But God...

1. [Accompany with background music of somber foreboding...] In Acts 12:3 - 6, We find Peter lying in a heavily guarded cell of Herod’s prison awaiting the same execution that James met [a few verses] earlier.
   
   

2. But wait! [Music suddenly changes to a major key with shocking crescendo!] God shows up! “And behold, an angel of the Lord stood by him, and a light shined in the cell: and he struck Peter on the side, and awakened him, saying, ‘Rise up quickly’. And his chains fell off from his hands.” Into this dead-end dungeon of hopelessness strides the power of God to: “bring good tidings unto the afflicted… to bind up the broken–hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound”(Isaiah 61:1).
   
   

3. In obedience to passages such as Matthew 25:36 “I was in prison, and ye came unto me,” we are today symbolically re-enacting those verses of hope as we enter prison after prison in this country and around the world with the promises of hope. These promises are encapsulated in Romans 15:13 "Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
   
   

Historical Confirmation

1. John Bunyan, no stranger to confinement, spent over a decade in 17^th Century prisons, places of squalor and disease. He was repeatedly offered release or pardon on the sole stipulation that he would cease from “illegal” preaching, i.e. unlicensed and unauthorized by the government. His refusal on principle to even admit he was guilty led from an initial sentence of three months to several incarcerations totaling more than 12 years. It is probable that many of Bunyan’s 60 books, including The Pilgrim’s Progress, were composed while he was in jail.
   
   

2. In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the dungeon into which Christian and his friend Hopeful are thrown belongs to a Giant Despair in the castle of Doubting. From Bunyan’s experience, we can be sure these were not random allegorical assignments. They reflect with painful certainty the reality of prison.
   
   

3. Just the synonyms for despair from Roget's Thesaurus are enough to evoke grief and burden the mind. Imagine living these words daily for years!

   	Definition: hopelessness
   	anguish, dashed hopes, dejection, depression, desperation, despondency, discouragement, disheartenment, forlornness, gloom, melancholy, misery, ordeal, pain, trial, tribulation, wretchednes

Setting the Stage - The Dungeon of Despair

Prison is a strange place to think of as “abounding in hope”. In fact, through all my experience working in prisons, I have been impressed with this single observation: Prison is a place which fosters, propagates, and encourages hopelessness. Men enter prison with the fresh and bitter memory of their crimes, arrest, trial, conviction, and sentence. They also bring with them fear and dread of prison, whether based on prior experience or hearsay. They are immediately, continuously, and relentlessly confronted with the fact of their failings and loss. Loss of freedom, yes, but also loss of relationships, privacy, citizenship, livelihood, property, dignity, choices – and loss of future, which is the essence of despair. It is, in effect, an incremental loss of life - a sort of emotional amputation in slow motion. The currently accepted term for a convicted felon is “offender”, to emphasize the act, or offense, that brought him there. As appropriate as this is to bring a much needed realization of guilt and responsibility: ownership of action and consequence, it freezes each of them in the past without any indication that there is “life after crime”. For the most part, this emotional pounding is weathered within a stiff exterior of purported innocence and undeserved mistreatment, the “tough guy” who rides it all out, no sweat! Beneath the hardened exterior, though, the cockiness of youth, the confidence of age, and the innate determination of the human soul are battered uncompromisingly. Facial expressions are largely those of guarded emptiness: “Don’t look at me – I’m not here.” The walls are gray, the walkways gray, the uniforms gray, and their hair slowly grows to match their surroundings as years creep past in monotonous succession. The singularly universal fixation seems to be the release or ”out date”. I’ve heard the phrase “Ten years and a wake up”, as if to say “My time in prison is like a bad dream from which I will be awakened the day I get out.” But even the thought of release carries perhaps more anxiety than hope, with the looming horror that, even getting back to “The Street” puts the likelihood of return to “The Pen” at greater than two to one. And each trip back is usually longer than the last.