Jail time, I need more

Once a month I help conduct a church service at the local jail. Like hospice, this is an "I get to", not an "I have to".

The attendance is usually very light, never more than a half-dozen. After all, this is a fairly small county jail, not a Riker's Island or Folsom Prison.

Today there were three of us. Me and two women in their mid-30s. The Sunday Mass gospel reading for today is the story of Jesus and the woman at the well in Samaria. Many of you know that story, of the discarded, rejected, outcast woman who encountered Christ in two drinks of water. The drink of physical water that she provided him. The drink of everlasting life of living water that He offered to her.

You know the story, we all do. But I know it better from sharing it with two women who are also scorned, discarded, rejected and outcast. Right now. Right here. They knew that woman in the passage. They knew her tears. They knew how hard her life was. Face to face.

We held hands and shared prayers. I will likely not see either of them again. But time and again the gospel message comes to life for me in the faces and voices and tears of the hurting and the dying. I am drawn to them for reasons that I do not understand.

My life has just been so much more than it should have been...