enlightenment

                                              In Prisons

How many of you feel like you are in prison. First we need to know what prison means. In the Webster’s dictionary prison means a jail; any place of confinement –prisoner: one confined in or as in prison or forcibly restrained. Much is said in that one definition. First it says “any place of confinement”. A prison doesn’t have to be a place where police take you and judges sentence you too. Judges can’t sentence you only God can. People can’t judge you, but God can. He can and will pass judgment. People don’t know like God knows you. A prison can be anywhere. The prison could be in your own home. It could be on your dead end job. It could be your life style. The biggest prison of all is a prison that you can’t escape from no matter where you run. No man or woman can break you out or bail you out only you and God. That prison is the prison of the mind. Lets defined confinement or confine: restrict within bounds. - Keep in doors as by sickness. What it means by restrict is you prevent yourself or stop yourself from getting that job that you wanted or from stop smoking cigarettes or stop doing drugs or from just being happy. The next part of the definition is “keep in doors as of sickness”. When you keep things inside to long it will eventually hurt you. It is like a pot that is full of water with the lid on it. When the pot is just setting on the stove the inside is calm. As soon as the heat is turn on the water becomes restless and is no longer calm. The pressure is building up more and more because the steam in being released. Eventually the top will fly off or all of the water will boil out. Either way if the heat stays on long enough the pot will be empty.  Keeping things inside is like a sickness. It slowly kills you inside. Lets define forcibly or forcible: effective convincing. You convince yourself that you can’t get a good job that you can’t stop smoking cigarettes that you can’t stop doing drugs, or can’t be happy. So you stay in your prison for years and years until you do one of two things, you do like some people do and that is take their own life. They are thinking that is there only way out not knowing it only gets worse. Or you could open your eyes only to let God close them again to everything that is bad which is sin. You must believe and have faith that he will take away everything that is bad and leave everything that is good. God is real. Sometimes a person who maybe already in prison, who committed a crime and sentenced to jail for a certain amount of years, feel that all they need to do is get parole. They don’t realize that sometimes we are in prison long before we ever go to jail. No man’s prison can hurt us as much as the prison within our own minds. What the system doesn’t understand is that the problem can’t be just solved by throwing people in jail. You have to help them let themselves out of prison of their own minds before you physically let them out or there will never change. Some prisoners get sent to an even smaller place called the hole. The hole is deep, dark, wet, lonely, miserable, and closed in. you are in there for weeks, or months at a time. You finally get out, but you are still in prison. The hole represents the place in your mind where you send yourself every time you dought yourself, every time you allow someone to tare you down, every time you don’t try, every time stop and don’t keep going, every time you quit, and every time you stop believing. Stop struggling and get up, get out and live. All you have to do is open your eyes because the eyes are the doorways to freedom.