Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: COMMUTE (07/07/16)
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TITLE: Pardoned Me | Previous Challenge Entry
By Daniel Rae
07/11/16 -
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Johnny languished in the ‘bullpen’, recently convicted and awaiting placement. Placement into the most notorious prison in the Country. You didn’t land at Rikers for stealing cars or dealing weed. You earned your spartan cell the hard way. Deemed too dangerous and/or violent for a medium security facility, Rikers welcomed only the hardest repeat offenders, who upon release, were considerably more criminally astute, than when they arrived.
Johnny was stripped to the waist, a human mural exposing more tattoo ink than unmarked skin. He nodded at the guard responsible for processing him into population, a man who knew his reputation well and feared it intrinsically. A cavity search was part of due process, and Johnny silently dared him to do it. He did not. Johnny was incensed by this particular conviction. He'd been accused and convicted of a despicable crime against a woman he'd never met. He was helpless as the court seemed to railroad him into a guilty verdict. For once Johnny was entirely innocent, but that wasn't going to change the length of his sentence or the size of his cell
.
Johnny was born 36 years earlier to a mother addicted to heroin. His first three months outside the womb were spent withdrawing from his mothers insidious habit. She was subsequently deemed unfit, and the tiny boy would go straight from the hospital to a transitional home for babies awaiting adoption. Less than a week later a young childless couple, would fall in love with the diminutive lad on their very first visit. They waited with bated breath and considerable prayer, for the adoption to go through. On the anniversary of Johnny's seventh month, he would spend his first night in the house of his adoptive parents, where a considerable amount of prayers and celebration, welcomed him home. His adoptive parents epitomized a Christian household and he was immersed in the things of The Lord. At 12 years old he was baptized and already taking a leadership role in the Church's young people's group.
The would-be orphan was thriving and delighting the hearts of his parents.
While Johnny languished in Rikers, a woman he'd never met was lobbying for his
release. As an Attorney that represented the wrongfully imprisoned, Johnny's case
had preoccupied her from the day she took the time to examine the evidence. 'Evidence' that had led to his life sentence. The circumstantial case was not only weak, it was also largely contrived. After years of persistence, she finally got through to the Governor of NY who, faced with irrefutable evidence, commuted Johnny's sentence to time served, ordering his release. But having the Governor 'commute' Johnny's sentence, was not her end game. She wanted Johnny 'pardoned', society's version of forgiving a questionably convicted felon.
True to God's Word* and on a particularly dark night in the bowels of the jail, Johnny came back to The Lord of his youth. He implored The Lord to restore him, to pardon him for a life that had shamed his parents and ultimately, himself. He had no way of knowing that a woman he'd never met was on the verge of having his sentence commuted and that his physical incarceration was about to end.
But The Lord has never been in the business of commuting or pardoning His children. Rather He is exclusively in the business of forgiveness. For when Jesus addresses the sinner on his knees before Him, He offers the one thing that no other Being in the entire ancestry of mankind, is capable of offering. In His incomprehensible measure of Grace, He offers forgiveness so complete, that our sins are not commuted and locked away in a giant vault, should they ever need to be referenced. Rather they never even existed, so far removed as to render them entirely erased, like they never even happened.
Thanks to The Lord for a Redeemer that never offers probation or commutation or even a pardon. For a promise in His Word exemplifies His desire to free us from each and every transgression, past, present and future. For "As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us". ( Psalm 103:12 NIV ).
*Proverbs 22:6
'Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is older will not depart from it'.
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