Dear Friends,

There aren’t any hallways or doors when you get off the elevator, only six Plexiglas windows with fixed metal stools and telephones. On the other side of those windows, beyond the railing, you can see the courtyard of the cellblock. You make small talk with the other visitors until your prisoner appears, then both of you smile and wave and pick up the phone. You have 15 minutes exactly before the line goes dead. After that you just look at each other, or you try to mouth a few last words, before your prisoner has to go back.

It wasn’t so fast or so cold when I visited my friend Tom in federal prison in Texas a few years ago. There they frisked us and made us walk through a dozen gates, but we got to sit together on benches in a big room for more than an hour and we hugged at the end. Here, at the Hamilton County Justice Center, it’s all about efficiency. The crimes that put people here are almost invariably messy, but the punishment – or the waiting for the punishment – is neat and clean.

What bothers me, besides the fact that my friend Deandra stabbed her boyfriend three times in a drunken rage, is that this visiting business is so foreign to me. How is it that after more than twenty-five years of supposedly following Jesus, this is only the second time I’ve been inside one of these places? How is it that I’ve preached so often about Matthew 25 and listened so seldom to the part about Jesus being in prison? Was I waiting for someone more like the Apostle Paul or Martin Luther King, stoic and righteous and unjustly imprisoned? Did it never occur to me that Jesus might sometimes come at us in the form of the guilty?

Deandra is definitely guilty. She and her boyfriend Donnie have been arguing and beating on each other for as long as I’ve known them, locked in one of the saddest, most dysfunctional relationships I’ve ever seen. They stayed together out of mutual desperation, each blaming the other for their poverty and unhappiness. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that if they didn’t separate soon, one of them would try to kill the other. Ironically, I had just received word that Deandra was second on the waiting list of the affordable housing program we had signed her up for when I found out she put Donnie in the hospital.

He was back on the street in a few days, more embarrassed than hurt, determined to never again let Deandra or any other woman into his life. Still, when I told him I was going to see her, he said I should do what I could for her. I’m not a forgiving person, he told me, but that woman needs some serious help.

Down at the justice center, Deandra told me the same thing, but it didn’t even take the full 15 minutes for me to realize that the kind of help she wanted had more to do with posting bond than with turning her life around. Still, when I told her she was stuck there for at least a month and maybe much more, even though Donnie isn’t pressing charges, she didn’t get angry or upset. Maybe this is where God wants me right now, she said with a small smile. At least I’m safe here.

Later that day, I tracked down Deandra’s older sister, a kind and respectable married woman who, together with the rest of her siblings, has raised Deandra’s four children and protected them from their mother’s junkie misadventures. Together we decided to leave her in jail until her case is resolved, partly to detox and partly to keep her off the streets while we seek out a decent drug rehabilitation program to put her into once she gets released. In the process, I heard the long story of Deandra’s degeneration from a bright college girl with a supportive family into a dangerous, isolated street person, courtesy of a few bad decisions and a lot of crack cocaine. Twenty years later, her family’s faith and goodwill is all but exhausted. Honestly, knowing what I know, I don’t have much hope for her either. That’s not the point.

The point is that loving Deandra has nothing to do with believing she’s innocent or thinking she might get her act together in the end. Loving her, at this point, is all about showing up. It sounds absurd to me when Deandra says that God put her in prison to keep her safe, as though abandoning her kids, getting high, and stabbing her boyfriend three times were acts of faithful obedience. Whether or not God wants her in prison, however, I know God wants me there.

Sincerely,

Bart