Psalm 119:68 Doing Good

For some of the people I've met in the prison chapel, transformation seems nearly impossible.

Janie confessed one day that until the first time she went to prison, she had never in her young life been sure she would get to eat three meals in any one day and have a bed to sleep on at night. Born into the make-do culture of generational poverty, the only “meals” she’d ever known consisted of whatever food could be scratched together. Sleep happened wherever she happened to be when the time came. To her, the proverbial “three hots and a cot” of prison life is a luxury.

In prison she has found her niche. She's learned the institutional rules - both the official rules and the unwritten ones - and she knows how to get through her days without too many problems. She even has a circle of friends to make her life a little brighter.

Her outlook turns dismal whenever she finishes a prison sentence and is released back out onto the streets. On her best days she has difficulty seeing beyond the needs of the moment. Being out in the world only worsens her reasoning capabilities. Life on the streets offers too many choices. Before long, she shifts back into a poverty-level approach to life, crosses the wrong lines, and finds herself back inside the only place where she feels comfortable.  (Breaking the Link from Poverty to Prison, Christian Standard, December 2014)

Janie's grew up in the poverty class of America, where the "hidden rules" of every day life are different than the way most of us approach our days.

For the millions entrenched in generational poverty, "good" is a moving target. Survival trumps goodness in the real world where the only absolute virtue is making it though yet another day. Bringing your family and friends along with you might also be important, but when suffering and affliction arrive like a cyclone, personal survival wins out for many.

When people who have lost any objective sense of goodness land in prison, they'll grasp onto anything to survive. It might even be church and faith.

Teaching or counseling them can be frustrating. Basic truths fall on ears that can't even comprehend ideas like sacrificial love or humble obedience.

The only way to break through is to introduce them to God. As they come to know the heart of God and the heart of Jesus, they begin to understand.

God is good. His goodness is like nothing they've ever experienced. In fact, His goodness is so contrary to everything they've come to accept as truth, they're forced to make a choice: run from Him or run to Him. Retreat or change.

You are good, and what you do is good; teach me your decrees. 

Psalm 119:68

That's why we teach them the Word and about how it applies in concrete ways to daily life decisions. That's what the Bible is for. Those decrees, laws, and principles help us understand the heart of God. Without the guidance of the scriptures, people like Janie are doomed to fall back into their old ways of thinking.

If you're starting to feel pity or compassion for these poor folks trapped in their warped way of life, that's great. Now look in the mirror.

Middle class people and wealthy people are just as much the victims of the society in which they live. Their sense of goodness is just as warped, but by a different set of "hidden rules". They've lived by those rules for so long, some start to equate there middle and upper class ways with godliness and faith.

It's just as hard to shake them out of their ingrained life habits as it is to change the mindset of a person in poverty.

Goodness is not found in any particular lifestyle or culture. Goodness is found in God. He is good and He does what is good. He's willing to teach you if you're willing to be taught.