“I
will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with
you forever” (John 14:16)
Hey Gang: I want to share a piece of wisdom that I have
acquired on the roadways and by-ways of this world: Temptation is a way of
life! Now, I am sure that is not a new
revelation to you. And temptation leads
to which dog you will fed today – the white dog or the black dog.
Bruce Wilkerson, in his book The
3-Minute-Temptation Buster made a point that I can identify with: “Each
time I am confronted with temptation my emotions send me messages of internal
agitation”.
While working in a detention
facility in California, I had occasion to work with some very tough hombres and
enjoyed chewing the fat with them. You
see must of these hombres had never just sat down and had a true conversation
with anyone. I wanted to know what was
going on in their heads, as well as their hearts. So, each night, after we had
put the kids down for the night, I picked one to help and went on a fishing
expedition.
One of my favorite questions was,
“Have you ever been to church?” This I
followed with have you ever heard of the man called Jesus? Most did not have a clue who Jesus was. From there I did some probing to see if they
ever felt love, not surface sex-type love, but love from deep in their
gut. The response was usually the
same. It was the same look you might
have, if you had been locked in a cellar for all of your life and knew there
must be something better out there, but you had not had the luxury of
experiencing it.
I asked these questions setting the
lads up for this question, “You have done some pretty nasty things in your
life. Did you ever feel deep in pit of
your stomach that what you were doing was wrong? Did you ever wish you had not done them? Did you ever dream that one day you would
find a rainbow or pot of gold and your life would be more than the pain and
agony that has been your life?
Tragically most would say, when I
was a little lad I would dream of my mom and dad together in a house on a
street where we were a happy family; but I don’t dream of that anymore because
I know it is an impossible dream.
When I asked them, if they knew in
their heart that what they were doing was wrong, the response was always the
same; “Ah, ya, Man! Something in here
(chest cavity) let me know.” But, they
also said, “As you grow older that voice is weaker and weaker and it is easier
to hurt people without feeling sad or guilty.”
In my three-year tenure in the Juvenile Hall I had
conversations with hundreds of tough dudes, more kids asking these same basic
questions. Nearly all made my top-ten
toughest hombres list, for you see every one of these bad hombres had a heart
that had been destroyed because no one had asked these same basic questions
when they were forming for life who they would be.
Most of these bad hombres were in my
section awaiting parole-violation hearings and placement to another facility,
where they would be locked in cages with the intent of fixing them. In my question sessions with these bad hombres,
I heard each screaming:
“I
am somebody, I am alive, I am not a case file in your file cabinet, I have
feeling too deep for you to understand because you have no desire to dig deep
into my soul and find out what makes me tick. We had a saying in the Juvenile Hall, we could
tell how tough a kid really was by how long he cried at night!
Last night, I had a problem finding
a comfortable position for my arthritic body.
On many of those nights there is a parade of’ tough hombres’ that marches
through my brain, there is Fritz, Ted, Swan, Lon and Dennis. There is Michael, Larry, Dennis, Michael and
the list goes on. I wonder if any of
them found that rainbow or Jesus.
Tune in next time- for the rest of
the story - but then again perhaps you do not want to know the rest of the
story!
Blessings,
Gramps
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