by Duggar, Jill
The girl left the room, and about an hour later, as we were talking to another girl, she burst in and said, “Girls! I’m so excited! I found these verses, and it’s so perfect for what I’m working through right now.”
She had found scriptures promising that, no matter what happens, no matter who else turns away from us, God will not forsake us.
“I think you’re right,” the girl said. “This is a testing for me, showing me that God wants me to treasure His love even more than anyone else’s.” And then she added, “I prayed for Dad. And, really, I think it’s probably a misunderstanding.”
The next day came, and her dad didn’t call. But by that point, the girl was so assured of God’s love for her that she could forgive her dad for his inability to respond the way she had desired him to.
Jinger: Ministering Behind Bars
Like Jana, Jill, and Jessa, I (Jinger) am at a time when I’m asking God to lead me in the direction He would have for my life. Photography is something I have enjoyed for several years now, and I’m constantly looking for ways I can use what I’ve learned, hoping it can be a blessing to others. Scott Enlow, the videographer for the 19 Kids and Counting TV series, has been very kind to share his wealth of information and teach some of us kids about the technical side of photography as well as sharing tips on things like composition and framing. I was honored to be asked to take individual portraits and family photos for some political candidates during the last campaign season, and I love snapping photos of our family whenever we’re traveling.
A friend and I also photographed a wedding—a rather scary thing for us because neither of us had done a wedding before. One concern was the lighting. We were hoping we wouldn’t have to use flash, both because the pictures aren’t as pretty and also because the flash itself would distract from the ceremony. We did a lot of preparation and praying in the days leading up to the wedding, and God helped us stay calm and focused (literally!) on the job at hand. When it was all said and done, the couple was pleased with the way the pictures turned out, and we were thankful for that.
We are humbled to be invited to play our violins (and, in Josiah’s case, the cello) at places such as Charles Stanley’s church, where this photo was taken.
One area of ministry I’ve felt a calling for is the juvenile detention center in our area. Every other week I go there with a couple of other ladies and usually one or two of my sisters to minister to girls who are in lockup there.
The kids at the detention center are eleven to seventeen, and they’re usually in “juvy” because they stole something, or maybe they’ve been caught with drugs, or somehow they just ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. Most are there for a relatively short time, no more than a month or two, but occasionally we talk to a teenager who’s done something violent and is facing serious consequences.
So many times we find that these kids are at the end of themselves. They feel lost and broken, and they’re looking for help, searching for answers in life. Looking for a way out of the downward spiral they seem to have fallen into, they are often receptive and sometimes even eager to hear what we have to say. Often we can tell that God has gone before us and softened the heart of at least one young girl who acknowledges her need for true repentance and God’s forgiveness and wants to trust Christ as Savior.
So many times in ministry, you reach out to someone with your testimony or some other information about the gospel, and that person just isn’t interested. But in juvy, more times than not, the teens we talk to are ready to listen.
We pray with them and talk to them about what it means to be free in Christ. Sometimes we meet with a girl who’s terribly sad and close to despair. She thinks no one could ever forgive her for what she’s done and that this is the way her life is going to be from now on. But we are able to tell her about God, who loves her no matter what, and who can forgive everything. To see a girl light up when she understands and accepts this truth is very exciting.
I’ve been so blessed by this work, which was motivated largely by my time at the Journey to the Heart retreat with my sisters back in 2009. So you might think that when I was invited to help with a Journey to the Heart program at a women’s prison in Florida, I would see it as the perfect way to combine two of my favorite ministries.
Not!
I felt scared, not about being in the prison, but I was afraid I was too young and wouldn’t know what to say to women who could be the age of my mother—or grandmother!
I sought advice from my mom. “Why are they asking me to go? I don’t know what I would say to older people. I’m used to working with kids.”
Mom told me, “Jinger, this is not about you. It’s about Jesus and sharing His love. When the time comes, God will put on your heart what He wants you to share with these ladies.”
So I prayed and read my Bible. I was inspired by 1 Timothy 4:12: “Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.” Even though I am young, I desired to be an example of believers!
At that point it was easier to say, “Okay, Lord. I had the wrong perspective. I understand now: it’s about You.”
About forty of us, both men and women, gathered in Florida for that Journey to the Heart. We stayed at a camp a few miles from the prisons and slept in bunkhouses, one for the women, one for the men. Every morning for seven days, we woke up about 5 A.M. (a stretch for us night-owl Duggars!) to get ready and then make the thirty-minute drive to the prison complex, arriving about 7 A.M. The men headed to the men’s prison and the women to the women’s. We passed through airport-type security and finally met the Journey participants.
As we entered the room, we received a special welcome from the ladies who had gathered; all were very eager to learn more about God. The lines of grief and bitterness could be seen on many of their faces as a result of the poor decisions that had led up to their incarceration. We prayed that God would use us to bring to every one of these women the hope and healing that we ourselves have found in His forgiveness.
