Thanks for starting this thread Mike, I agree God has, is, and will continue to use prison to bring many to Himself. Not just prisoners, but their families, friends, officers, etc.. Prisons are a rod of His chastisement for many and an extension of His mercy, patience, longsuffering, and forebearance. Prison gives people time to reflect and ponder their sins and transgressions. Prisons are NOT the sudden destruction that comes upon the fool without remedy, and that destruction being death and the remedy being the ability to repent.
The fields within the prisons are truly ripe and ready to harvest.
I to am very familiar with prison life as my next oldest brother was sent to prison for 4 years when I was 17. This began a 32 year long stretch for my brother going in and out, in and out of prison.
Of the 32 year long stretch, he spent more than 75% of those years behind bars. Me and my family visited him often in prisons all over Michigan. My brother became a model prisoner over the years, he became in good standing with not only other prisoners but especially the officers.
While in prison he would stay very close to God but when he got out, he left God in the prison. I was the one who went with him before the parole board on so many occasions I cannot remember them all.
In addition to my brother, I have a very good brother in the Lord whom I have known since we met in 1994. He was in prison for 10 years for 2nd degree murder.
After his crime he just barely was able to recommit his life to Christ before he planned on taking his own life. The reason? The life he took was that of his own infant daughter. But God intervened. With no one willing to visit him beside his own father and one elderly woman who went to visit my friend to tell him not to take his life.
There are so MANY things of what God has done in my brother and my friends lives, our families, and the many many people we have met and interacted with in the prisons.
As a result of my brothers incarceration and my visiting him often as there were 5 prisons within a 1 hour drive that my brother was in each of them at one time or another.
I got to know many officers and families when I would visit my brother. As a Christian, my heart is filled with compassion and a desire to extend Gods love, grace, peace, and hope. After my visits with my brother, he would tell me things that other prisoners, their families who were visiting, and even the officers would say about me.
I never realized it at first because I was just being myself and looking at and treating people through the eyes and heart of Jesus. The attraction was not me, but who was in me.
Prisoners my brother would not necessarily gel with would come to my brother after one of my visits and tell him to tell me thank you for treating their mother, wife, or family with kindness when I was there. As a result, this would forge a friendship and a bond with these other men and my brother.
For me, being in the visiting room was always very comfortable and there was a peace that prevailed. Prisons can be a very racially segregated place but my brother and I were raised to respect, love, and honor all people because God made us all.
People know when you genuinely care about them, it makes them feel comfortable and more open. It is true that there were always some that no matter how caring you might be they still did not want to have anything to do with you.
I can tell story after story of Gods goodness to so many the miracles He had done in my friend and brother.
The proverb, birds of a feather flock together is especially true. True Christian brothers have no problem finding one another in prison. My friend says some of the best praise, worship, prayer, and fellowship he has ever experienced was while he was in prison. Many times He says he misses it.
I may have shared this once before but I will close with one of the miracles the Lord did on my brothers behalf.
After one of my brothers releases from prison in 1998 within one week he was arrested for something I cannot remember. After you get paroled you cannot get arrested for any crime because it is a violation of parole and you get automatically sent back to prison.
As a result of him going back I knew he was going to be very hard on himself, depressed to the max. As I was praying the Lord cautioned me that my brother was not going to be able to handle this set back and I heard the word suicide.
I called my bother in law, my cousin, and this friend who did the 10 year stretch to come and pray for my brother as I felt he was going to end his life. This was a Friday.
We prayed well into the night and we asked the Lord to go to my brother and speak to him and tell him that He loved him. Then the burden lifted and the peace came, we knew we were finished.
Monday when I came home from work I received a collect call from my brother. When I answered, he was frantic, crying, and talking so fast I could not understand him. I said to please slow down.
He said that Jesus came to him on Friday night as he was preparing to cut his throat and bleed out. He said that he was planning all week that when he was going to be locked down for the night he had gotten extra towels and a shank to cut his juggler vein with and he was going to place the towels underneath himself to catch the blood so when the officers would walk by they would not see a pool of blood.
As he prepared himself he laid down in bed sobbing as he pondered his life, the lonliness, pain, and suffering he caused us all. After the doors were locked he took the shank and was going to cut his throat a hand touched his shoulder and it startled him and then he heard the audible voice of the Lord.
"My son, My son, do not harm yourself for I love you and have always loved you. Be patient and trust Me and I will deliver you from this place"
My brother laid in that bed and cried the whole night. As he told me the story about what God did for him, the devil was on him with such a vengeance trying to steal his joy and peace. He told me that on that Sunday morning as he laid in bed a black crow came and sat on his window sill and was crowing relentlessly. He said the evil that was coming from that bird and the voice of the enemy was causing him to lose hope.
My brother did not eat one bite if food for 16 days as God did a purging of his mind, soul, and body. God Himself took my brother through a great deliverance.
Yes, prison does have its place, whether it be judgement, chastisement, and even a refuge for people like my brother who just found it hard to live life in the world.
Hebrews 13:3 Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.
