His eyes darted back and forth, like a caged animal searching for an escape.
Or maybe he was trying to avoid locking eyes with mine.
It’s been years since that day, early in my pastoral ministry, when I served in Alabama. A relative of a relative who was a member of my church asked me to visit him. He himself was an itinerant preacher and had recently married a lady with a teenage daughter. Something happened with the daughter that shouldn’t have. And the daughter, or maybe the mother, made the accusation.
I don’t know what I represented to him as I stood before him. A morality judge? A fellow pilgrim willing to lend a hand of grace?
The truth is, I was an uneasy young preacher who was making a courtesy visit. I was neither sure what to say nor how to say it. So, I stumbled around for words. Finally, after an awkward introduction, I admitted my pastoral inexperience and told him I was simply there to pray for him.
He melted, crumbling before my eyes. After regaining his composure, what he said next has stuck with me since that day.
“I saw an opportunity to sin,” he slowly spoke to the floor, and then, raising his eyes to meet mine, concluded, “and I took it.”
Silence hung in the air, his words floating, trying to find a place to land, on either the anvil of judgment or the safety net of compassion.
We, all of us, may be separated from him in degree, but not in kind. Who among us has not seen an opportunity to sin and taken it? Jesus’ words to the accusers who caught the women in the very act of adultery (John 8:10-11) echoed in my mind that day. “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
Standing in the jail cell with the accused — he in an orange jumpsuit, me in my starched white shirt and silk tie; he, with a few days’ stubble and the faint aroma of stale cigarettes mingled with body odor, I, clean-shaven with a splash of cologne; he, waiting on institutionalized prison cuisine, I, looking forward to a home-cooked meal—I felt the valley separating us and the iron bond attaching us.
Jeremiah, the prophet, said it best, “The heart is deceitful above all things,” he warned the upright citizens of Judah, “and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
So, what are we to do? Wallow in the sickness of the soul?
This season of Lent can be a time not just of turning from the murkiness within but also of looking outward to the good, the true, and the beautiful without.
The Proverb says, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7).
So what are we, flawed creatures that we are, to think? “Since you have been raised with Christ,” Paul the Apostle wrote, “keep thinking about things above…where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (Colossians 3:1-2).
In another place, Paul even gave us examples of what we can think on: “whatsoever is true, noble, right, whatsoever is pure, lovely, admirable, whatsoever is of excellence and worthy of praise, think on these things (Philippians 4:8).
Walking down the corridor in the detention center, the clickety-clack of my wing-tips echoing past the jail cells, I kept whispering, “There but by the grace of God go I.”
Then, stepping outside the detention center and onto the street of that sleepy southern paradise of a town where I served, a gentle breeze caressed my face. Looking at the fall leaves adorning the trees, dappled with hues of red, orange, and brown, and fixing my gaze above, where a ray of sunshine broke through the clouds, I was suddenly imbued with hope.
And I was quite certain I caught a smile from God.
Thank you and have a blessed day!