By Lisa Groen
I believe if God sees fit to take someone to jail, God is faithful to put the kind of faith in them to match the level of hardship he takes them through!
Perhaps from the sheer boredom and praying that I would learn whatever the Lord wanted to teach me I took on the posture of teachableness. The Bible became very meaningful to me in fresh ways and Jesus became more real to me and showed himself to be my most reliable and trustworthy friend. We get so distracted by the stimuli in the world, and when you have those things stripped away, it’s interesting how your ears get opened and your heart can grow soft to God’s leading. I found a Bible right away and kept my nose in it day after day. I would pray about the stresses of jail, and sought God as to why He let the circumstances happen that led me into jail. I sought God in jail and let Him know I didn’t want be a hard hearted person which is a common stereotype people on the outside of jail have of people on the inside.
I prayed about many things in jail on a personal level because you have time to do a lot of self-reflection. You realize you need encouragement, but many family and friends I had for years never wrote me back after I would write them a 6- or 7-page letter. At the time I wondered why people can’t write back a sentence or two after you pour your heart out to them. I realized to become resentful about that would be not fitting because prisoners by definition have few rights. I found it was best to focus on the people who wanted to be in my life.
As far as jail goes harassment is common. A lot of it is based on power struggles and on who thinks they can dominate. Some of the women in my pod wanted me to get kicked out of the low security part and put in lock down. I was told about 5 of the women who happened to be black misinterpreted something that I said and they thought I was racist. They were saying I was the whitest one in the jail because they used hood language and I didn’t know what they were saying some of the time because I am not from the hood. So, I tried to fit in by dancing like some of them. They thought I was making fun of them by my lousy dance so a few days later one of my friends who was friends with them warned me about the 5 women. It just happened to be a woman who I shared part of my testimony of Jesus with.
The women who wanted me to get kicked out of low security kept doing things like putting their shampoo in my shower stall when I would go to wash my socks and underwear. They wanted me to close the door to the shower stall so they could accuse me of stealing their shampoo, but the Lord directed me as to what was going on, and I kept the shower stall open and nothing happened because the video cameras were just outside the shower stalls recording everything.
Kindness always goes a long way as a Christian in or out of jail, but you have to know who you’re dealing with. Sometimes hardships can pop up when you’re going out of your way to be a generous person. One woman told another right in front of me I was her B- – – – because I was nice and would share snacks and other things I would buy from the commissary. So even though I was trying to be nice, some of them thought I was trying too hard to win friends so they began to “use me” to get free snacks and other things. One girl tried to pretend to be sick to see if I would give her free cough drops without asking for anything in return. It was obvious to me she was not sick but only pretending. I told her she didn’t look or sound sick and did not give her any cough drops. I hate being lied to.
Other conflicts that arose from a power trip happened such as one of the women waved her arms around my head and leaned over me and said something like “whhhhooosh!” so I ducked out of the way and I had to lean over the balcony on the second floor in order to keep from being hit in the head by her. I told the guard about her because I had done nothing rude to her. One of my cell mates would get off her bunk really quick and she kicked me in the head as I sat on the side of my bed. When she did it a second time I told her to quit doing that and she flipped out on me and said I was crazy. She then was yelling at the top of her lungs at me about all kinds of things and fabricating lies about things she said I did wrong but I did none of those things. I thought “there is going to be no peace in my cell because she has flown off the deep end and she didn’t seem to want to be reeled in” by anything I said. I complained to the guard about her wild imagination and her unpredictableness and her verbally and physically aggressive ways for no reason and asked for a different cell. They ended up moving her out of my cell across the pod to a different cell.
I did not realize how quickly a person becomes unpopular when you tell the guards about another prisoner not treating you right. I had no experience in jail before this. That’s when she and several other women wanted to believe I made up lies about her so they began to treat me with dirty looks, suspicion, hostility, and loud rude comments and dozens of acts of mockery. At times it felt like I had a lot of enemies in jail, and little support from outside of jail or from many people I had known a really long time. Jesus helped me make the friends I needed to have in jail, and he protected me from the people I did not need as friends and their schemes. One day God gave me the scripture Isaiah 41:12 which says “Though you search for your enemies, you will not find them. Those who wage war against you will be as nothing at all.” I knew God was promising my jail experience was going to get better. The Lord also gave me hope that I wasn’t going to get beat up by the 5 women when he showed me Proverbs 6:16-19 “There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: 17 haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, 18 a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, 19 a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.”
God was taking the time to show me he hated their behavior. Because they were devising schemes to make me look like a thief, and were lying about me to the guards, because they had a plan to rush into evil by harassing me daily, and because they were stirring up conflict in the community by constantly mocking me and changing position in line whenever we would stand in line for meds, so they could be right behind me or in front of me to harass and intimidate me, criticize me loudly and trying to humiliate me. In the middle of that, God gave me the assurance that he was going to protect me from their evil plans, conflict, harassment, and pointless mockery, because He showed me those scriptures. I knew some relief was on the way! It was just a matter of His timing!
Because my friend informed me, I knew what to pray for. I used the promises God gave me to pray. As I waited on God to answer, I was harassed by those 5 women for weeks until one of the guards made everyone get out of their cells and come down to the main floor and yelled at everyone and said he wanted the disrespect to stop and then pointed at me and yelled at everyone for their behavior for a few minutes basically saying they need to stop harassing people, and he pointed at me to show them who to stop harassing. One of the main women who harassed me day after day and brushed against me with her giant body calling me the B word decided to be nice to me after a while. (She was about 6 feet tall and weighed about 320 pounds, and I am 5’4”). Others became nice to me when they saw I was a good volleyball player. God prevented them from getting me set up to look guilty when one of them threw a lit match in my cell when the guards were passing out mail and when they got to my cell and smelled the smoke from the match I didn’t get in trouble for it and God prevented me from going into lock down high security.
I knew God wanted me to do something positive other than just trying to “hide” my life in Jesus. I remembered Jesus said he has made us the light of the world, (In Matthew 5:14, Jesus says, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.”) I knew we should not hide our lights, and that meant I was going to need to keep praying and ask God to help me overlook people’s abuse and nastiness and the mental strength to be kind to them and not look at their wrongs. God never left me but He let me go through hardships while He drew me close in jail when all that negative stuff was happening. I found some of the hearts of the women changed and God gave me what I needed in the midst of a difficult 75 days as long as I was praying about being a positive influence and not hiding my light under a bushel.
Lessons learned:
Pray that God would help you be teachable. God will provide faith to match the level of difficulty of the situation.
Don’t become miffed at people who don’t reach out to you after you reach out to them. Focus on the people who want to be in your life.
People in jail can be hypersensitive. Don’t try too hard to fit in, because people can misinterpret your behavior.
If you get harassed, I believe God cares about this, and God still wants his justice to unfold on behalf of those who trust in Him and seek Him for help behind bars.
Pray about everything. Break out of your shell even if people treat you roughly in jail and take time to be kind to people. Don’t take your relationships for granted even if you just met them because God has a purpose even for the difficult relationships, and they may need the light of Jesus from your faith to shine on them and that can only happen when your heart is right toward them. If God sees fit to put you in jail, let Isaiah 9:2 become a reality for others. When they see your faith is real, and if they can get a needed glimpse of Jesus, and if they are drawn to God, we will be able to tell the testimony “The people which sat in darkness saw a great light.” LG
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