THE LOCK WAS ON THE INSIDE

As I listened to her recount her experience, she recited with amazing clarity the words of her former friend, painful statements filled with venom and cruelty. Obviously, they had stung deeply. I longed to extend the healing balm of God’s grace to this wounded heart, so I asked a question. “When did this happen?” After all, the hurt seemed so vivid and fresh!

This graying great-grandma replied, “We were in High School. It was May of our senior year, just before graduation.”

Oh my! That was nearly sixty-five years ago! To hear her describe the event you would have thought it took place yesterday: tears still moistened her eyes, and the angry pain still caused her voice to crack.

In the six-and-a-half decades since it took place, she had relived and recited the event until it came to dominate her whole life. And now, she had called me, her pastor, because she felt trapped and afraid.

It struck me that, through all those decades, she had been constructing her own private prison. Building on the foundation of that oft-rehearsed High School betrayal, she had mixed the mortar of her pain, and stacked the bricks of other bitter memories, each pain remembered, each disappointment recorded, all put carefully in place.

In this prison-building process, a time came for her when prayer had changed into an exercise in doubt. She began to approach God convinced He did not love her, as evidenced by the pain in her life. Eventually she had all but given up praying, except in a routine, religious sense.

By the time we first talked, she had been incarcerated in her pain-prison so long she had begun to doubt her salvation. She was unsure about heaven. She questioned the truth of the Gospel. She struggled between her sometime faith in God and her mounting fear of the future. And she wanted me to give her assurance.

We talked. I prayed for her. Not once, but often. Sadly, every scriptural assurance I offered evoked only another recitation of her ancient pain. Every prayer I prayed caused her only to argue that God doesn’t answer prayer.

In the last conversation we had, I tried once more to assure her of God’s love and grace. She said she hoped it was true.

Some time ago I heard that she had died. I hope she left her prison before she left this planet. No prayer I prayed, no scripture I shared, could free her from that prison. The lock, you see, was on the inside. She had put it there herself. Only she could open it. But she would not.

Do you know people whose well-rehearsed pain has confined them to such a prison? If so, tell them the lock is on the inside, and Jesus offers them the key of forgiveness He forged at the cross. He paid the price. They only need to forgive to be set free.