WRideout
01-24-2016, 08:31 AM
Here is a personal essay I wrote a few years ago.
Mark 10:35-45
I was exactly one month into my new job at the State Correctional Institution, Pittsburgh, when the lockdown occurred. A lockdown simply means that all the inmates in the prison must remain locked in their cells until a security situation is resolved. This normally makes it easier on the Correctional Officers, but the other side of that is that there are no inmates to work in the large institutional kitchen that feeds the 1500 or so inmates. All those people locked in their cells and hungry, with lots of time to think about it could create a few problems.
When I arrived at my work station Becky, my supervisor, called an all-hands meeting. “Today we are going to help in the kitchen,” she stated matter-of-factly. “I expect everybody to make the best of it, and show the Corrections staff that we are team players.” The admonition was necessary because we are contractors, providing drug and alcohol addiction treatment for inmates, and we are not necessarily bound by Department of Corrections rules.
By the time I arrived at the kitchen, it was a beehive of activity. Blue-suited food service staff who are normally supervisors of inmate workers had pitched in and were busy cooking and fetching. The rest of us were technical staff and contractors, dressed either in khaki uniforms, or business casual. We were put to work on the assembly line filling bags with breakfast, to be distributed on the cell blocks. For the next few hours, I stuffed bread into plastic bags, while others passed brown paper bags down the line to be filled sequentially with milk, cereal, fruit, bread, utensils, and the little restaurant-style packets of peanut butter and jelly. The filled bags, fifty at a time, were loaded onto carts and wheeled to the cell blocks for distribution.
The day went on that way with an occasional break to have some prison coffee (which is pretty bad, by the way). After assembling lunch, and sweeping up, I was looking for something to do, and accosted a supervisor. “How about if I wash some pots in the back?” I asked. He agreed, and explained how to use the commercial sinks, with the automatic soap dispensers. “You might want to wear one of those smocks, to protect your clothes,” he added. I found a white smock in the closet, and noticed that it was marked in large dark letters on the back, D.O.C. It was a smock one of the prisoners would have worn.
I filled the sinks with suds, and started washing. A few of my co-workers joined me, to rinse. I had a fleeting thought to toss out an appropriate quote from the Bible, to the effect that he who would be great among you, should serve, but I did not think that they would recognize the passage.
As I worked I thought about the last time I had been concerned about my own greatness. In 1983, I had been having a terrible time in my life. Many things had gone wrong all at once, and I was far from the church that might have supported me. I was determined to turn things around, by my own strength, and was desperately seeking way to prove my own worth. At that time I was a new Officer Candidate in the California Army National Guard, and was enrolled in a grueling program of Officer Candidate School, conducted on weekend drills. I needed something to help get me through all this, so I wrote a short verse that I could refer to when I felt weak. It went like this, “I will achieve greatness in my life. It is my destiny, no one can take it from me.” I held on to that thought with all my might. I did graduate from OCS, and went on to achieve some success as a reserve officer, but ultimate affirmation of my worth, I could never seem to get.
So here I was over twenty years later, washing pots and pans for inmates in a state prison, up to my elbows in suds, wearing a prisoner’s smock. It hit me that after all these years I may have achieved that greatness I sought, not by my own achievements, but by humbling myself in service to others. I bowed my head and said a short prayer, “Thank you Jesus.”
Mark 10:35-45
I was exactly one month into my new job at the State Correctional Institution, Pittsburgh, when the lockdown occurred. A lockdown simply means that all the inmates in the prison must remain locked in their cells until a security situation is resolved. This normally makes it easier on the Correctional Officers, but the other side of that is that there are no inmates to work in the large institutional kitchen that feeds the 1500 or so inmates. All those people locked in their cells and hungry, with lots of time to think about it could create a few problems.
When I arrived at my work station Becky, my supervisor, called an all-hands meeting. “Today we are going to help in the kitchen,” she stated matter-of-factly. “I expect everybody to make the best of it, and show the Corrections staff that we are team players.” The admonition was necessary because we are contractors, providing drug and alcohol addiction treatment for inmates, and we are not necessarily bound by Department of Corrections rules.
By the time I arrived at the kitchen, it was a beehive of activity. Blue-suited food service staff who are normally supervisors of inmate workers had pitched in and were busy cooking and fetching. The rest of us were technical staff and contractors, dressed either in khaki uniforms, or business casual. We were put to work on the assembly line filling bags with breakfast, to be distributed on the cell blocks. For the next few hours, I stuffed bread into plastic bags, while others passed brown paper bags down the line to be filled sequentially with milk, cereal, fruit, bread, utensils, and the little restaurant-style packets of peanut butter and jelly. The filled bags, fifty at a time, were loaded onto carts and wheeled to the cell blocks for distribution.
The day went on that way with an occasional break to have some prison coffee (which is pretty bad, by the way). After assembling lunch, and sweeping up, I was looking for something to do, and accosted a supervisor. “How about if I wash some pots in the back?” I asked. He agreed, and explained how to use the commercial sinks, with the automatic soap dispensers. “You might want to wear one of those smocks, to protect your clothes,” he added. I found a white smock in the closet, and noticed that it was marked in large dark letters on the back, D.O.C. It was a smock one of the prisoners would have worn.
I filled the sinks with suds, and started washing. A few of my co-workers joined me, to rinse. I had a fleeting thought to toss out an appropriate quote from the Bible, to the effect that he who would be great among you, should serve, but I did not think that they would recognize the passage.
As I worked I thought about the last time I had been concerned about my own greatness. In 1983, I had been having a terrible time in my life. Many things had gone wrong all at once, and I was far from the church that might have supported me. I was determined to turn things around, by my own strength, and was desperately seeking way to prove my own worth. At that time I was a new Officer Candidate in the California Army National Guard, and was enrolled in a grueling program of Officer Candidate School, conducted on weekend drills. I needed something to help get me through all this, so I wrote a short verse that I could refer to when I felt weak. It went like this, “I will achieve greatness in my life. It is my destiny, no one can take it from me.” I held on to that thought with all my might. I did graduate from OCS, and went on to achieve some success as a reserve officer, but ultimate affirmation of my worth, I could never seem to get.
So here I was over twenty years later, washing pots and pans for inmates in a state prison, up to my elbows in suds, wearing a prisoner’s smock. It hit me that after all these years I may have achieved that greatness I sought, not by my own achievements, but by humbling myself in service to others. I bowed my head and said a short prayer, “Thank you Jesus.”