Worries

I know my husband is a big boy. I know he can take care of himself. I know he knows how to survive in prison, but sometimes I just think of him in there and it absolutely breaks my heart. I feel scared. He always has to appear hard at any given moment. Emotion can be mistaken for weakness. He sits in a tiny cell alone for 23 hours a day. They don’t even let him go to church. He doesn’t buy extra food off of commissary so he can buy stamps to write me. We are not able to talk on the phone every day because I can’t afford it. He has no one that he feels he can really share his feelings with in there. He holds everything inside.

I know prison is not rehab or summer camp. I know this is where he must face punishment to hopefully get a chance at redemption. I worry about him everyday because I honestly have no concept of what he faces every day in there. Do they not say a sin is a sin? Who are we to judge the quality, the make up of a sin? Who are we to place a man in a cage like a beast until in punishing him, we strip him of the very humanity we accused him of lacking to begin with? 

Babe I know your fragile heart and I pray for your protection each and every day. I am confident you will find redemption along this journey, but until you do, know that I have not forgotten your kindness and your goodness, and your love, and your massive heart. I have not forgotten that you are a person, a human being, a man whose heart beats, who feels pain, and who seeks forgiveness in life just like the rest of us.