Dying to Live

By Ken Gartner

Dying to Live is a book about survival, encouragement and overcoming personal issues of life by calling on the power of Jesus, and points the reader unashamedly to Christ’s mending and healing powers in any possible situation. It is a straight up, no nonsense book for someone who is having a hard time. This book has been referred to as a spiritual toolbox or a repair manual, helping to repair the hearts and spirits of broken and struggling people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483514932

Book preview

ENDNOTES

CHAPTER 1.

A taste of prison.

Twenty-three years ago I was in prison on remand, the darkest time of my life! Never again, I swore to myself. Prison ripped me apart, as it does with many prison inmates. Satan toyed with me, watched me suffer, until I eventually asked for the power of Jesus to come in to me, in order for me to get through that time of darkness. That’s what Satan does when you’re in prison. He torments you and makes you squirm. That’s why you need Jesus.

Every hour crawled by as slowly as a year. I was a caged animal. I was also mentally breaking up. Even the clouds teased me with their drifting without restraint across the small cell window to the other side and out of my view. I was part of the pain and anguish crying out within those cold brick walls—aimless, bewildered, dejected and condemned souls hidden from the eyes of the uncaring world outside.

This was prison in all its hellish reality, with its stench of vomit and excrement and disinfectant and stale, torpid air. Abuse flowed from mouths of the foulest of humanity—the only form of communication most of them were ever exposed to. A constant chorus of crude insults and sadistic laughter pierced the high concrete walls and violated my sleepless brain every night and hour after hour without relief.

How many of you have tasted the same bitterness and pain as a result of having transgressed against society, and ended up as a consequence, in a dark outpost of Satan such as this for the first time?

Prison is an ugly memory, with its stigma carved into your mind as scars never to be completely erased. The heavy yoke of a criminal record dogs you, shackling your neck for the rest of your life and promising only hopelessness and a tough future for you. Prison represents a time of wallowing in the deepest sewage, the ruination of you and the stripping of your self-respect and mana.¹ How can you cope as a first-timer with prison when you feel down like this?

We all fail. I fail every day. I failed exceptionally badly once. I’ll undoubtedly fail some more. I’m a human being. We’re all regular failures. At that time, I wished I could have erased that period of darkness from my past and forgotten it. I wanted those mistakes wiped out so I could start all over again! That’s plain fantasizing. You can’t erase what you’ve done, or the scars you have inflicted on others. However, darkness eventually fades away, and daylight eventually spreads its rays of hope. Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes in the morning.² I don’t have a criminal record with Jesus. My slate is clean. Jesus wipes your criminal record out if you confess your sins to him and put your trust in him.

You stuffed up once upon a time? Regard it as history. You don’t have to dwell on your past. Look ahead, not over your shoulder. You may be constantly impaired by the effects of your past mistakes, but you can still hold on to hope. You have to acknowledge those past mistakes, deal with them in constructive ways, and move on. You can start again, even in the midst of the dark period of your life by putting your trust in Jesus. He gives you a new start if you call on Him.

The bible gives an account of someone who strayed right away from the path of right living. It reads like diary entries of the wayward, who turn from what they know is right and follow their own ways which they know are wrong, with disastrous results. This is the parable of the Prodigal Son.³ It is the story of the son who took his share of the father’s farm, cashed it in and left home. The son lived it up, followed his human desires, and spent his money essentially on sex, drugs and rock and roll. He spent the lot, ending up with not even any food to eat, and in fact, hungering after the food which was fed to the pigs! He had reached tough times, the end of the line, of life as he once knew it. As a result of his hopeless situation, he was forced to take a look at himself and take stock of his life. However, the hard times did teach him some equally valuable lessons. Even in present day situations, tough times force people to turn to God often for the first time, or after a time of ‘backsliding’. This frequently happens while a person is in prison.

Many people in desperation turn to God—as I did—because of some disaster or tragedy, such as prison, divorce, the death of someone close, changing fortunes, serious illness and so on. The prodigal son was sorry for his sins. Not only was he sorry. He also repented, otherwise he would have continued on down that rocky path. He would have gone home, sucked up for some more funds off his father, and headed straight back to his sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll existence. But no, he gave that sort of living up. And we can do the same.

