Work Detail

My family left West Virginia in 1955 for Joppa, Maryland.  Each summer we made the yearly trip back to West Virginia to visit grandparents.  Often, my grandparents would come up to Maryland and pick up me and my younger brother and keep is for two or three weeks before my parents would come to West Virginia to claim us.  The trip was long (before interstate highways) through the states of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia.  I remember asking my dad about the prisoner detail working on the roads in Virginia.  They bagged trash, pushed lawnmowers, and cleared brush.  I was intrigued by their prison jumpsuits, shackles, and the guard watching with the scattergun.  Dad said that chain gangs weren’t cost-effective as work crews, but they served as a deterrent AND local citizens felt good knowing that justice was happening.  Hey, the apostle Paul was one of those jailbirds and he wrote about it in the book of Philippians.  But Paul was glad to be a jailbird because he was a jailbird for Christ.  Philippians 1:12&13, “But I would ye should understand, brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel; So that my bonds (shackles) in Christ are manifest in all the palace, and in all other places.”  Paul was a prisoner, but he was a willing prisoner for the sake of Jesus Christ.  And with each shift-change, a new pair of Roman soldiers got a witness for Christ from Paul.  What a testimony!  Hey, are you a prisoner for Christ?  Has Jesus captured your soul?  Let me encourage you to serve Jesus today.  You’ll be glad that you did.