As we began to greet the ladies one by one and looked deep into their eyes, we remembered Dad’s words to us growing up: God sees everyone the same. We are all sinners. So we can never compare ourselves to others and think that we are somehow better than they are.
He would also tell us that a person doesn’t just wake up one day and decide, Hey, nice day for robbing a bank. I think that’s what I’ll do today. It starts with one small, bad decision that leads to a bigger bad decision, and before you know it you’ve done something you never saw yourself capable of doing. As the saying goes, “Sin will take you farther than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to pay.”
Classic hymns of the Christian faith are taught in our home from an early age. Here you see Jessa leading in song around our family table.
Our hearts were full of compassion and love for those women. Each morning we started with the large-group meeting. Being that this was our first time in a prison, all of us girls were struck by the world in which these women live. Massive fences are topped with three rows of barbed wire, and a center guard tower controls all doors and gates. About a hundred women had signed up for Journey. As a prerequisite, a few months prior, all of them had completed another IBLP program called the Basic Seminar, a sort of introduction to Christian living.
Each morning during Journey, the group heard a video message followed by personal testimonies from some of the leaders or assistants, who talked about things like former addictions or fears. Next we worked through the Journey to the Heart material assigned for that day.
Then came a break when each person “got alone with the Lord,” as we described it, to ask Him to reveal the negative heart conditions or other areas each woman needed to work on. Each one was given a Journey binder that included journal pages where she could record her prayers as well as the direction in which she felt God leading
her.
Jana was serving as a small-group leader, and Jessa and I came along as assistant leaders, but the leader I was assisting was the organizer of the complete women’s Journey team, and she often had to step away to help another leader or speak to prison officials, so I was often left in charge of leading the team time for my group. “My” ladies ranged in age from twenty-three to sixty-five—definitely different from the juvenile detention center, where the oldest person I’d worked with was seventeen!
One of the major differences between Journey seminars held in a quiet retreat or in a prison was that, at any moment, a session in the prison could be interrupted by a “call-out,” when a prison guard would step into the room where we were meeting and call out the names of inmates who had to leave for various reasons. Usually after the large-group session we would split up into our small groups of ten to twelve women, but one day so many women were called out that only two women were left in my small group. But the amazing thing was that the Lord knew exactly who needed to be there. The two women who were left that day were from the same dorm and had held hard grudges against each other for quite some time. In that quiet, very personal setting, they were able to make things right and apologize to one another for their wrong attitudes and actions.
Working seven days straight in the prison from 8 A.M. to 8 P.M., I expected to be exhausted. And I’ll admit, at the end of the first day, I was pretty tired. But after that, I felt energized because while God was working on the hearts of the inmates we were serving, He was also doing an amazing work within our own hearts and strengthening us too! It was sometimes overwhelming to see how He continually worked to open these ladies’ hearts and minds to His love and grace.
Sometimes this happened through the simplest comments. For example, on the first days we were there, one of the women in my group who had a daughter my age asked if we were going to the beach after Journey ended. She assumed that, coming from a landlocked state like Arkansas at the end of winter, we would want to enjoy a spring break trip to soak up some sunshine on Florida’s beautiful shoreline.
No, we told her, no beach trips are planned.
Oh, she said, eyebrows raised.
Then she said she’d heard there were some good antiques shops in the area, and she asked if we had found time to go shopping.
No, we told her, no shopping, either. “We’re only here because we wanted to bring God’s love to you,” we said. “You’re the only reason we’ve come.”
The thought seemed almost shocking to some of the participants overhearing the conversation, and it obviously carried a heartfelt message: that they mattered more to us than a Florida vacation. And equally surprising to them was that the Journey team members spent the whole day in the prisons. They told us that other volunteers who had come in would usually leave to eat lunch in town somewhere. But most days, we ate both lunch and supper with the inmates, sitting with them at the stainless-steel tables in the huge dining hall and eating exactly what they ate.
Sure, we probably could have gotten tastier food in a nearby restaurant, and the dining experience would have been quieter and less stressful. (At least once during each meal, and sometimes two or three times, prison guards would call out, “Count!” which indicated that all volunteers were required to stand at the table—or sometimes against a wall—so that all the inmates could be counted to ensure no one was missing.) But what amazing opportunities we would have missed if we hadn’t shared those meals with the women we were serving!
However, for me, it wasn’t the meal itself that led to the most life-changing moments but the simple walk to and from the dining hall. The various prison dormitories are connected to the dining hall by eight-foot-wide sidewalks, each painted with yellow lines two feet from the edges. The inmates are required to walk within those outer borders so there’s no opportunity for contact with inmates who might be walking in the other direction along the opposite edge. Only volunteers and prison guards and officials are allowed to walk in the center of the sidewalk. Most of the time, we walked in line with the inmates, but sometimes being able to walk alongside one of the women provided the opportunity for a brief, heart-to-heart talk.
