Hello, my name is Lisa, and I was incarcerated.
That word has a terrible stigma attached to it, but God wastes nothing. I have been saved since I was 18, and I am now 54 years old. I ended up going to jail when I was around 50, but God ended up teaching me through my jail time. I want to write about some different experiences that caused me to change. This is the first in a series of articles in which I will attempt to examine my incarceration and how God used that time period in my life. For those who seek God sincerely there is nothing He can’t do in his help of us, but he doesn’t always do it comfortably. It is always smart to pray according to God’s will but if you are ever in doubt about what to pray for, and your life doesn’t make sense, it is valuable to pray for God’s guidance, and ask Him that we don’t miss the lessons He is aiming to teach us, especially when you encounter a new situation and can’t yet tell what you are going to experience.
During the trial they had for my crime I had a feeling I was going to go to jail even though people were telling me they were almost sure I would not have to go. What happened was, a few years ago I was involved in someone’s accidental death. I was very sorry for my actions that led up to the death of the victim I never met before. People kept telling me that they didn’t think I deserved jail, but I was not surprised when the judge sentenced me to 75 days.
I did not know how to deal with the aspect of committing the kind of sin that took someone’s life. I found it not easy to go to God to find forgiveness because I was fixing blame on myself for having a lot of hardships in life. I was tempted to imagine I was a terrible person for God to decide He wanted me in jail, but I learned later that I was attaching my own old baggage, much I had already asked God to forgive me for, to the fact that I was in jail, thinking God must be really fed up with me to have me go to jail. I realize now that that is a false notion. That the Christian’s life must get easier as our faith grows or easier the more we spend time in the word is not shown to us as the normal life in the Bible for many Christians. These false idealisms I had in my head were distracting me and I was shifting the focus off my current sin, onto old sins, forgetting that God forgave me already in the past for the things my mind was re-blaming myself for.
I simply had to deal with my current sin in a God honoring way. Because of the idealisms I believed I had been working for such as I thought life should get easier with a four year degree and once I got the degree I thought I should be able to settle down into a comfortable job was one of the notions I had that motivated me to get the degree. Now that my schooling was over and the time had come and I had the degree, I thought life was going to get a lot easier. This idealistic concept I held and the fact that this was my first social work job I had gotten with my degree led me into thinking really deep about life. I had the job for less than one month and because the accident happened on the way to work I simply could not understand why at this time in my life God would allow me to get nto an accident. Because of my self preoccupation a couple friends said they wondered if I was sorry for the accident because I was thinking about how the accident affected me instead of thinking about how it affected the family involved. But I like to understand why God allows things he does that we would not specifically choose. We can learn more from God’s choices and plans than we can from our own choices and plans.
It was humbling to hear that, and I wondered why a couple people couldn’t tell if I was sorry. I learned I had some entitlement issues. I learned it is dangerous to think Christianity teaches that your life must get easier with your spiritual growth. But it does teach that you can grow more like Christ in your attitude. I prayed “Lord, I think there is something wrong with me if certain people can’t tell I am sorry for the accident. I want to express myself in such a way that I communicate my sadness over what I had done to those who needed to hear it.” I was on my own mind too much which kept me “distant emotionally”. I was complicating God’s forgiveness by thinking the forgiveness He would give would be real only if my life was easy. It is never good to think God’s forgiveness is less than what it is, because I believe now God truly wants us to be able to admit our guilt without getting into condemnation. We don’t have to rehearse our guilt before God. God believes us when we are truly sorry. The Bible says in 1 John 1:9 that “God cleanses us from all unrighteousness” when we admit our sins and even says God is faithful in his cleansing of us. So, we don’t have to rehearse the old sins we have already received forgiveness for.
Truths I learned going through jail time:
God wants us to be able to admit our guilt without getting into condemnation.
God is able to hear your heart if you are sorry, even if you seem distracted to others, because God is able to see what is going on in our hearts and can see past our distractions and shed light on our minds which if left to ourselves might complicate the issues.
When we attach old baggage to our current sin or to our time we serve for a crime, we are reducing God’s forgiveness into something less than it truly is. We are making forgiveness more complicated than it needs to be. We have forgotten we were forgiven for our past sins, if we have already told God we were sorry for those past things. God’s forgiveness is real and simple to receive. LG
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