Christian Living

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Larry Lilly's Letter Monday June 23, 2008

A mother called and asked, "Larry, my son has been sentenced to prison for 3 years. What should I send him to read?" You may find my recommended reading material strange, but then you haven't read the two pieces I sent or you haven't been to prison or both.

Number one is the Bible, with good notes to help him to identify with those souls in the Bible who spent periods in prison. Number two on my list is a book by a Jew, Viktor Frankl, who never really came to any faith, but whose book written from the crucible of his suffering in Nazi Concentration Camps, losing everything dear, including his beautiful wife, wrote "Man's Search For Meaning" in 1946.The Library of Congress in 1991, noted "Man's Search," as belonging on the list of the ten most influential books in the United States. I might add the world.

Take a moment to read and then muse on the following quote from the book:

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

Having read the book while in my early teens, I concluded that most of the things we Americans whine about are nothing compared to Auschwitz. When I became a Christian at age twenty, it did not take long to reach the same conclusion about the things we Christians moan and groan about.

Most Study Bibles in the introduction to "The Book of Revelation" for instance fail to mention that the isle of Patmos was not only a place of exile, but a cruel prison/rock quarry much like the one seen in the movie, Spartacus, in which the prisoners labored naked and lived under the most brutal circumstances imaginable. John, the pen of the revelation was on this isle due to his refusal to recant, or forsake the Lord, thus, the cruel regime of Domitian tried to break him.

John did not go along with the program of the Emperor! He made the choice, alluded to by Frankl, to exercise his last freedom, and chose the attitude of Christ. He writes in Rev. 1:10, "I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day…" I am absolutely certain most of the other prisoners were thinking of ways to get the Empire to provide clothes, not better clothes, just clothes. John chose to have a talk with Jesus.

For the bulk of my life I have been given to bouts of despair, depression, melancholy or whatever name you want to put on it. Many great men have suffered with this malady, including the Great Emancipator; yet in spite of this recurring hindrance, I find help and strength to go on when I read again the accounts of the suffering of John, of Frankl, of G.I. Prisoners of War and my own small sufferings along the way, remembering from experience that Christ is intensely real, therefore I choose to "Think on Him." I know He cares for me.

Larry Lilly Copyright © 2008 Use with credit.

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