Spiritual Survival Guide
1: Starting Well: Surviving Spiritually on the Inside
need some short-term wins. Since we’re an easily discouraged group of people, we need some practical steps that head us in the right direction. We need to have the Holy Spirit help us with some momentum builders, some minor victories, that can feed our faith and combat all the negative voices. Let’s say your vision of living more abundantly this year involves (1) being more disciplined in your prayer life and (2) reading the Bible in a way that gives you more understanding. Your short-term wins might involve deciding that for the next month, you’re going try a couple of specific disciplines. So, for example, you leave your copy of the Bible or other devotional material on top of your toothbrush each evening, and vow not to brush your teeth each morning until after you’ve gone through that day’s texts and said your prayers. You just set your Bible there on top of the brush. It’s a simple thing: if you don’t pray, you don’t brush. It’s simple, and it works. ( Unless you like green, fuzzy teeth, that is! ) Second, you might try your best to get connected spiritually in the next thirty days. You share this book with your celly or another guy on your deck. You ask him if he’d like to read a section and talk over the questions at the end. You get out of your own head for a while without worrying about the outcome. God will take care of the outcome. You just begin to put yourself in those situations where God can do his thing.
time you keep it to yourself; nobody else needs to know what you’re up to. But you’ll know. And so will God. The key thing is, don’t try to overwhelm yourself with taking too many steps all at once. That’s a recipe for stumbling. At this stage just commit yourself to one month of small, short-term wins. Just get yourself to next month. And then you and God can figure out where to go from there and what steps you’ll want to take to get there. Get ongoing help . If you really want to flip the odds in seeing significant change in your life from 9 to 1 against to 8 to 2 for , get ongoing help. The research showed that heart bypass patients needed at least weekly sup- port and coaching in order for them to stay on track. Otherwise all their health gains tended to unravel. Think about how many of us are too proud to look for help once, much less on a weekly basis! We have to find a way to come out of our isolation, simply for the fact that it’s blocking us from changing. We need focus and attention and helpful friendship. The truth is, we change best when we change together. That’s why you hear the Christian guys around you always talking about “fellowship.” It’s not about being in some kind of exclusive religious club, or about forming a Christian “gang.” It’s about being honest and getting that ongoing help that we all need.
What Works and What Doesn’t: Wisdom from C and D Blocks
If it’s a less selfish and judgmen- tal spirit you feel Jesus calling you to, you might vow to pray for the guys around you for the next thirty days. Not one day more. But not one day
We thought it would be interesting to compare what we were hearing from guys passing through the NRC with what inmates from Stateville said when they reflected back on their first few months. We wondered what they might say about what worked for them and what didn’t. What follows is not a list of “dos and don’ts” that you’d better do or else.
less, either. You make a list, starting with your celly (if you have one). You include the guys up and down your deck, and the officers on all the different shifts (even the ones you don’t know or can’t stand). During this
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