It costs very little to make someone feel loved.
My first year in prison was by far the most traumatic. I had no previous dealings with the law, no friends in this prison, and no concept of how to get along. In December of 1980, one week before Christmas, there was a riot. I suffered second degree burns from my neck to my waist and carry scars on my collar bone to this day from those burns. It was some hours before my injuries were discovered by staff and I was put in a cell in the prison Infirmary.
I spent three weeks, twenty-three hours a day, locked in that cold, bare Infirmary cell. I had only the clothes I had on when I was burned, not even so much as a change of underwear. I washed those out every evening and put them back on, icy cold and damp, each morning. I simply clung with desperation to my young faith in Jesus, grateful I had not died, that my injuries would not permanently maim or disable me.
On Christmas Eve, the prison provided cocoa and cookies, and a brown lunch bag containing an apple, an orange, a generic soda pop, a small bag of in-shell nuts, and another small bag of hard candy. What an amazing treasure it seemed! These impersonal and anonymous gifts cheered me a great deal.
By the time another year had rolled around, I and the other long-term cases were housed in the psychiatric unit and mixed in with the Mental Health patients. Those patients had already found their way into my heart. Many of them had no resources: no money, no family, and no ability to provide anything for themselves. As Christmas neared, I knew I needed to do something for these ladies. God had poured out His love on me until “my cup runneth over” (Psalm 23:6) and I needed to pass on the blessing.
The Christmas project was small that first year. I stitched together sixty diminutive felt stockings. My dear friend Marge and I bought enough candy from canteen to fill them. And then God inspired me to take it one small step further. As amazingly wonderful as all of those anonymous state-provided gifts were, personal attention was so important to my charges. So I made individual gift tags, and each woman’s stocking had her name on it. The effect was amazing. “Look! It has my name!” Faces glowed with joy – faces that were usually devoid of expression. Minds in which schizophrenic voices were hushed by massive doses of thorazine had been penetrated by God’s love.
By the next Christmas, there were several more sisters in Christ, protective custody inmates like me, who contributed gifts and labor to the project. Staff soon noticed that, unlike any other mental health facility, our suicide attempt and violent incident rates actually decreased instead of increased at the holiday season. These women, so starved for love and attention, didn’t want to risk missing out on Christmas gifts that they had learned to trust would be there.
Yes, I still coordinate Christmas stockings for the psych unit, although the number is double since each cell now holds two bunks instead of one. And we try to do Easter baskets, Valentines, and any other excuse we can come up with to show God’s love. As economic times get harder, prison rules ever more restrictive, and canteen options ever more limited, the tokens are not as lavish as they were in their hay day. And now the project reaches further. There are 144 beds on each living unit, and the women on my living unit are precious souls, too. In expanding the love tokens, I have watched a grown woman cry because I gave her a stamped envelope for Christmas. She was new to our prison, had not yet shopped at canteen, had not been able to tell her family she had been transported here, and had no way to tell them where she was. She wept in joy that God had provided her with the means to contact her family.
I talked to another woman who, three months later, had not yet eaten the three penny candies from her Easter basket. The love the represented to her was too precious for her to consume, but instead was treasured and hoarded to provide her encouragement in a future time of need.
“You probably don’t remember me,” a young woman in orange Forestry worker uniform said to me as we waited together for appointments in the clinic. “You walked up to me on the yard on Christmas Day and gave me a decorated tootsie pop! You just don’t know how along and depressed I felt that day. I was ready to give up. You changed my life. You touched me and gave me hope. Now I serve God and I’m doing really well. I’ve been out at Fire Camp working as a firefighter for two years and I just came back for some dental work. But I’ve wanted to find you and thank you. I will parole in a couple of months and I think I will do well. I even have a church to go to!” A tootsie pop costs ten cents at canteen, yet it had the power to change a life.
It doesn’t take money to make a love token, it takes love and compassion. “Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have, give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.” (Acts 3:6) The apostles ministered healing in Jesus’ name and a beggar walked. Maybe all we are called to give is a smile or a hug. Maybe we are called to give something of unutterable value but which costs no money to give, our time. Like Father Lawler, who just took a few seconds to say “Hello and God bless you”, and whose memory I still cherish, it doesn’t cost much to give love.
The important thing to realize is the price that Jesus paid to cover the cost of our love tokens. We were yet his enemies (Romans5: ) and yet He died for us, to provide us with the benefits of His love, benefits we desperately need. Our tokens don’t have to be much because they are not the actual good in themselves. Our tokens are only arrows, pointing the way to the author of our love, to Jesus.
This is how I explain to young Christians who sometimes get upset with me when they think I am buying into paganism by celebrating Santa and the Easter bunny. I do know that bunnies don’t lay eggs and that those traditions stem from pre-Christian spring fertility rights. But the love in the Easter baskets, the love that I am trying to give, is then easier to accept to people who are afraid, terrified, that acts of “charity” have strings attached. I use the Easter basket and Santa Clause as excuses to minister tokens of love. And since those tokens point to Jesus, it is therefore the powerful healing, enabling, wisdom-producing love of God that is thereby unleashed.
