The other weekend I was at visitation with my folks. Every month, they make the ninety mile drive
from their home in North Carolina up here.
They are both healthy, late-seventies people, and that gives me hope for
a lot of years post prison. Our
conversations run the gamut of what’s going on with whom, and where people
are. Invariably, my mom will make an
aside about my former church and the minister there. At my worst, as I sat in the Henrico County
Jail trying to find any reason to go on, he refused to come see me.
For a long time that treatment – by people I worshiped with
and helped – gnawed at me. How can my
own minister turn his back on me? 2012
was an epiphanal year in my life. And a
fair number of issues and emotional baggage I’d been carting around slowly
began to go away. Things that had seemed
to hurt me so deeply didn’t really matter too much. In fact, I began to appreciate the pain they
caused. Call it rationalization, or
maturity, or salvation, but I began to understand what the Apostle Paul meant
when during his imprisonment he wrote “And in all things God works for the good
of those who love Him according to His purposes.”
Paul was a heck of a writer and his words struck at the
mystery that is faith in times of deep trouble.
Those words – I recited that verse literally dozens of times on my worst
days as I tried to will myself into believing nothing was happening that God in
His infinite power and grace couldn’t work out for my benefit.
I have a dear friend, an Episcopal minister, who regularly
visited me at the jail and the receiving unit.
He has provided counsel, and support – even getting his congregation
involved in my circumstances, and has listened during my Job-like periods when
nothing made sense. He stayed in touch,
writing and visiting me even while undergoing chemotherapy. His friendship is a true blessing in my
life. Here’s the irony. I never would have met Gary had it not been
for my own minister’s snub. Another
friend, one of Gary’s parishioners, asked him to come see me after my own
church rejected me. “If only”. Somehow, I think Paul is smiling and saying, “Larry
finally gets it.”
Back to college graduation – I sat there and watched our
students march in and I remembered I missed my older son’s college graduation. A wave of emotion – sadness, guilt,
loneliness – hit me. “If only”, I
thought, and I felt myself growing back into the guy who struggled so long in
here. I started thinking about Paul’s words.
The ceremony ended and I was eating with a few friends and
two college faculty members when one of our graduates came up. “Larry, my parents want to meet you.” I walked over with him and said hello. An elderly black woman with a cane stepped
up, then threw her arms around me. “Thank
you”, she said. “You helped our son so
much. You answered our prayers.”
Funny thing, that same reaction happened eight or nine times
after that as grad after grad got me and introduced me to parents,
grandparents, spouses, children. “This
is the guy who got me through my academic classes.”
I thought about Joseph in Egypt. Sold into slavery, sent to prison, forgotten
and then saves Egypt during a terrible drought.
Through divine intervention he is reunited with his brothers who fear
for their lives. Joseph, in one of the
Bible’s great lines of mercy forgives his brothers. “You meant to harm me, but God meant it for
good.”
“If only.” Sometimes
we focus too much on the regret and not on the blessing. I couldn’t help but think about Paul, and our
graduates and their families, and my prison journey. “In all things God works for the good….” Even in embezzlement convictions,
incarceration, and divorce that message applies.
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