yourself is also the fourth step in addiction recovery, since addiction, like prison, can also be the lowest point in a person's life. It’s amazing how God so loves the broken things of this world.

And that fearless moral inventory…..Man, nobody wants to do that!

Can you blame them? It's unpleasant to honestly look at what really motivates us and who we truly are. We do so love to be coddled and be told of our self worth and importance. But it’s vital to know of our own depravity. Yea, I know it’s a harsh word. And it’s a difficult concept to accept, that we are so lost in sin and the love of this world. Maybe it’s just me but I didn’t understand who God is until I realized who I am by comparison. And the outlandish amount of grace needed to cross that chasm.

Romans 3:23 tells us that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but I don’t imagine that’s a shocker to most of us. But in Isaiah 64:6 we are pronounced infected with sin and that our righteous deeds are like filthy rags to God. That’s a more accurate picture of who I am. 

I hope this story stir’s you to take a moment and consider who you really are, a desperate sinner in need of amazing grace. Some of us needed to be put in desperate straits before we would come before the throne, laid bare and begging forgiveness. But understand, it’s a requirement for all who would receive it. 

If you're like me and that amazing grace happens to shine on you inside a prison cell, you’ll have a faint hint of how far He will go for you.