My first year in prison was by far the most traumatic. I had no previous dealings with the law, no friends in this prison, and no concept of how to get along. In December of 1980, one week before Christmas, there was a riot. I suffered second degree burns from my neck to my waist and carry scars on my collar bone to this day from those burns. It was some hours before my injuries were discovered by staff and I was put in a cell in the prison Infirmary.
I spent three weeks, twenty-three hours a day, locked in that cold, bare Infirmary cell. I had only the clothes I had on when I was burned, not even so much as a change of underwear. I washed those out every evening and put them back on, icy cold and damp, each morning. I simply clung with desperation to my young faith in Jesus, grateful I had not died, that my injuries would not permanently maim or disable me.
On Christmas Eve, the prison provided cocoa and cookies, and a brown lunch bag containing an apple, an orange, a generic soda pop, a small bag of in-shell nuts, and another small bag of hard candy. What an amazing treasure it seemed! These impersonal and anonymous gifts cheered me a great deal.
By the time another year had rolled around, I and the other long-term cases were housed in the psychiatric unit and mixed in with the Mental Health patients. Those patients had already found their way into my heart. Many of them had no resources: no money, no family, and no ability to provide anything for themselves. As Christmas neared, I knew I needed to do something for these ladies. God had poured out His love on me until “my cup runneth over” (Psalm 23:6) and I needed to pass on the blessing.
The Christmas project was small that first year. I stitched together sixty diminutive felt stockings. My dear friend Marge and I bought enough candy from canteen to fill them. And then God inspired me to take it one small step further. As amazingly wonderful as all of those anonymous state-provided gifts were, personal attention was so important to my charges. So I made individual gift tags, and each woman’s stocking had her name on it. The effect was amazing. “Look! It has my name!” Faces glowed with joy – faces that were usually devoid of expression. Minds in which schizophrenic voices were hushed by massive doses of thorazine had been penetrated by God’s love.
By the next Christmas, there were several more sisters in Christ, protective custody inmates like me, who contributed gifts and labor to the project. Staff soon noticed that, unlike any other mental health facility, our suicide attempt and violent incident rates actually decreased instead of increased at the holiday season. These women, so starved for love and attention, didn’t want to risk missing out on Christmas gifts that they had learned to trust would be there.
Yes, I still coordinate Christmas stockings for the psych unit, although the number is double since each cell now holds two bunks instead of one. And we try to do Easter baskets, Valentines, and any other excuse we can come up with to show God’s love. As economic times get harder, prison rules ever more restrictive, and canteen options ever more limited, the tokens are not as lavish as they were in their hay day. And now the project reaches further. There are 144 beds on each living unit, and the women on my living unit are precious souls, too. In expanding the love tokens, I have watched a grown woman cry because I gave her a stamped envelope for Christmas. She was new to our prison, had not yet shopped at canteen, had not been able to tell her family she had been transported here, and had no way to tell them where she was. She wept in joy that God had provided her with the means to contact her family.
I talked to another woman who, three months later, had not yet eaten the three penny candies from her Easter basket. The love the represented to her was too precious for her to consume, but instead was treasured and hoarded to provide her encouragement in a future time of need.
“You probably don’t remember me,” a young woman in orange Forestry worker uniform said to me as we waited together for appointments in the clinic. “You walked up to me on the yard on Christmas Day and gave me a decorated tootsie pop! You just don’t know how along and depressed I felt that day. I was ready to give up. You changed my life. You touched me and gave me hope. Now I serve God and I’m doing really well. I’ve been out at Fire Camp working as a firefighter for two years and I just came back for some dental work. But I’ve wanted to find you and thank you. I will parole in a couple of months and I think I will do well. I even have a church to go to!” A tootsie pop costs ten cents at canteen, yet it had the power to change a life.
It doesn’t take money to make a love token, it takes love and compassion. “Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have, give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.” (Acts 3:6) The apostles ministered healing in Jesus’ name and a beggar walked. Maybe all we are called to give is a smile or a hug. Maybe we are called to give something of unutterable value but which costs no money to give, our time. Like Father Lawler, who just took a few seconds to say “Hello and God bless you”, and whose memory I still cherish, it doesn’t cost much to give love.
The important thing to realize is the price that Jesus paid to cover the cost of our love tokens. We were yet his enemies (Romans5: ) and yet He died for us, to provide us with the benefits of His love, benefits we desperately need. Our tokens don’t have to be much because they are not the actual good in themselves. Our tokens are only arrows, pointing the way to the author of our love, to Jesus.
This is how I explain to young Christians who sometimes get upset with me when they think I am buying into paganism by celebrating Santa and the Easter bunny. I do know that bunnies don’t lay eggs and that those traditions stem from pre-Christian spring fertility rights. But the love in the Easter baskets, the love that I am trying to give, is then easier to accept to people who are afraid, terrified, that acts of “charity” have strings attached. I use the Easter basket and Santa Clause as excuses to minister tokens of love. And since those tokens point to Jesus, it is therefore the powerful healing, enabling, wisdom-producing love of God that is thereby unleashed.