If we repent, we receive God’s forgiveness and can then start again. As a result of his repenting, the father treated the son like a much-loved person who had returned home after having gone astray in the wilderness. And God is joyful when one of his sons or daughters likewise repents, and comes on home from the wilderness of Satan’s world. God waits for you to come home as that father did with his son, with the father waiting and watching in the distance for the son’s return. And when Our Father recognizes you as you appear on the horizon, imagine the joy on the Father’s face as He holds out his arms to welcome you. That’s how our spiritual Father regards each of us when we have returned home from the cold and into his arms.

As with the prodigal son then, if you realize you’ve been going the wrong way for too long and wasting your life—then change direction. Not just a nudge towards Jesus, but turn right around, to face Him. Face the direction you know He wants you to walk—towards Him. He’s been calling people such as you to follow Him for the last 2000 years. He doesn’t force you. He invites you. I mean, why continue up the same dead end path anyway? Why continue in blindness? A lot of people smoke dope, indulge in booze, rip folks off, start fights, curse and think the worst of fellow neighbor, when they know there is a better way.

God wants to take you and transform your life. He wants to turn you inside out and stand you up the right way. But you have to take that first step. Jesus wants you to lean on him. He said in John 11: 28, Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. He wants you to have rest, and peace, by leaning on Him, the Son of God, the guy who went to the cross for you. He wants you loving others and bringing them hope, and doing good for them. He wants to take the guts of your soul and wring the cancer out and heal you with His living, cleansing waters, leaving you transformed and purified with love.

Vast numbers of people outside prison walls are lost, aimless, and full of disillusionment and discontent. They need people like you, who have been through the tough lonely times and are still going through them, to tell the lost ones—family members or friends or strangers—that there is someone they can trust and who cares for them. There is a better way, and Jesus Christ is the way, as well as the truth and the life, and there is a heaven after death if you choose to believe in Jesus the Son of God. You don’t have to stumble through life’s problems on your own. Christ is there to provide you with a beacon for life.

Remember that Jesus hears you when you pray to Him. He wants you to turn to Him, and follow Him, and also be joyful at your decision, because you will have made the most important and positive decision of your life. Jesus wants to mold you so that you become more like Him. He wants to build up your patience and strength, not the strength that enables you to punch someone’s lights out, but the strength to enable you to stand and be counted, as one of His followers and ambassadors. He wants you to be His hands and His feet and His mouthpiece while you are on this earth.

If you’re a prisoner, then prison is only part of the deal in your life, whether you’re in for a short term, life, or on Death Row. The wider and more important focus is the eternal, never-ending nature of your spirit and soul. They don’t die. They don’t turn off like a tap. Your spirit and soul live on. Where do you want your soul to go when your time on this earth is done? You have a choice. Choose wisely.

Keep this promise of the bible in your heart by learning it and cherishing it. It means hope for you, and liberty for your spirit. If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. And you’re on your way to salvation. Prison does not have to be the end of you; it can be the beginning of a new beginning for you, as it was for me! Take the opportunity while you have it.

CHAPTER 2.

I survived Prison.

No-body told me about Jesus when I was a kid, nor when I was a teenager. My first introduction to him was as a student during a Billy Graham crusade in Auckland. I walked down what seemed like ten miles of steps and past fifty thousand people to the middle of the stadium and said Yes to Jesus for the first time.

I realize now of course, the tremendous significance for me of that first decision. It meant that from that minute on I was in His hands forever, no matter what I did in the intervening years. However, although I now know that eternal life was mine from that moment on as a late teen, I gradually slid back. The acquaintance on my part didn’t last. Church seemed only for goody goodies, for white, nice, middle-class folk. Coming from a working class family, I felt that I didn’t really fit in. I continued my rambling, rudderless journey through life. Marriage to an attractive young woman, blessed with two beautiful daughters, and a good career ahead of me in teaching. But no closeness with Jesus.

Jesus didn’t figure in my plans anymore. Not for another twenty years, until I was forced to hastily add that divine ingredient to my recipe for life. God wasn’t a necessity in my program of good times and self-indulgence, until I started tampering with a time bomb, which would inevitably explode.

