My Favorite Family Memory: Christmas in Jail


One of my favorite memories with my family takes place in a jail.

How many times have you heard someone start a sentence like that? My guess is…never.

None of us were arrested or thrown in jail. If you know my family, you’d be lucky to find a speeding ticket on any of our records.

Each year when my  large, loud family gets together in Florida we go to the jail my Uncle Bryan works at. He is a deputy and a chaplain at the jail. I have so much respect and appreciation for what he does.

What we do on Christmas day is something different than what most people might consider “cheery”. We gather up presents and we sing Christmas carols to the inmates while walking through the halls of the jail passing out presents to them. By doing this, we’re trying to elicit the feeling of hope and change into the lives of people who have probably never been given that.

I’ll never forget singing to a young girl who could not have been older than 12 or 13 years old. She was in jail. My Aunt Debbie, who is known for being quite outspoken, begged me to sing the song “Breath of Heaven” to the girls as a solo. After protesting and saying no to her about 70 times she convinced me to do it (because if you know my aunt Debbie…saying no to her is just not an option). 

So we walked into the cell and I reluctantly began to sing Breath of Heaven. For those who have never heard it, it is a song about Mary when she was pregnant with baby Jesus. She's asking God to hold her together through her journey of carrying the savior of the world. 

 As I sang, the young girl began to sob. It was a ripple effect. The girl began to cry, my aunt began to cry and all of the other carolers in the cell with us began to cry…and soon enough the other inmates surrounding her cell began crying as well.

So I'm standing here thinking, "Oh my gosh...I've ruined Christmas and made everyone cry." Crying is usually not a good thing…but in this moment, the tears were of empathy and compassion.

 Here is this young girl, with her entire life ahead of her, spending Christmas in jail. She has done something obviously horrible enough to get her locked up, and she understands that and so do we. But in that moment I like to think she felt a little bit of hope and little bit of love. In that moment I believe that God touched her heart. He brought out an emotion of true remorse.

So as everyone within 30 feet of us began to cry, I started to cry too and could no longer sing the song without sounding like a blubbering idiot. And what we did next we weren’t actually “allowed” to do but we couldn’t help it. My aunt and I ran over and gave the girl a huge hug. She grabbed tightly onto us as if she hadn’t been held in ages. 

She was a perfect stranger that the world had forgotten. She was a sinner in need of love and truth, just as the rest of us are.

I don’t know who she was, I don’t know what she did to be put in jail and I am certainly not excusing whatever poor decision she made to land herself in jail…but in that moment none of that matter. She is a child who comes from the same God I believe in. A young girl who needed a picture of hope and of love in her life.

 I can't fix all her problems. I can't give her a "get out of jail free" card. I don't have the answer to why her life has played out this way. In that moment all I had to offer was a hug and a song. One of my favorite quotes I feel applies to this situation.

"I can’t bring salvation; Jesus did. I can’t bring conviction; the Holy Spirit does. I can’t bring judgement; God will. But I can love. And in a broken, hurting world it’s the least—and simultaneously the most—we can do. "
-Bianca Juarez 

And I can only hope that that is what we provided her with on that day.