consequences.
The Four Stages
1) As I said earlier, my confidence in God and His word began as a get out of jail free card. Many, many people promised me great miracles of deliverance. “Believe hard enough,” they said, “and God will do all that you ask.” So I studied hard, and believed with all my fleshly might, and refused to listen to the few who spoke with wisdom when they said, “Submit to all authority.” So I went to court, and I loss, and I went to prison for three and one-half years.
2) The get out of jail card failed. The time behind bars began. I set about to redeem myself to family and friends. My second steps into a life of faith and confidence in the Bible as God’s word took on the nature of trying to prove to the world that I was changed, redeemed, and not the bad man that had ended up behind bars. It was a time when I nearly drove my wife and children away from me. Yet even with all my mistakes, a miracle was taking place. My family endured. God kept them near to me. His grace and his mercy were beginning to overcome the consequences. Not by changing them, but by changing me; and by keeping near to me those who loved me in spite of myself.
3) The first year passed like an open sore within my belly, oozing pain day after day. Sometimes it was emptiness, and sometimes it was a certainty that physical death lingered on the verge of every breath for I felt within my mind that a body and soul could not bear so great a suffering. At times, I felt that my inner screams would rip me open from the inside out, and that all the world would see my weakness; or that the inner blackness that still clawed at my mind and heart would somehow gain victory over that which Jesus had