The Clink
>> Sunday, March 23, 2008
OK. As you all know, I seldom post, and most of it is nonsense anyways, but I have really been thinking about something over the past couple days and felt I should share.
So on Good Friday, I found myself in the clink. Actually, it was two, and suprisingly my wife ended up at the big house twice as well. Why? Because we needed our fingers printed. See, we just adopted an almost terrible two year old, and if that wasn't crazy enough, we spent Friday riding from jailhouse to jailhouse looking for someone to take my stupid fingerprints.
The ironic part was, I had my Jersey prints with me, we have been fingered three times in the state of Florida, twice federally and once locally. You might even say I am one of those sick puppies who just loves to have his fingers inked, so that when I walk into Walmart at 3 AM with my finger ink dried and stained, people wonder about me. Not necessarily afraid of me, but definitely hug your children tight kind of nervousness ... but I digress ....
Unfortunately, for us, the state we were adopting from would not accept prints from Jersey, or Florida, or anywhere else ... so there we were, driving around looking for any cop who would be willing to ink us. The second clink we drove up to happened to be the winner. The nice officer took us to the main control room for this jail/police station. I had my newly adopted son with me and I am pretty sure I made a couple stupid jokes about the drunk tanks we passed with the blue phones and metal benches.
Then it happened. I looked up at a board that was filled with names, ages, sex, etc. There were 11 prisoners in this jail this past Friday. Of those 11, 9 were black males, one was a black female, and one was a white male. There was only one name that had a bond amount next to it. Only one person in that block who had an opportunity to leave that day. Who was it? Yep, the white guy.
All the sudden I was overcome with emotion. Of course this adoption was a "good thing." I knew we were making the "right decision." Here I was, in the same city that my little 2 Yr B/M was born in, and in that moment I felt ... like a thief. Yep, a thief who was looking up at a board and understanding that I just stole my baby's future from him.
What future did we steal? This son of mine will NOT be looked at as another big city statistic. He will no longer sleep on the floor. He will get 3 square meals. He will experience love in his life. He will experience joy. He will grow up in a stable environment. There will be no "social status" that will keep him down. If he wants to go to college, I will send him. He will not know what a gang is except for what he reads in books and sees on TV. He will have opportunity after opportunity that other children left behind in his situation will never have. Most importantly he will he will come to know Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior!
And lastly my prayer is that when Satan gets distracted for even a moment, when through his arrogance he believes he has already won, that my son will know how to slip into the enemy's camp, a thief for his God, and steal the very thing that we stole this week... another soul and another blood line for the Kingdom of God.
