Catch Stones
When I was in college, I helped with a women’s ministry at the local jail. Another woman and I arrived at the jail every Wednesday night with a boombox, Bibles, and a stack of CDs. We sang worship music with any women who wanted to come, and we led a short Bible lesson. We took prayer requests, and we prayed. The women filed in, wearing orange tops and bottoms, and sat in rows, and they never talked of why they were in there, only of Jesus and their families and hope.
I was terrified the first time I went. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do; I wasn’t sure what the women would be like; I had never been inside a jail. But in the time I spent there, my vision of prisoners and of punishment for them was changed. I knew these women, reaching for Jesus and trying to make sense of what their lives were. I was doing the same thing.
When I read Bryan Stevenson’s powerful book Just Mercy, I thought of these women again. Mr. Stevenson’s book dealt with the criminal justice system and its systemic injustice against the poor, and particularly against the poor citizens of color in this country. His legal work focused on helping inmates unfairly given death sentences or life imprisonments, and often centered on children tried as adults or the mentally impaired. I had never read a book like this, and I’m ashamed it took me six years to read this one.
The points Mr. Stevenson made about the need to help the poor and disadvantaged could have come straight from the mouth of Jesus, and I was struck by how often we act and react against our sisters and brothers out of fear. Over the course of the book, Mr. Stevenson shows that “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done,” and that if we would admit that we are each broken, “we could no longer take pride in mass incarceration, in executing people, in our deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable.”
I’m grateful that Mr. Stevenson’s work for justice has freed so many innocent people. I’m no lawyer, and I can’t help the way he can. But as my pastor said on Sunday, my life is about what I do with what I’m given. How can I, in this spot, in this situation, with the people around me, start to make a difference and help break down prejudices and fear (starting with my own) and usher in mercy?
My favorite story from the book came near the end, when Mr. Stevenson met an older woman in the courthouse. He had seen her several times and assumed she was related to the client he had been defending. But she was not. She was there in the courthouse because of her past experiences with the justice system, which had made her want to be a person whom suffering people could lean on, saying, “I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other.”
I’m praying about what I’m supposed to do now, here and with what I have, after reading this book and remembering in a concrete way my desire to help, and I think this is a big piece of the answer. There are people around me who need me, and if I hide behind my fear that I’m not enough, or I make judgements about their situations, I am letting people suffer for the sake of my own safety.
Whatever my action looks like, I want it to start here, in this home, this church, this town, with these people I already know. I want to be a person who stands up for mercy. I want to look people in the eye, listen to their stories, and, unafraid, reach out to catch their stones.
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