I crashed, through gradually turning away from the divine hand that had been once offered to me. Instead, I had allowed Satan to insidiously overpower my life. Through ignoring the warnings of close friends, I was struck down into Satan’s darkness. He took great pleasure in seeing me writhing in despair in my attempted suicide, a subsequent court appearance, and time in jail on remand.

Immediately before the domino like collapse on that fateful Good Friday evening, the realization was hitting home between the young female high school student and me that our blissful world was about to terminate. Ironically, it was on the same day that Jesus had sacrificed his life for mankind so many centuries earlier.

Circumstances and bad timing in the midst of our forbidden liaison had caught us out. If we couldn’t express our bizarre love openly, which we had both yearned to be able to do, we would end it in an equally bizarre death. The day of reckoning arrived. The hurriedly written suicide notes penned with the eager assistance of the devil, to parents, brothers and sisters, her special friends, and close colleagues of mine who would be shocked out of their trees of conventional existence.

We drove under the cover of night, in case her parents or police became aware of our grim intentions, to an isolated parking area by a river. In a place hard up against an embankment and hidden by trees, I started the motor in the darkness. The thick exhaust fumes pumped into the rear of the vehicle by way of a plastic pipe. Two hours passed, and gas continued to vomit into the poisoned darkness. She was fading gradually into an unconscious state. The distressing part was that she was slipping away from me and our hopes and dreams, yet I was still awake, and increasingly alone in my tortured consciousness. I had to be taken too!

Somewhere within my traumatized state, I gradually become aware of a presence and a voice that kept repeating: ‘This isn’t the way! Stop it now. Stop what you’re doing.’ It was a long time after—perhaps a few years—that I realized it was Jesus speaking to me through his Holy Spirit. I will never let you down, never walk off and leave you..⁴

The following week was spent recovering in hospital; then she was taken home and I was taken to jail in an unmarked car flanked by two detectives. After a time of imprisonment on remand, I was released on probation for three years, provided I lived in another town and had no contact with the other party (ironically enough, called by the authorities, ‘the complainant’). Had I not prayed silently in my legal counsel’s office and while standing in the dock, things would have been far worse. The miracle was that I had dodged the overwhelming likelihood of seven years in prison, only through the power of the One to whom I had turned, Jesus.

For the next year in recovery, I was at rock bottom. Everything lost, including the respect and love of two deeply scarred daughters. A home. My wife. A teaching career. My place in the sun. All gone. ‘He who brings trouble on his family will inherit only the wind.’⁵

But at least for the first time, I had earnestly called out to Jesus as my Helper. The period since then had not been always been smooth, and I hadn’t always acknowledged God in all my ways,⁶ but I had at least been aware of His loving presence. I even went to church some Sundays, the first time in a long while.

In my effort to rehabilitate myself, I went to university and gained three degrees. The scars of having been inside however, as with many prison inmates, are still tender memories at times. Fortunately, the worst of these scars has almost disappeared through the work of Jesus in my life.

Finally, as a result of another crisis in 1992, I handed my life over to him completely. I made a decision to trust only Jesus, to follow His path as best as I was able, and asked Him to come into my life. No more holding back this time. ‘Jesus,’ I pledged, ‘this time Lord, I want to serve you and be part of you and follow your ways.’ Sometime after being ‘born again’, the Spirit of God urged me with subtle persistence over several months to serve Him in prisons. I took up his call.

There is nothing more fulfilling than being blessed by the Lord during one’s walk with Him. The blessings that come from putting one’s faith in Him big time are too numerous to write here. I am now blessed with a wonderful, born again Christian wife, and also blessed everyday with the love, respect and trust of many prison inmates and ex-inmates, whom I have had the privilege of knowing and encouraging. I also receive tremendous blessings every time I speak in a church and meet thousands of wonderfully positive people as I travel around New Zealand.

The times I cherish most are when I see a prisoner covered in tattoos and on his knees praying, or standing in a chapel service to follow for the first time, the path of Jesus. To have been brought by God through my years of rebelling in the wilderness with all its resulting pain to experience scenes as overwhelmingly joyful as these, makes those unsavory parts of my life in a strange sense, almost worthwhile.

