PRISON FELLOWSHIP: Prison Fellowship International

It was more than a decade ago, but Melissa still vividly remembers the day she was held at gunpoint.

“It was a Tuesday, which is generally a quiet day,” she says. Melissa was bent over her desk at a bank on the north side of Brisbane, Australia, when she heard someone approach her.

Prison Fellowship International, Prison Fellowship’s ministry counterpart, is the largest, most extensive association of national Christian ministries working within the criminal justice field. To learn more about PFI, visit www.pfi.org.

Ibrahim wears deep lines on his forehead, and bears a scar across his left cheek.

The congregation knelt in silence for the prayer of confession . . .

“Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against thy holy laws, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.

It sounds strange, somewhat on the line between irony and absurdity, to think that people would rather label and judge something as significant as each other but completely bypass a peanut. … World peace is only a dream because people won’t allow themselves and others around them to simply be peanuts.

Hunger…it may not and cannot be experienced vicariously. He who never felt hunger can never know its real effects, both tangible and intangible. Hunger defies imagination; it even defies memory. Hunger is felt only in the present.

– Elie Wiesel

“HUNGRY – Will work for food!”

So the people of the valley sent a message up the hill, asking for the buried treasure, tons of gold for which they’d kill. Came an answer from the kingdom “with our brothers we will share all the secrets of our mountain, all the riches buried there.”

Remember prisoners as if you were in prison with them, and people who are mistreated as if you were in their place.

– Hebrews 13:3 (CEB)

Prison is a growth industry proclaimed a recent article in Financialtimes.com.  “Brazil’s economy might not be growing as fast as it used to, but investors will be given the chance to buy into what remains a true growth industry in Latin America’s largest country – prisons.”  

You can’t get forgiveness from God… without also forgiving others. If you refuse to do your part, you cut yourself off from God’s part.1

“Can he ever be forgiven?  Can he find redemption?” – asked the interviewer.

“Those are the questions,” replied a psychologist, and then mused aloud, “but who really deserves forgiveness?”

A quotation often attributed to Blaise Pascal came to mind this past week – “there is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator.”1

I had been reading a newspaper article about a provocative new book that examines the relationship between a person’s image of God and their attitudes to economics, justice, social morality, politics, love and life in general.2 “It is the shape of God,” I said to myself “and how that affects my interaction with the world – my worldview.”

A devastating fire ripped through a Honduran prison today killing at least 300 prisoners. Here is more from the Associated Press on what they are saying is one of the world’s deadliest fires in decades:

Some 475 people escaped from the prison in the town of Comayagua and 356 are missing and presumed dead, said Hector Ivan Mejia, a spokesman for the Honduras Security Ministry.