One January weekend I spent two very full days with my daughter and her husband, renovating one of the bathrooms in their house in Michigan. They wanted to do a real overhaul of this particular room, with new plumbing, electrical wiring, and drywall work. We had to cut holes in the ceiling, in the walls, and even in the floor.
As we worked, we found a lot of problems we couldn’t see from the outside. They’d been covered up with drywall and tile. We had to fix them before we could move on. If we had been unwilling to invest the money and effort, we could have just covered them up again with fresh tile and paint, but it would have cost us in the long term. Eventually, a wire would have shorted out, or a pipe would have burst, causing some real damage.
It’s a similar situation when we try to deal with crime by legislating heart change. Proposing new laws or programs might make us feel good in the short term, but in a lot of ways, it’s just window dressing. You can’t fix something that’s broken by just covering it up – you have to deal with the real problem.
We can’t solve crime by instituting the right laws – we need solutions that penetrate to the core of the community and the individual human heart. Each of us – prisoner or free – needs to experience true conviction of our brokenness, and we need the Spirit to drive us to the cross in search of forgiveness.
Transformation starts with the heart. Find out how you can be part of God’s redemptive work in prisoners’ hearts today.
