PHOTO: A March snowfall in The Catskill Mountains of New York State.
March is the month when prisoners of northern climates feel like their sentences will never come to an end. It teases us with a nice day now and then. It's as if our cells are open for a moment and then some prison guard comes and quickly slams the door.
Being shut up in a house with cabin fever, however, is but a pittance to what true prisoners experience. For captives live with a unique longing.
It’s almost a privileged longing in the sense that there is a more than a metaphor holding them in, keeping them from doing the things they want to do, tasting the food they prefer, seeing the people they love or walking in the hills that are just beyond the barbed wire. The metaphors of captivity are endless.
When a man finally walks out of prison, he becomes the living metaphor for freedom. He feels a weightlessness that what few of us will ever know. He can eat gelato, lie in a meadow, passionately embrace his lover in his own bed and watch his children grow and doesn’t have to be rudely awakened by a prison guard or come back to his room only to have all of his belongings thrown all over “just because.”
Former prisoners see two worlds. We can’t.
But if we could physically observe the shackles that bind us… insecurity, a physical malady, a compulsion or addiction, a never-living-up-to frustration, a desire unfulfilled, anger, a relationship, etc...
What would it be like to say goodbye to the prison guards of our soul and the longest winter of our lives?
PORTAL TO HEAVEN: Being released from a bondage of any sort should make our steps lighter and our testimony so strong that it becomes a freeing portal to heaven for others. Is there something you want to bring to The Savior Of Our Souls who has the key to our prisons?
Jesus answered them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin…’For I see that you are full of bitterness and captive to sin’…He has sent me…to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners
John 8:34, NASB, Acts 8:23 NIV, Isaiah 61:1 NIV
Dedicated to Michael.