Each year as Easter approached I’d try and find meaning, try
and understand why, why was I going through this, why had I lost so much, where
was the loving God I prayed to each day in the midst of struggle? On a simple level, I knew I was guilty. I was paying the price, serving the sentence,
imposed by a legitimate court following my guilty plea for the theft of two
million dollars. And, I knew I deserved
to be punished. I knew all along I was
breaking the law. I knew I’d lose my
wife and friends. I knew it all. Yet, the punishment was worse than
expected. The swiftness and finality of
rejection beyond what I could imagine. I
was paying more than a just price for my conduct.
I have felt so alone, so abandoned, rejected, and betrayed
that no one, I feared could comprehend the depth of my suffering. I would cry out, over and over at night alone
in a stank cell, “help me, God. Please
help me.” And my tears, my pleas would
fall on deaf ears. Everything I had
feared my whole life, everything I believed about myself, that no one did love
me, that everyone was dependent on me giving them something or they would
abandon me, proved true. It was, on more
than one occasion almost too painful to bear.
On more than one occasion, especially in that first year of
living in a jail cell with no physical contact with friends or family other
than the all too infrequent thirty-minute “how are you doing?” through Plexiglas,
I actively planned my own death. Death, I
believed, was better than prison, divorce, rejection. I was empty.
Nothing could change my circumstances.
It is the worst position to be in.
Hopelessness kills.
Each year, as the Lenten season began, I vowed to
renew. I’d sacrifice some silly pleasure
and devote myself to meditation and prayer.
I’d try and meet God halfway, try and understand what all of this meant,
try and hope when every rational fiber in me said hope is gone. Easter would arrive; I’d hear the words from
my years of church attendance ring in my head.
“The Lord is Risen”, and the rote response, “He is Risen indeed”, and I would
wait expectantly for the miracle to unfold.
I wanted, I craved that “come thou long expected Jesus” moment, the one
that would restore me to family and friends.
It never came.
Tough. Painful. Lonely.
Survivable? I wasn’t sure. I cried to God, I argued with Him; I tried
everything I knew and then I concluded nothing I could offer or promise would
matter. My life was beyond my
control. The only decision I really had
to make was, do I hope or do I just go on.
I thought of a man in Texas as I tried to figure out what to
do. He served over fifteen years in a Texas
prison, convicted of murdering his wife.
He told anyone who would listen he wasn’t the killer. He loved his wife, he told the jury. But the evidence, the prosecution argued, was
overwhelming. It was cold-blooded
murder. Life in prison was his
destiny.
I heard Michael Morton speak about his time in maximum
security, how close he came to breaking.
There was the time his son turned twelve and wrote him and announced “I
don’t want to visit anymore”. And the
pain from that letter seared his heart.
It got worse. At seventeen, his
son wrote again. “I’m going to be
adopted” by the family raising him. He
was changing his name. “My heart broke”,
Morton said. He gave up.
Then a miracle happened.
The Innocence Project heard about his case. They petitioned the court to examine the
prosecution’s file and discovered evidence exonerating Morton that was withheld
at trial. And then DNA evidence proved conclusively
Morton was not the killer. Another man,
already doing life in Texas for murder, had killed his wife.
Michael Morton walked out of prison a free man. But, he wasn’t truly free until he was able
to forgive all those people who put him in that hell, all those people who
abandoned him. Nothing he went through
made sense and yet, in God’s infinite wisdom it all made sense. He had survived the valley, stared into the
abyss, and was made whole. More importantly,
Michael Morton found peace. He mattered
and what he’d gone through mattered.
This Lenten season I embarked on another time of renewal and
spiritual cleansing. I gave up potato
chips – my weakness in here, and coffee.
Each morning I began with reading one or two Psalms and an Old and New
Testament lesson. Ironically, three
times I read Psalm 77, a Psalm of crying out to a silent God and then finding
strength remembering His prior amazing deeds.
More ironically, I read the story of Joseph, sold into
slavery, imprisoned for thirteen years, and then he saved both Egypt and the
Israelites. “You intended it for evil,
but God intended it for good.” I read
the Exodus story. God heard the cries of
His people and sent Moses, a murderer of an Egyptian, abandoned by his own
people, to go and announce to Pharaoh, “God says, Let my people go.”
And I listened as I prayed waiting for God to tell me what
this all means. I heard silence, but the
silence gave me comfort. I cried out
some nights, I hurt, I was lonely, but somehow each morning the silence
sustained me. Did anyone know what I was
going through? Did anyone care? I read the Gospels and saw it, the suffering,
the rejection. His twelve most trusted
friends; one betrays him, ten run and hide, afraid for their own lives; only
one – John – shows up at his execution.
He knew what I felt. He knows
what I’m going through. He is with me.
This morning I awoke to a cloudless Easter morning. I went out and ran. Over and over I heard the words from the
Gospel of Luke, “and they went to the tomb and it was empty. And the angel of the Lord said, “He is not
here. He is Risen.” I thought about that empty tomb. I thought about all I’d been through these
past four years. And I realized I’d
never felt closer to God than I did this morning.
I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I don’t know when this trial will end or what
will be in my future. I know what I pray
for each day. There is hope in
suffering; there is hope in emptiness. “The
tomb is empty.” There is hope. 
No comments:
Post a Comment