While in the US, I worked as a Chaplain Assistant at Lebanon
County Correctional Facility (LCCF), I also worked at a Half-way house called
Transitional House where the formerly incarcerated who were also on parole were
housed for a period of six months as they looked for a job and saved some money
to help them as they transited to the “external” world. I also volunteered on
Thursdays and weekends at a Thrift Store. All these stations of work were all
under one roof, JUBILEE MINISTRIES, a very wonderful Christian Ministry
organization that created and still creates the needed impact in that part of
East Coast of the US.
One morning while attending to some of the incarcerated men
in the prison in a Bible Study, I remember one member in my class asking me,”
if the God you say exists and loves humankind so much, why did He allow my two
sisters to die of leukaemia ” Another one in one of my closed door case studies
asked me,” You say God is there and watches over, why did He then allow me to
keep the drug paraphernalia that got me arrested again and I am back here in
the prison?”
The above mentioned questions are just but a few of the
difficult ones that I grappled to answer. How could I justify God’s LOVE for
the few mentioned above! How could I convince them that God indeed was watching
and that God not only loved them but LOVED
them so very MUCH!
I have been back home for now one and half years now, I
haven’t had a job for a very long time, close to a year now, I have been
engaged long enough and ought to have been married by now, I have my pursuit for
further education pausing if not stopping, a lot of “bad” things have happened
that I haven’t liked and never thought would come my way. Jobs knocks at my
door step sometimes and eventually slip off again; opportunities come and before
my very eyes and many others that are more personal and dear to my heart.
I have asked for God’s provision, fasted, prayed and asked
God to forgive me of my sins that at some point I thought were blocking my ways,
I have served in church and in my neighbourhood, may be I haven’t done enough.
But as a staunch Christian who has walked with the Lord for
many years and having been brought up in a Christian family and set-up, now,
regardless of my shortcomings, I have always known that God’s LOVE is UNCONDITIONAL
and true, I have always asked knowing that He will give, sought and thought I
could find, knocked and I have been waiting for Him to open. I have known God
to be very faithful in fulfilling His promises, many are the times that I have
lost sight of this fact. I have asked for signs, I have asked Him to literally
speak to me and be given direction but in vain.
Many are the times now I have found myself asking the same
questions the incarcerated were asking me then! I have asked whether He do
care, whether He watches, whether His LOVE is still UNCONDITIONAL. Some of the
times, I have asked and petitioned Him to prove that His words in the Holy
Bible are not lies. I have asked Him and told Him, that, yes, I haven’t been so
diligent enough in my service to Him coming from my human background of
culpability to sin but at least to reward me and stand out to the many that don’t
trust in Him that indeed He does reward His people. I have complained that He
has taken too long to answer my prayers.
The question that has always lingered in my mind is, “Am I
asking for too much?”
I will leave it at that point.
