Christian Living

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Larry Lilly's Letter Wednesday May 26, 2010

Over the course of my life I have felt drawn to the literature of and about POW's and other prisoners. I am being somewhat used in the area of outreach to men and women in prison and as you might imagine the underlying message of successful prison ministry involves a great deal of hope, for prison can be one of the most hopeless situations in the world.

Yet, within prison walls some of the most dramatic instances of outrageous hope ever displayed. I do not mean a burning hope for some miraculous release, but a hope that transcends prison walls and even life itself. It is a hope that desperately clings to the truth that there really is more to life than what see and experience in what is commonly called "the now."

I was in a blah for several days last week and I know that being in the blahs is not spiritual so please spare me a load of clichés. Often times I use Elijah's Juniper tree, after all he left it years ago, and I attempt to get a real heavenly angel to feed me. But in most cases my heavenly angel is off to visit the grandchildren, so there I am, with nothing but the Bible and thoughts thereof to nourish me.

During this time while I mused, a few words of a song penetrated my mental stupor and registered and brought me to reality. A phrase kept repeating in my head and so I speared this thought and now I am removing the spear and sharing it with you, cleaned up of course. Spears can be messy.

The phrase simply states:

"Thought it's midnight in the prison, my father reigns in heaven."

For application the prison may be literal steel and cement dungeons or it may be what we call figurative, such as enslavement to drugs, the thrill, a person or multiple persons. Faith in Christ is the deal breaker, for we know that through Christ we can overcome that which afflicts us, attempts to destroy us, or the power of any type of prison, literal or figurative.

Viktor Frankl wrote "Man's Search For Meaning" as a brief on survivor's of Nazi Concentration Camps, which he survived, though his wife was murdered in one of the camps said:

"Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

Jeremiah Denton, John McCain, Viktor Frankl, Corey ten Boom all knew what Paul meant in 2 Timothy 1:12; For the which cause I also suffer these things: nevertheless I am not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.

Larry Lilly Copyright © 2010 Use with credit

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