Finding Pride

When I was first released from prison back in 2011, my focus was on all that I had missed out on during the previous eight and a half years. My focus was on my feelings and my brain was stuck in 2003. I did not realize the truth of the common prison belief that “the age you go in is the age you come out.” I was stuck in my twenty-six-year-old mentality. It felt as if someone had pressed pause on my life the moment I stepped into that ten-year sentence. I was still yearning for everything I had lost that day.
Aside from the man whose death I was responsible for, however, nobody else’s life stopped while I was away. The whole world just went on without me. As a result, I came home feeling like I had a whole lot of catching up to do. But as I set out to catch up with the life that left me behind, God was busy catching up with me. And once He did, He showed me a number of things He wanted me to get through my thick skull.
Just about everything I had ever known in life was ultimately found to be a lie. Visit after visit to my old neighborhood reminded me that life had moved on without me. Things had become so different while I was away that it almost seemed as if I had never even existed in the first place. But I didn’t get it, so I kept trying to fit myself back into the places God did not want me. I was forfeiting my current blessings by hanging onto the past; and by hanging onto my past, I was putting off my future.
When I first returned to prison, I could not help but feel all of the overriding negative emotions that came along with the harsh surroundings. I was also feeling quite confused by the discrepancies I had discovered between my perceived reality and my actual reality. I had believed so many lies for so long a time that the truth looked more like a lie to me than the actual lies did. I had painted such a positive picture in my mind of all that I had ever hoped for myself that that picture was all I could see. I built a reality of falsehoods and, just as water colors run when rained upon, so too did the reality of my life bleed through when truth finally rained down all over it.
My entire life has been an ongoing series of ups and downs, usually more downs than ups though. I have personally experienced what the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 7:15 about wanting to do what is right but always choosing what is wrong. Alcohol has been a problem in my family from generation to generation and no-one, up until this point, has been able to conquer this demon and break free from the never-ending cycle of alcoholism. My father and I seemed to understand each other and the struggles we were both facing. Now that he is gone, I feel like I am carrying on his legacy; so it is up to me to break the chains that have bound our family for so many years.
When I reflect back upon my life thus far, I wonder sometimes how I went from being a sweet little boy who enjoyed earning good grades, riding his skateboard, and playing marbles with the neighborhood children to a gang member, alcoholic, drug abuser, and three-time convicted felon. I have learned that these changes were the result of a number of things but, mostly, of my not being intentional about life. And it is through these reflections that I have finally arrived at this understanding: the only way change will come is by understanding that it is necessary, acknowledging what specifically needs to be changed, learning how to change it, and taking steps to do so. There is nothing anyone else can do to change me; I am the only one who has the authority and ability to do so. And in order to do so, I must become intentional about doing so.