Peace Within Reach booklet on PDF
My friend Lynn (age 40) is doing a life sentence in a prison in South Dakota. Lynn doesn’t have the perspective on life that God is the creator of the world, that he can be in a personal relationship with God, and that he can go to heaven when he dies.
Lynn has an evolutionistic, “godless” understanding of the world. Basically he sees every living thing, including us humans, as if we were leaves in a forest. The leaves live and grow on trees, until Autumn. Then, they die and fall off the trees, joining other fallen leaves. Over time they rot away and are buried by falling leaves of the next year, and the next. The leaf, a human life, lived during its season and now its life is over; it falls to the ground, likely to be forgotten in this impersonal, cold, “world-machine” that somehow started a long time ago. It’s over. Make room for the next. My friend Lynn has lived the last ten years in a maximum security prison. He will likely live the next 25+ years there. He often feels like a nameless, meaningless product 
living in a big human warehouse. If I had Lynn’s perspective on life I would feel that way too. It’s a hope-less, peace-less, meaningless existence. No wonder he talks matter-of-factly about sometime just ending it — committing suicide — in one last gesture to say, “ In your face state of South Dakota.” While prison is a tough place to be, a much more hope-filled perspective is held by some, which allows them to thrive. The Apostle Paul, a writer of much of the Bible, while in chains and soon to be executed by beheading, was able to write, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). Ah, heaven.