These talks were powered by prayer and scripted by God. Each day as we rode to and from the prisons in large vans, and also during each day’s late-afternoon gathering of the entire Journey team, we would share prayer requests for the inmates we were working with, and we would also share scriptures that could be helpful for an individual. We watched in awe as so many hearts were turned. It was a week of miracle after miracle as God worked wonders within the inmates we were serving.
For example, one of the inmates I was working with was probably in her mid-thirties. I’d been praying for her, and I’d asked the other team members for guidance in how to handle the questions she was raising and the attitude that seemed to be blocking her from being willing to give up everything for Jesus. One day as we walked to lunch, I asked her, “Are you a fan of Jesus or a follower? Are you just saying, ‘Yay, Jesus!’ or are you willing to lay down everything for Him?”
Some people love to stand in church on Sunday and sing all the songs, but they don’t want God to interfere with the rest of their week. They are delighted with the thought of Jesus being our Savior, which literally means that He forgives our sins and saves us from judgment and spending eternity in hell. But they’re not willing to give Him the place of Lord and Master, which means giving Him authority over and control of their daily life and allowing Him to remove anything from their lives that He doesn’t approve of. But what they don’t realize is that they can’t have one without the other. If Jesus is your Savior, He also takes the position of your Lord and Master.
This woman obviously did a lot of thinking as she ate because as we left the dining hall that day she said, “Jinger, I think I’m ready to commit my life to the Lord.”
We were all lined up on the yellow line, waiting to walk back to the meeting room. I was excited for her but didn’t want to do anything that would get her in trouble with the guards. I said, “Do you want to wait until we get back to the room, or do you want to do it now?”
“Now!” she said excitedly. We quietly stepped onto the grass alongside the sidewalk and prayed together. And right there in the open, she committed her life to the Lord. What a moment! I almost felt that I heard the angels singing, right there inside the prison walls.
Another woman in my group seemed so wise with head knowledge of the Bible and Christianity, but when we talked about a personal relationship with Jesus she seemed to hold back. Much of the time she was there physically, but she was zoned out emotionally. She was in her mid-forties; she had only been in the prison a few months and seemed to be in denial about her situation. I kept thinking, Something is different about her. But what is it?
I asked the other team members to pray for her, and I prayed, too, that God would do whatever was necessary to bring her into the personal relationship with Him that she so needed.
The next morning when the session began, I asked the woman, “How are you doing today?”
“I’m doing great,” she answered with a tight smile.
We continued with the day’s schedule, and then a little later during a break I asked her again, “How are you doing?”
“Do you want to sit down?” she said.
I pulled two chairs together, and we sat. Immediately the tears started flowing as she shared some of what had been holding her back. She asked if I could walk to lunch with her, and she continued sharing as we walked. She asked questions about how she could have a real relationship with the Lord and what that would mean. And then, right there in front of everyone, she prayed in humility and repentance for God’s Salvation. She asked Jesus to come into her life, and again the angels were surely rejoicing!
When I shared her story with the other leaders that evening, one of them commented, “That just goes to show that intellectually, a person can have all the head knowledge of the Bible and Christianity, but so
metimes people stop short of truly knowing Jesus.”
When this Journey experience began, the team leader told us she had a list of the participants and the crimes they’d been convicted of that led to their imprisonment. Most of us didn’t want to know about the convictions going into the retreat because we knew that might subconsciously influence our work with the women. But as this woman shared her story with me, she told me she expected to spend the rest of her life behind bars. It turned out she’d been convicted of first-degree murder.
As we flew home from Florida at the end of our week in the prison, I thanked God for the time I’d been able to spend with each of those precious ladies.
When we were in El Salvador, working in the orphanages and making home visits in the remote villages, I had thought, It just can’t get any better than this. It’s the most rewarding work anyone could hope for. And then I spent that week working in the prison and realized that each new opportunity is more inspiring and energizing than the last. I can’t wait to see what doors and new opportunities God will open in the future. As Dad says often, “Life is an exciting adventure when you’re seeking to follow God!”
Jessa: By the Numbers
Like my siblings, I (Jessa) am grateful for the opportunities God provides for us to minister to others. For example, although I’m not nearly as skilled in photography as Jinger is, I’ve learned some things from her and from Scott, the family’s videographer. When Jill came home from a day of midwife training and mentioned that some of her clients were wishing someone could photograph their baby’s birth and precious first hours with parents, grandparents, and older siblings, the obvious choice was Jinger, the “family photog.” But then we remembered that Jinger would probably pass out at the first sight of blood (proving again that all of us Duggars have our own personal likes, dislikes, abilities, and hang-ups).