My regrets, which at times run deeply, are that I caused pain and grief to those so close to me, that it took me so many long, destructive, wasted years, to become a true follower of Christ. My joy now is in knowing and following Christ the Savior and Master—be the times hard or smooth.

Equally joyful is the privilege of being able to serve Christ by bringing His hope to those who need hope and encouragement, and also to a group of people who have been rejected and cast off by the majority of society, prisoners.

CHAPTER 3.

Let Jesus Take away your pain.

When I stood in the dock looking down in shame that day many years ago in the High Court, I didn’t want to look up at my family or supporters scattered among the stunned, silent audience because I was ashamed. How did it get to this point? Why didn’t God stop me before I ended up in this situation? Why didn’t He protect me?

I found myself praying silently. My lawyer had warned me: Ninety nine percent of those who commit this sort of offence get about seven years, so be prepared. I refused to listen to his warning, and shut my eyes and prayed as I stood there facing the judge, for God to put me with that one percent who escape a long prison term. He answered my prayer. God got me off a few years’ stretch because He had other ideas as to where He wanted me, and it wasn’t as a long-term resident in a prison, but as a visitor to prisons and a supporter of prison inmates.

God never plans bad, destructive things for us. He works for our good. (Romans 8-28) We plan our own programs of self-destruction by not following His plans, as I had found with a lot of hard regret. We plan our own programs of self destruction, by following our own ways of doing things when we know they’re not the wisest ways, but we just carry on doing them anyway, sometimes like, over a period of our whole lives! God doesn’t teach us how to commit crime, how to learn all the wrong principles in life, to do things we know are not right! We make our own choices. I chose to do that crime twenty-four years ago and caused pain to a lot of people as a result of my crime. God didn’t tell me to do it.

We often plan our paths to self-destruction willfully, despite knowing the consequences if we get caught. Okay, some of us have been influenced by bad or violent parents, or tough people we hung around with, but ultimately we have the brains to make our own choices. I made some very wrong choices, some which I thought at the time were right choices for me, and will regret them forever. I don’t blame anyone but myself.

God’s plans for us are very different from our plans for us. My plans in the past were to make myself as popular as possible, score as many women as possible, for as many people to think I was a cool singer and guitarist at parties as possible. My driving force was to make as much money off gambling as possible, and enjoy life as much as possible. Shame on myself for my shallow, selfish values back then! No thought for others in those days, just for Mr. Ego.

And we all think like that at different stages of life, until we know about this God, and realize there are far more worthy dreams to pursue than those shallow, artificial, selfish ones. His plans for you and me are totally different from what we might regard as good plans. He wants to prosper us, but not in the ways we think He should prosper us. Where’s the wisdom in wishing for Him to prosper us with money or flash cars and the like? We can’t take one cent with us when we leave this earth! He wants to give us hope and a long term future,⁷ so obviously if we want these to happen, we have to turn to him first, and recognize that our plans are inadequate and selfish. His plans for us are high above what our own plans are for ourselves. Our plans just don’t count when you’re talking His language, like eternity, and being free, being forgiven, and following Jesus.

He thinks of our long-term destiny. Not living from pay packet to pay packet or one day to the next or one meal to the next or one stretch to the next. He thinks long term for you, not just while you’re in prison and needing Him, or outside and free and needing Him, but also when you die and where you will be when you die, in His presence of cast away from Him.

He thinks of you and your soul and your spirit, the parts of you that last and don’t die when your body dies. He thinks of your heart, and how strong your faith and belief in him are, and whether you are ready to make some real and worthy sacrifices for your brother or sister down the road. He’s interested in how willing you are to lay down your life for them and sacrificing for Jesus Himself by following Him. That’s long-term destiny to Him, not the short term stuff that is temporary and won’t last and that stuff will pass away and turn to dust when your heart stops ticking anyway. But the long term deal, the things that really count about you.

You are called upon to live your life differently, and not carry on tomorrow the same as you carry on today. If by tomorrow morning, you are in exactly the same place within your soul as you are today, and you haven’t given any more thought about what your real destiny is, then it means you will not have advanced any closer towards