Seventeen
____________
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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