Some late night musings: I awakened from a dream in which I had been put in prison for the rest of my life. My heart was beating wildly, and the adrenaline was running. As I lay in bed, I began to ponder the biblical heroes who spent time in prisons, which must have been absolutely horrific. Was the dream triggered by recent reading I’d done from Fr. Walter Ciszek’s book He Leadeth Me? Ciszek had been thrown into a Russian prison by the secret police.
He describes the moment like this:
That experience is something you cannot describe adequately. Anyone who has ever been arrested by mistake or held overnight in jail will know the feeling, but I cannot find words to convey fully the shock, both emotional and physical, that comes over you in such an experience. Helplessness may be the closest one-word description of that feeling, and yet how pale and inadequate it seems to express the reality. You feel completely cut off from everything and everyone who might conceivably help you, unable to make a move to help yourself and powerless to get in touch immediately with anyone who might help, totally at the mercy of those who have you in custody, not free to go anywhere or take any action unless they allow it. It is as if an iron door has slammed on the world you know and can operate in, and you have entered a totally new universe with its own set of rules and powers and boundaries. Those who give the orders do not have to listen, nor do they ever seem to have to make an accounting to anyone. You, on the other hand, are helpless to say or do anything that might affect your plight for the better. (He Leadeth Me, Walter J. Ciszek, S.J., with Daniel Flaherty, S.J., Ignatius Press, 1995)
The next morning I re-read the account of Paul’s imprisonment at Philippi in Acts 16. Not such a breezy story after all, I thought. He and Silas had every reason to panic; yet they sang songs at midnight that all the prisoners heard. That’s courage!
I meditated on this a few days ago: “God is at home; it is we who have gone out for a walk” (Meister Eckert quoted in Larry Crabb’s book Soul Talk, Integrity Publishers, 2003).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds me:
To allow the hungry man to remain hungry would be blasphemy against God and one’s neighbor, for what is nearest to God is precisely the need of one’s neighbor. It is for the love of Christ, which belongs as much to the hungry man as to myself, that I share my bread with him and that I share my dwelling with the homeless. If the hungry man does not attain to faith, then the fault falls on those who refused him bread. To provide the hungry man with bread is to prepare the way for the coming of grace.
And I say to myself: I guess as long as 35,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable diseases, as long as we know that there will be 25 million orphans under the age of 15 by 2010 (thanks to AIDS), and as long as 5.6 million children are said to be entrapped in some form or another of sexual abuse and prostitution, I had better remain restless. This question comes to mind: can an evangelical Christian really claim a genuine conversion experience if he/she doesn’t evidence a passionate concern for situations like these?
Provocative thoughts for me.
Gordon MacDonald is chair of World Relief and editor at large of Leadership.
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