Spiritual Survival Guide
7: Surviving Spiritually Beyond Prison
These are solid, hopeful, understandable, and wonderful things to hope for in a new church community. And these things can, in fact, be found in our neighborhood churches. Unfortunately, the picture they paint looks more like heaven than our local church. And that’s because our churches are also full of sinners like ourselves! We can thank God that our churches are full of sinners (there’s room for us), but that makes them considerably less appealing than the ideal picture we often conjure up in our head. Here’s what happens all too often: When we show up at a local church and the spiritual temperature is less than we were used to in prison, we can feel let down by the worship experience. When we show up and people welcome us with less than open arms (they’re wondering if we’re for real, or if we’re playing a game), we can feel like they’re a bunch of hypocrites. When we show up with our untrusting prison defenses still up, we can behave awkwardly and find it hard to connect with people. When we show up feeling conspicuous and self-conscious because we’ve been in prison, we can isolate ourselves and end up feeling even more like an outsider than when we walked in.
Think About It. Talk About It.
1. If you’re still in prison when you’re reading this, how much hope do you have for your own good re-entry and for surviving spiritually beyond prison? If you’ve already been released, how did your first few months of re-entry go?
2. How do you react to Dan’s story of going home? Do you think it’s fairly typical? Are there any lessons for you in his story? 3. Every inmate who is going home needs both profound hope and realistic expectations. Do you have both things right now, or are you missing one of them?
4. What excites you most about the idea of surviving spiritually beyond prison?
5. How good are you at advance planning? At communicating your plans? If you’re not so good at planning or communicating, who could you get to help you to improve? As your release date draws closer, will you use the Communi- cations Checklist?
6. What worries or concerns you most about surviving spiritually after prison?
Church is hard because life itself is hard. And yet, with all the things that can (and do) go wrong, finding a church where we can truly worship, contribute, serve, learn, connect, and love and be loved is
a) feeling overwhelmed by the pace of life on the outside
b) not setting up a new spiritual support system in time
c) making wise decisions on a consistent basis
d) the streets—not handling my freedom in a God-pleasing way
probably the greatest spiritual gift we can give ourselves. And that’s because God made us for community. We’re simply never going to thrive spiritually on the outside without being deeply connected to other believers. So whatever else you do, find yourself a church and dig in.
e) basic life issues—getting a job, relations with my family, etc.
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