Every night (or late afternoon) before I sleep, I read a passage from the Bible. This habit has carried me through many years of prison. I’m not a deeply religious person when it comes to abiding by the traditions and rituals that bring comfort to so many people, but regular prayer, the Bible, and reflection on the wisdom in the Bible has strengthened me. Last night I finished reading Revelations, the final book of the New Testament.
I don’t recall how many times I’ve read the Bible from cover-to-cover, but now that I’ve finished reading the New Testament again, I’ll go back to the beginning, to the book of Genesis. I look forward to beginning with Adam and Eve, then Noah’s Ark, the stories of Abraham, and Jacob, and Esau, and Joseph. By the time I finish reading the Bible again, from Genesis to Revelation; for sure I will be home. That comforts me.
It is good for me to have these kinds of markers, these incremental steps to freedom. All of my activities in prison help me feel that I’m advancing to freedom.
I remember my first thousand days. Back then, the journey ahead seemed so far in the distance. I couldn’t see the end. Regardless of how many steps I took, I didn’t have any clarity that would suggest I was advancing. By setting these personal goals—like reading the Bible, like working toward university degrees, like strength training and distance running, like striving to create opportunities to prepare for my eventual release—I created my own markers to gauge progress. Those markers helped.
Now I believe that I’m taking the steps through my final thousand days. In the beginning, even if I worked through a thousand days, I knew that I had more than eight thousand days ahead. That’s not the case anymore. Although I don’t know exactly how many days separate me from freedom, I feel strongly that I’ll be in the community with my wife within 1,000 days. That’s encouraging to me. And as I advance from one passage of the Bible to the next, I know that I’ll enjoy the guidance of God to carry me through the home stretch.
This morning I expected my wife’s visit so I cut my exercise short with only a three-mile run and followed with only 200 pushups.
[consecutive running log: 3,683 miles over the past 415 days]
[pushups in 2010: 10,200]
Sunday, 31 January 2010
PDF 
