Every Friday is a Good Friday

This piece was posted by Philip Walters on backyardbelievers.com:

I was invited by a free news magazine to submit an Easter message to be included with the rest of the local clergy in the Easter edition. 150 words max. What can you say in 150 words? Here’s my contribution.It fits in well with my last blog post.

Good Friday. For most people it comes around once a year. But for me every Friday is a Good Friday. Because I’m a Prison Chaplain and Friday is the day I’m privileged to go inside and spend a day with some guys who have become pretty special. Men who have hit the bottom, tried to get up by their own strength, given up and fallen back - into the arms of Jesus.

Not that they expected Him to be in there really … but where else would you expect to find Him? When He was on earth Jesus declared that he had come to set the prisoner free and, on that first Good Friday, one of those prisoners took him up on the offer. A dying thief, who had run out of hope and whose time for amending his ways had also run out, met Jesus. Not looking up at him from a safe place but there, right beside him, on a cross, sharing his guilt and his pain.

And each Friday I see the same scene worked out. That’s why every Friday for me is a Good one.

This is the site of the Keppel Coast Christian Fellowship in Queensland, Australia led by Philip and his wife Esther. He is the Prison Fellowship chaplain at Capricornia Correctional Centre in Rockhampton.