"If you're not nervous, you're crazy..."

"Hey Chap, got something I need to tell ya," says an older man with thick glasses standing at a caged door to a room just off the main visitor's area. Chaplain Harrell steps over to the man, leaving me standing next to the entrance lock. I watched Chap Harrell speak to the man for a brief minute, hearing only something about a meal selection, and Chap telling him, "You did a good job." As Chap turned back towards me, I met eyes with the man in thick glasses looking at me from behind the cage door. I nodded my head towards him, he responded doing the same.



The man I caught eyes with, who spoke to Chap about his meal selection, was Melbert Ray Ford, scheduled for execution on Tuesday, February 23, 2010.

The drive home was a constant whirl of thoughts. I feel extremely unnerved knowing I looked a man in the eyes who, one week from today, will put to death in an ultimate show of state power.
As I read The Executed God, by Mark Lewis Taylor,I am struck by his tongue in cheek comment as he pretends to be the "wise ethicist" who logically reasoned the use of the capital punishment. "Hmm," he writes, "murder is a serious crime, and so we need the ultimate penalty of death to express society's outrage over murder and help the victims find closure." This is not how capital punishment made it into US Legal Code. With the use of capital punishment we are "living out a historical legacy that resorts to official killing". In this official killing, there is no love, there is no forgiveness. All that remains is the demise of another child of God, and realizations that we really aren't as free and civilized of a society as we think we are.

"Since 1976, for every 8 people executed, 1 on death row has been found innocent."
- Mark Lewis Taylor (www.deathpenalty.org)

Before I spent a couple hours talking with the prisoners, Chaplain Harrell asked me how I felt. I told him I was a little nervous. "That's good. If you're not nervous, you're crazy, and we've got enough crazy people here," he said with a tickled laughter. Chaplain Harrell has a fairly crude sense of humor.

For over an hour I spoke with Bobby A., a Bronx native doing time for drug possession with intent to distribute. It truly was a pleasure to talk to this man. I rarely see someone with such a positive attitude, and being able to keep that attitude in a place that was built for "Spiritual death" (Abu-Jamal) is absolutely a work of God. I didn't have to say a whole lot during our time of conversation. I was there really to give him the opportunity to just get anything and everything off his chest without fear of retribution or other punishments. He told me about his family; how much he loves his wife; how is oldest son has been diagnosed with cancer; how it finally struck him the other day that he is a grandfather at 42 years old.

I began to ask him how his faith impacts his life, and boy did he start to talk! Bobby was "saved" in Butts County jail about 2 years ago, reads the Bible everyday , attends Bible studies, and as he puts it, "converses with God at all times." "People think I'm just talking to myself!" he added with a huge laugh. We continued to talk about faith, Scripture, and family but Bobby kept going back to the few things that he really struggles with in prison. Waiting, Numbness, and Patience.

Waiting to go home...Numbness at the isolation of an uncaring system...Patience to make it through the day.

He brought up patience a lot. Bobby told me how he prayed for patience each and everyday, how he needed patience to overcome the hatred that guards show him, how he needed patience to overcome the hatred he sees with love. Puts patience in perspective when I pray for it to get through theology class or a Sunday evening when the youth group has less of an attention span that usual....

Before ending with a prayer, I asked Bobby what his favorite passage was. He told me, Matthew 5:2-12. I knew immediately he was referring to the Beatitudes. "My favorite too," I told him. He gave me a big hug, then went back to his cell.