I am a cradle-to-grave Lutheran Christian. While I am not in the grave yet, I do sometimes wonder how I would fare if I was taken prisoner by Hezbollah, the Islamic State, or Putin’s Russia. Would I have the grit and determination and courage to withstand existence in a jail cell in a Russian prison? 

Well, that is what happened to the famous basketball player Brittney Griner, who was jailed for 10 months but was sentenced to eight years and never knew if she would get out before. 

While in the past she had associated religion with pain and intolerance, Griner discovered her religious sensibility and the power of faith in a Russian prison cell. She surprised herself by taking solace in the Bible, which the Russian authorities allowed her to have. She found herself studying it every morning and her favorite passage was from Psalms 56:3-4: “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you. In God, whose word I praise — in God I trust and am not afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?” 

Freedom held the luxury of resisting faith, but prison required embracing it. I find this to be so true because somehow despair, failure, frustration becomes an entry to looking at oneself and God in a different way.

A Russian prison cell may be a classroom for discovering a lot of things about yourself. Griner discovered God and the power of faith. What happens to many people is that they discover faith “in the clutch”. When you are up against a wall, when you are pushed to the end, you begin to look for help beyond yourself. It is when you are out of options that you reach out for help. The psalmist is right when he says, “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.”

There is a word for this; it is called despair. The more I thought about it, the more I began to realize that sometimes we find God and meaning, direction and purpose, when in our exhaustion we reach out in desperation and a hand comes out to grasp us. 

I wonder where Griner is at now, living in the luxury of freedom. I wonder about myself, who has always lived in the luxury of freedom. I also have a creeping feeling that in some ways all of us may find ourselves living, for a time, in a cell. It may not be Russian, but there are plenty of places in life that can hold us captive.