Someone Like Me – February 2024

Someone Like Me – February 2024
I just watched a podcast about an FBI sting that took place in Chicago while I was a 27-year-old trader on the floor. After learning about the ongoing investigation, we wondered who would get arrested next and whether any of the new traders in our pit might be federal agents. After the indictments came, it was apparent that any one of us could have been charged since the people they arrested were regular guys who had the misfortune of befriending the agents who stood next to them in the pit.

Many people my age talk about their success in such a way that suggests if you do certain things and make all the right calls like them, your life will turn out hunky dory. It makes for a great story but it just isn’t true. Our lives are much more complicated than that. Yes, it matters to work hard, be smart and strive to be honest. These things are vitally important and without them, lasting success is improbable. But at the end of the day, there are things we don’t control and good fortune needs to smile on us. To think otherwise is hubris.

Years ago I was visiting a correctional facility with a friend and the chaplain of that prison. I was nervously sitting down with a group of tough looking inmates when someone from the far end of the table called out, “Brother Joe!” I looked over and to my surprise, saw someone I knew from years before. “Brother Alexander?! What happened?” Alexander had been a welcomer at our church years before and then disappeared. I remembered him as a gentle giant with a big smile who had started his own business (massage therapist) because no one would hire him as an ex-offender. The fact that he was such a physically intimidating man caused his massage therapy business to fail because no one had signed up for treatments—
he was too tough looking. Now he was back in prison and physically, was just a shell of his old self. “God saved me, Joe. If I hadn’t gone to prison, I never would have received treatment for my cancer and I’d be dead by now.”

As we left the prison that day, I couldn’t stop thinking about my friend. He had sat in the front row of a church goal-setting seminar I helped with years before. He had diligently followed the steps advocated. None of it had worked for him. Yet in spite of that fact, all he wanted to talk about was his gratitude for the way God had saved his life in prison. He had done all that he could and jail time and cancer were his rewards. What would cause me to think that I could have done any better with the cards he was dealt?

Let’s be honest. No one wants to go visit prisoners. The reason I went that day was because of my friend’s urging. That and because Jesus said it was a good thing for us to do. Is that a pattern for Jesus? Encouraging us to do things he knows we would hate? I used to think so. Now I think there are a couple good reasons for it. The first is that we seem to do better when we meet others’ needs rather than just our own. This is an obvious truth that we all know to be true. But my guess is that what Jesus really wanted was for us to have the chance to see ourselves in the faces of those behind bars and realize that they could easily be us. During the FBI sting of 1989, this came closer to being true for me than I would have liked.

As much as our culture focuses today on our differences, the truth is that what joins us is far greater than what divides us. Those with different political persuasions are not our enemy. They are who we would likely be in differing circumstances.

I knew when I visited prisons, that I shared more similarities than differences with those serving time. I am like the traders I knew who got indicted. I’m also like Alexander who died in prison. When I forget this truth, I lose a big part of my humanity. But when I remember it, a proper humility sets over me and the world seems much less divided.