Maximizing Your Potential

Chapter Nine

Receiving Your Potential It is always better to fail at something than to excel at nothing. Get up and try again. A hush fell over the room as a petite, neatly groomed woman stepped to the podium. Unlike most of the others in the room, she was not clad in prison-issued attire. Yet she did not seem to be or to feel out of place. Those who watched her wondered at this, for they had observed many people in these weekly meetings. Most had a genuine desire to help the prisoners, but their actions and remarks often revealed that they were uneasy being there and that they did not truly understand what imprisonment did to a person. Although the prisoners were grateful for the concern and well-meaning of these visitors, they preferred those speakers who were comfortable within the prison walls. They often understood more accurately the particular needs and frustrations that prison life produced. Expectancy filled those who faced the woman on the stage. Although they could not define why, they sensed that this speaker was different from the rest. She didn’t look any different, yet she was different. Perhaps it was the gentle compassion in her face as she looked out over the women who packed the small room. Perhaps it was her calm, assured manner that revealed an absence of fear or nervousness. Perhaps it was that she did not place any notes on the lectern. For whatever reason, the prisoners knew that this speaker was unlike the others who had come to encourage and strengthen them. Her first words startled them. “I am one of you. I lived here for five years. I came here at the age of twenty, leaving behind my husband and my young daughter. Although it has been many years since my release, I still remember the intense loneliness and the consuming despair that filled my first days here. I can also hear in my mind the click of the gate behind me. I doubt those thoughts and feelings will ever leave me. “I am here today because something very important happened to me here. I met the Lord Jesus Christ, accepted His forgiveness for my past, and entrusted