There Is Always Hope

Though I haven’t blogged in quite a while, I felt called to do so tonight because over the last two weeks I have learned (or at least been reminded of) two things: 1) There is always hope and 2) God never abandons us.  I’m guessing that every one of us knows someone that we care about that we hope and pray will “change.”  Maybe we want them to come to know Jesus Christ.  Maybe we want them to clean up their act.  Or maybe we want them to stop making the same mistakes over and over again.  Maybe we want to change ourselves.  Well, please believe me – God can work in our lives or in their lives at any time.  The situation may seem hopeless, but it is not.  Sometimes it takes years and years of praying.  And that can be so frustrating when it seems like our prayers are going nowhere. But God hears our cries.  So please, don’t give up hope.  Don’t stop praying.  And remember that sometimes God is calling us to work in their lives, and sometimes the best thing we can do is step away from the situation, continue lifting them up in prayer, and trust that God will work on their hearts.

“Dead Man Walking”

If, several years down the road, I am in Prison Chaplaincy and start to question why I’m there in the first place or I start to get burnt out, please remind me to watch Dead Man Walking again. I just watched it for the first time tonight. Man, is that a powerful movie. It gave me so much to think about, but what I liked most about it was that it really showed the perspective of all the people who are involved/affected by crime. This is probably something that I need to be reminded of. I tend to want to focus so much on the inmates, I forget about their families that are hurting, the victims, the victims’ family, and the toll that is taken on Prison Guards and other employees. This movie also served as a reminder that many of the inmates will have done terrible, horrible things. That is another side of things that I may sometimes forget. Yet, every one of them, no matter how much bad they’ve done, is a son or a daughter of God. I know this is hard for many people to accept. It’s very hard for me to accept sometimes. I’ve always struggled with whether or not there is pure evil in this world. Some stories you hear and think, “This person has absolutely no conscience whatsoever. All good and all humanity has left them.” But the other part of me still wants to say “NO MATTER what you have done, you are still within God’s reach and He still loves you. Turn to Him before it is too late.”

SPOILER ALERT:

At the end of Dead Man Walking, as they are leading Matthew Poncelot, the prisoner, to his execution, the nun, Sister Helen Prejean, steps up to him and says, “I want the last face you see in this world to be the face of love, so you look at me when they do this thing. Ill be the face of love for you.”

Who is God calling you to be “the face of love” for?