You Are Not Home Yet

When this life is all you can see, every loss feels like the end of the world, because in that frame it is. The relationship, the setback, the diagnosis, the sentence. If right now is the whole story, then right now being ruined means you are ruined. I lived in that frame for most of my life, and it nearly finished me. The thing that finally changed was not my circumstances. It was my perspective. I learned to remember that I was not home yet.

Scripture keeps pulling our eyes up off the thing in front of us. We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen, for the things seen are temporary, and the things unseen are eternal. That is not escapism, and it is not pretending the pain is fake. It is the exact perspective that lets you walk through a hard chapter without the hard chapter swallowing you whole.

A punishment became a purpose

I learned this in the one place that should have made it impossible. In my book I wrote that I began to see prison as a mission field rather than a punishment. Nothing about my circumstances changed when I wrote that. Same cell. Same number on the door. Same decades in front of me. The only thing that changed was the lens. I stopped asking only how do I survive this and started asking what eternal thing could God do right here, through me. And the whole place changed, not the walls, the point. A dead end became an assignment. The men around me stopped being a sentence to endure and became people to reach.

That is where I learned the truest thing I know about freedom. True freedom is not about where you are, it is about what is happening inside you. What is happening inside you, your soul, who you are becoming, is the one thing the bars cannot touch. They can own your location. They cannot own your soul unless you hand it over.

Faithful, not fast

For years I believed I had fallen too far behind to matter. Too much time gone. Everybody my age was ahead, and I was decades back with nothing to show. That despair was built on one mistake: I was running by the wrong scoreboard. In my workbook I wrote the line that fixed my eyes: finishing the race was never about being the fastest, it was about being faithful. The world scores you on speed and status, right now, against everyone else. Eternity scores you on faithful, over the long haul, in your own lane. By the world's scoreboard I lost decades. By the only one that lasts, I am not behind at all. Late is not the same as lost, and it is never too late to start being faithful today.

What will matter in a hundred years

Here is a question I had to ask from a cell, where I had nothing but time to get honest. Will the thing eating me alive today matter at all in a hundred years? Most of what I had worried myself sick over turned out to be completely temporary. And most of what I had ignored, the people, my soul, who I was becoming, turned out to be the only stuff that was actually forever. I had the whole scale upside down. Jesus put it plainly: lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. You can find out what you actually worship by looking at where your time and worry and energy go. And a man's life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses. You can spend your whole life grabbing and die with empty hands, because you take none of it with you.

The smallest things I ever did for eternal reasons turned out to matter more than the biggest things I ever did for myself. A quiet prayer. A word to a hurting man in the next cell. A kindness nobody saw. None of it looked like much against the size of the darkness. But anything done for something eternal does not evaporate when the moment ends. In the economy of forever, nothing faithful is ever wasted.

It felt like the end. It was not.

In my book I wrote that the cracks are not the end of the story, they are the places where His light shines through. That is a sentence only an eternal perspective could write. I once saw a cracked, ruined life and nothing else. I learned to see the same cracks as the exact place the light gets in, because I started measuring my life against forever instead of against the next hour.

So if tonight feels like the end of your story, hear this: you are not on the last page. You just cannot see the next one yet. If the book kept going for me, after a life sentence and everything lost, it is not over for you either. If it helps, the first chapter of my book is free, written from the exact point where I was certain my story was finished. You can read it at unshackledtruthmedia.com. And if you have already lived through something that felt like the end and found out it was not, your story is somebody's proof the book keeps going. Share it at unshackledtruthmedia.com/share-your-story, named or anonymous. I read every single one.