Called —Part 1

Do you feel called? Sure, there are certain things we enjoy doing, but that doesn’t mean any of those things are necessarily our “calling.” After all, some things we enjoy may not be good for us. These thoughts whirled in my mind one evening as I left Unit 28, the women’s prison. I’d just had to tell a young mother her ten-year-old daughter was in the hospital dying of cancer and, according to the doctors, would be gone within a week. This inmate was almost done serving her sentence and had hoped to be home in five weeks —now, too late to see her daughter again. What heartache and anguish! What need of the comfort only a loving God can provide! My husband and I volunteer at a medium/maximum prison in Tennessee, where he started giving Bible studies twenty years ago. I first went along as a support for him, though doing so wasn’t very comfortable for me. We didn’t see much growth in our Bible study group for the first few years.

We’d been told not to teach anything that might be potentially controversial or cause the inmates to be uncomfortable.

Around 2012, the elderly, longtime volunteers’ leader retired and asked my husband and me to lead out. After much prayer, we accepted but also decided to teach what we believed the Bible taught regardless of who might be offended.

Things began happening.

Bible study group attendees became more interested in the studies and invited fellow inmates to join our group, which began to swell.

Exciting? Yes! But I still didn’t feel as though I quite fit in.

I still didn’t know if prison ministry was, indeed, my “calling.” So I kept praying about it and searching the Scriptures even as I continued to volunteer.

Around 2013 an expansion project swelled the prison population from eight hundred to three thousand inmates.

A new unit was added for women prisoners.

A new chaplain came aboard... but was I in the right place? During those years, I learned that the best ways to discern God’s calling for your life include (1) keeping your complexities before the Lord in prayer; (2) seeking His will and guidance through daily time in His Word; and (3) being ever watchful for His opening and closing doors of opportunity as daily life unfolds around you. Sooner or later, “thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it” (Isaiah 30:21, KJV).

Diana Halverson