prison faith

"I ask Ron to think back to the worst setting he'd ever seen. I took this writing assignment to see how faith survives among people who are pressed to the limits... Had he ever found a place of absolute despair, with no crack of hope? What was the ultimate 'table-top test' of the gospel?

Ron thought for a moment and then told me about the time he and Chuck Colson visited a maximum security prison in Zambia. Their 'guide', a former prisoner named Nego, had described a secret inner prison built inside to hold the very worst offenders. To Nego's amazement, one of the guards agreed to let him show the facility to Chuck and Ron.

'We approach a steel cagelike building covered with wire mesh. Cells line the outside of the cage, surrounding a "courtyard" fifteen by forty feet. Twenty-three hours of each day the prisoners are kept in cells so small that they cannot all lie down at once. For one hour they are allowed to talk around in the small courtyard. Nego had spent twelve years in those cells.

'When we approached the inner prison, we could see sets of eyes peering at us from a two-inch space under the steel gate. And when the gate swung open, it revealed squalor unlike I have seen anywhere. There were no sanitation facilities - in fact, the prisoners were forced to defecate in their food pans. The blazing African sun had heated up the steel enclosure unbearably. I could hardly breathe in the foul, stifling atmosphere of that place. How could human beings possibly live in such a place, I wondered.

'And yet, here is what happened when Nego told them who we were. Eighty of the 120 prisoners went to the back wall and assembled in rows. At a given signal, they began singing - hymns, Christian hymns, in a beautiful four-part harmony. Nego whispered to me that thirty-five of those men had been sentenced to death and would soon face execution.

'I was overwhelmed by the contrast between their peaceful, serene faces and the horror of their surrounding. Just behind them, in the darkness, I could make out an elaborate charcoal sketch drawn on the wall. It showed Jesus, stretched out on a cross. The prisoners must have spent hours working on it. And it struck me with great force, the force of revelation, that Christ was here with them, sharing their suffering, and giving them joy enough to sing in such a place.'"

- an excerpt from "Finding God in Unexpected Places" by Philip Yancey