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Friday, February 22, 2019

At Light's Edge - Chapter 17: Buffer Zone


Seventeen
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Buffer Zone


“Escort,” the two porters cleaning the main hall’s floors quickly stood aside as the Correctional Officer shouted again, “Escort.”
The floors were slightly wet from the two young female porters cleaning and buffing efforts, so the escorting officer and two inmates walked carefully and slowly by, smelling the chemical cleaning fumes that filled the still hallway air.
“Look,” Maggie said to Jenny in a whisper, “It’s those two boys from the construction project.”
Jenny whispered back as she stood flat against the chapel corridor wall waiting for the trio to pass, “I know… they come in every day for one hot meal. They eat somewhere else than we girls do though.”
Maggie commented softly, “Now, that’s a shame, they look sort of cute. Don’t you think, Jen?”
Jenny held back her laugh, but found it hard not to smile as the two inmate males and their escorting officer passed.
“Don’t step on the stripes, you’ll slip,” commanded the officer to the two young men he escorted.
Two stripes were painted on the floor to divide the corridor for inmate and staff traffic and to provide an escort walkway between the two lines down the corridor’s center. These lines became very slippery when wet and many inmates enjoyed seeing staff slip and fall.
One of the boys pointed to a poster locked behind a glass bulletin board case on the chapel’s double entry doors and said quickly, “You two girls should go and try that meeting out.”
“Quiet, Inmate Stone,” the officer barked at Renwick as the shocked youth attempted to continue, “Those meetings are great and—”
“The name’s Cornell Purdue,” the second inmate announced.”
“In your dreams, boys,” Jenny shouted.
The officer smiled slightly, reflecting on what he might do or say to two young teen women if he were in these two young men’s circumstance. 
“You too, Purdue. You two are bothering these young ladies.”
After the escort group passed by, Jenny and Maggie studied the poster in the glass case carefully. It detailed a Christian ministry called ‘Cyrene’ that was working in prisons and on the street with troubled teens.
“Like Simon of Cyrene we help teens bear the burdens of life as Simon helped Christ bear his cross. We help replace life’s thorny crown with a crown of peace and joy in the Lord God,” Jenny read from the poster.
Maggie quickly replied, “It’s just a bunch of religious stuff, Jen, probably as boring as hell.”
“I doubt hell is boring,” Jenny replied.
The two girls mopped and buffed the corridor floor for the rest of the day as the words Jenny read from the poster ran through her thoughts like one of those radio songs the listener just cannot seem to rid their mind of, but end up humming and singing all day.
That night Jenny was plagued by her continually recurring dreams of life on the streets, but this night she saw a man far away in the background that appeared to be carrying a huge cross… Jenny woke up startled, but soon drifted off again into a deep sleep.
Time passed by, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, Jenny’s dreams persisted. At times she found herself waking in the night crying. Angrily, she would quench those emotions and write in her diary for a while before attempting to sleep again. During the ensuing months Jenny attended a few of the Cyrene Ministry meetings in the chapel. She listened carefully to all that was taught, being very skeptical, and she was careful to check everything the ministers said and quoted with the words printed within the Bible the ministry had given her. The women and men involved with this ministry did not appear the same as those Jenny had watched on TV on occasion. They did not wear suits and one of the men had fairly long hair.
One afternoon, while Jenny worked alone buffing the corridor floor that led out the side of the prison to the construction area, she had the opportunity to talk with one of the boys who months earlier had pointed out the Cyrene Ministry poster on the chapel’s door. His escorting officer, who was new and a recent graduate from the correctional academy, allowed the short conversation.
The young man informed Jenny that his name was Renwick Stone, “but almost everyone always calls me Renie.” He explained that he and his coworker, Cornell, would be leaving soon to finish up some work on an international youth prison located at a place way up north. “Svalbard… or something like that,” Renie stated. “It’s supposed to be colder than ice up there, too. And it’s a super maximum security place.” During the progression of conversation the young man and Jenny discussed what Jesus Christ had done for them. Renie commented, “Jesus took our place of punishment of all of our wrongdoing, sin, evil and selfish thoughts and actions, and he died so we can live.”
Jenny listened in earnest.
“Jesus was placed in a grave just as it was predicted in prophecy. He rose again alive in his own same body just as he said he would and just as was predicted in prophecy. The resurrection of Jesus Christ gives us the hope, the strength, and the ability to live a new life. Only God’s Spirit can change us. In the first book of Corinthians in the Bible’s New Testament,” Renie continued,  “chapter fifteen, verses three and four, it says 'For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.’”
The two youths exchanged inmate identification numbers and promised to write each other if possible. They both knew that the Youth Maximum Security Prison’s mail may take months to forward letters to an inmate once they were transferred to another facility, or even released after their sentence was served. Jenny maintained high hopes of establishing some sort of contact to brighten the darkened days and nights of her time behind the razor wire.
The months passed by slowly for Jenny. Her only break in the bleakness of prison life came once every three weeks when the Cyrene Youth Ministry people came. She sat silently through the meetings, never asking a question and never volunteering to speak, she just sat and listened.
Like a flower struggling to push its way up in a garden of weeds, Jenny began to grow softer. Not anything those around her would notice, but the slow melting of her ice encrusted heart started to change her ways of perception.
The Cyrene folk taught from the Bible and from their collective personal experiences, there was a sense of sincerity and genuineness about them. Jenny had always felt she would need to change herself first to be worthy of God, any god, and she knew she did not have the power or strength to restack the misdealt cards of her life.
You don’t have to change, Christ will change you from the inside, your feelings and thoughts will change. Change is not an issue within the kingdom of our Savior, Jesus Christ, you can’t do it yourself, that would be just some boring religious junk to pile on your life like garbage in a dump, Jenny reminded herself of this concept over and over. A walk with God is a relationship, not a religion. Jesus catches his fish before he cleans them.
Jenny treasured the Bible given to her by one of the Cyrene meeting leaders. The woman had written a scripture verse inside its cover from the first letter the Apostle John wrote in the New Testament, ‘But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin’.
Jenny kept herself busy by working, studying, and attending occasional Cyrene meetings. One day a postcard arrived, the message scribbled upon it simply said, “It IS colder than ice up here at Svalbard, Renie.”
Days later during a routine evaluation hearing discussing Jenny’s situation, the prison psychologist, Wendell Patterson, recommended that Jenny be released to the care of a youth home. He informed the panel that Miss Philips was a model inmate and had successfully completed her rehabilitation program. “It’s time for her to reenter society under direct supervisory avenues. A youth home is the best avenue at this time.” For some unknown reason, the decision was agreed upon by all prison panel members.
Jennifer Philips suddenly found herself standing at that final door between the organized lifestyle of prison confinement and the random daily chaos of the outside world, and she did not know why.
Model inmate? Jenny wondered what all of this meant.
“God be with you, Jennifer,” Mr. Patterson said, “Good luck.”

Next Chapter: The Arrival

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