A vibrant sensation of comforting lightness, gentle but all powerful, engulfed my body. It saturated me and seemed at first to lift me away. Musical sounds filled my being--the sounds of a gradual progression up the musical scale. I heard three notes in all--do, re, mi. All the instruments of every band and orchestra in all the world and in heaven saturated that tiny cell in perfect harmony. Then something else began to occur. I felt an expansion. Slowly I became aware of a distinct new connection with everything around me. It felt as if new life had been breathed into the walls of that cell, into the air, the floor and the ceiling, and the tree outside my barred window. I heard the rustle of every leaf on the tree; I felt the warmth of the sunlight and I smelled the grass in a new way, as if for the very first time. I was becoming the floor, the ceiling, and the walls of my cell. I felt at one with the air, the trees and grass outside that window, with the rustle of the leaves and the sunlight.
That's an excerpt from the following :
Sometimes in our darkest hours,
God turns on a light which changes the whole trajectory of how we view the
world. My darkest hours came while serving a ten-year prison sentence. I made
the potentially fatal mistake of engaging in a hot verbal confrontation with
another convict. He was the leader of one of the largest and most dangerous
street gangs in the Chicago area, and he wielded as much power inside the
prison walls as he had on the street.
I don't fully recall what the
argument had been about, but it had been serious enough that the order came
down from the gang leader that on the following morning I was to be killed.
There would be no escape from that fate. Alone in my cell that night, I paced
nervously and smoked the last of my cigarettes. I experienced the darkest
moments of dread and fear I had ever suffered in this lifetime. Visions of a
horrible physical struggle followed by my inevitable death filled my thoughts.
A major life-threatening confrontation was about to explode and I was
afraid--more afraid than ever before.
For the first time in many years
I turned to God. I got down on that concrete cell floor and prayed. Long ago
I'd given up on the God thing. To me, God had become nothing more than a fairy
tale--something only the gullible believed in. Until that moment, God had all
but been forgotten except for those moments when He took the predominate blame
for all my sorrows and circumstances.
I prayed for hours, begging,
pleading, promising, asking God for a way out. Soon I had the thought to write
out a note for help and give it to the next guard who would pass by my cell. In
the note, I described my predicament and the impending danger.
After many more hours on the
floor of my cell, my prayers were answered. I'd passed the note to a guard who
returned much later, just before dawn, and he led me away. That same morning I
was transferred from that maximum security prison to another facility, a
minimum security confinement prison miles away.
The moment I was delivered to
that new environment and heard the door of my cell locked behind me, I got down
on my knees and thanked God for what I considered to be divine intervention. I
thanked Him for a long time, remaining on my knees in grateful prayer,
convinced beyond all doubt that my rescue had been nothing less than God
answering my pleas for help. After hours of thankful prayer I became weary of
kneeling. I laid down on my new bed and the instant my head rested on the
pillow it happened. A vibrant sensation of comforting lightness, gentle but all
powerful, engulfed my body. It saturated me and seemed at first to lift me
away. Musical sounds filled my being--the sounds of a gradual progression up
the musical scale. I heard three notes in all--do, re, mi. All the instruments
of every band and orchestra in all the world and in heaven saturated that tiny
cell in perfect harmony.
Then something else began to
occur. I felt an expansion. Slowly I became aware of a distinct new connection
with everything around me. It felt as if new life had been breathed into the
walls of that cell, into the air, the floor and the ceiling, and the tree
outside my barred window. I heard the rustle of every leaf on the tree; I felt
the warmth of the sunlight and I smelled the grass in a new way, as if for the
very first time. I was becoming the floor, the ceiling, and the walls of my
cell. I felt at one with the air, the trees and grass outside that window,
with the rustle of the leaves and the sunlight.
I wanted to go farther but as
quickly as the power began to flow it subsided and very gently returned my
awareness to my body. I was dumbfounded. What was this strange feeling? While
it seemed oddly familiar and comforting it remained like something out of
science fiction or religion. Religion had never held my interest. In fact,
until that precarious previous night, when I begged for help and prayed for the
first time in years, I'd long since given up any belief in spiritual subjects
or in God. This had to be something bigger than all of it---bigger than
anything I'd ever been told about or taught.
I was convinced that the feeling
I'd just experienced had something to do with God-stuff, or maybe there was
some scientific explanation, but without knowledge or a reference of any sort I
could only wonder in awe. But something else stayed with me. There was the
unmistakable conviction that God had acknowledged my prayers; God had answered
me with a glimpse of an experience that would remain with me from that day on.
God had blessed me with a brief but all-comforting assurance that real Love is
unshakable, all-prevailing, all powerful and forever dev oted. It is the sort
of compassion that a Father has for His Child.
What was it? Where did it come
from? How could I feel it again? I couldn't answer those questions, but I have
since spent the past thirty years asking them over and over before finally
coming to understand that God is always with me, has never left, and never
will.
**************
After losing his wife and family
and serving a ten-year prison sentence, Joseph Wolfe now lives in Sedona,
Arizona. He wrote and published Letter to a Prisoner to help convicts
everywhere understand that there are greater powers lying beyond what their
eyes can see.
Only in dreams is there a time when he appears to be in prison, and awaits a future freedom, if it be at all. Yet in reality his dreams are gone, with truth established in their place. Lesson 279
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