Friday Night in County Jail

Tonight I went back to the Elkhart County Jail. I went to speak with one lady in particular. She is the daughter of a friend of mine. She (L.) is a bright girl who comes from a loving home, she has many people that love her and have tried to help her but she has spent the last 7 years of her life as a crack addict. Drugs have caused her to lose both of her children, stoop to prostitution and be homeless. She has served 6 month stints in prison 5 different times. This last time she was only out of jail for 3 months before she picked up a new charge and violated her probation.

I wrote to her right before she was released this last time but we had never met face to face…until tonight. She was sort of expecting me. Another inmate had told her about a woman named Rocki who sometimes comes in to minister on Friday or Saturday nights. L. knew it had to be the same Rocki as her mom had told her about, the one who had wrote to her. My pastor had actually been her pastor as a child. He counseled with her in 2003 and spoke about me to her. We have many common links, she believed it was a divine appointment for us to finally meet…so did I.

We hugged the moment I arrived like we had known each other for years. We sat at a table to talk and some of the other women immediately came over to join us. I wanted to have a chance to speak with her one on one but I couldn’t ask the others to leave. The ladies came and went from the table as we talked, I was there for over 2 hours. I had not prepared a lesson tonight as I went to speak with L. straight from my heart.
At one point about an hour in to our discussion I felt so heavy and hopeless. It might have been all the people that had warned me before I went to talk with L. of how many people had tried to help her. All the opportunities she has turned her back on, how she knows the Bible, how she seems to be different every time she is clean and in prison but that when she gets on the street she goes right back to the drugs.

My heaviness might have begun there, or it might have been the two girls I saw walking into the jail as I was arriving. They had a baby wearing only a diaper, they bumped his head as they pulled him out of the car, he was barely hanging on as they carried him. They were muttering “Your mom better not be nasty to me after I did all this for her” as they checked in for a video visit. I looked at the babies eyes and I could see that he had a birth defect of some sort, Downs or something similar…it made me so sad.

But more so my heaviness peaked as the inmates at the table with L. and I were all telling about what they have been through, or what they were dealing with in their lives.
A 25 year old who has just accepted Christ has 5 children, her oldest is 12 ¾ years younger than her. She recently gave up another baby for adoption because when she gave birth the baby was black and her husband is white. Her step daughter, who is 16, is pregnant and deciding whether she should have an abortion. Another woman there was telling of her 8 children, two of whom are teenagers and who she just found after not being with them for 10 years. She plans on having them back when she gets out. Another has a 13 year old who recently told her over the phone that she was bisexual.

I could hardly get a word in edgewise as these ladies and L. poured out their stories to me. I listened to every one of them but somewhere along the way I started to feel overwhelmed. Every time I would try to share from the Bible a way that they could start releasing their past and move toward the life that God has for them, I would be interrupted by another story of street life, sleeping under bridges, crack houses, abuse, self defeat and hopelessness.
I started crumbling under the weight of it all. I felt so ill equipped to share God’s Hope with them.
Even the couple ladies who told me they had been reading the Bible, they were so excited to tell me about how they were working on what we had talked about in my previous visits. They went on and on about how this time it was different for them, they were done with drugs…I did not believe it. I was smiling and nodding and listening and crying and holding hands…and inside I was cringing.

Silently, as I listened to the ladies, I started to cry out for help from the Holy Spirit. “Lord, let me look upon these ladies with Your eyes, let me hear them with Your ears, show me how You see them.”
Oh, how He wants them to have eternal life, to be a part of His Kingdom…so passionately does He desire to be with them that He gave his only Son.

I then remembered that it was not up to me to show them a way out of their current situation. I could only share the Hope and Love that is my Savior, to whom nothing is impossible. No one is a lost cause to Him, I wasn’t, and neither are these ladies.