My Happiness Habit: Whatever is Just

Occasionally I run across a really good story; a story full of redemption, a surprise hero and things worth thinking about. Like most good stories this one starts with something bad.

A young woman named Jennifer Thompson was raped. She identified a man named Robert Cotton as her attacker. He was sentenced to life in prison.

A couple of years into the sentence, a man named Bobby Poole was housed in the same cell block as Robert Cotton. Poole began bragging that Cotton was doing time for him since he was Jennifer Thompson's true rapist. Cotton fashioned a knife intending to kill Poole. His dad encouraged him not to become a man who deserved to spend his life in prison. He told his son to put his faith in God instead.

Years later, DNA evidence in the case was examined using technology that didn't exist at the time of the original trial. It proved that the real rapist was Bobby Poole and not Robert Cotton. Cotton was released from jail after serving 11 years, and that's when the story gets really interesting.

Jennifer Thompson was in anguish over her own crime. Unintentionally she had stolen 11 years of an innocent man's life. She knew there was no way to give back those years, but she wanted to do what she could, so she arranged to meet Robert Cotton face to face.

They met in a church. She apologized and he forgave. They talked for hours about what had gone wrong. They talked about DNA and faith. Miraculously, they actually became friends. The man whose face had haunted Jennifer Thompson's nightmares for years, became her role model of forgiveness. She determined to forgive her real attacker.


15 more years have passed and Cotton and Thompson remain friends.

 "Ron just calls to make sure I'm doing OK," Thompson says.
 "He is an amazing human being. He has been a real good teacher for me."

Together they have written a book entitled,  Picking Cotton and they work together for reforms of eyewitness identification procedures.

It is a story that is just worth thinking about.

Finally brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just...think about these things. Philippians 4: 8

I gathered information for this post from the following web sites.
http://truthinjustice.org/positive_id.htm
http://nersp.osg.ufl.edu/~malavet/evidence/notes/thompson_cotton.htm

Only Once in Forever

Halloween night, right at sunset, we were grilling brats for dinner. The kids were impatient to get outside to trick-or-treat; every 10 seconds they were demanding help for with this or that. The table needed to be set, I'm pretty sure that the phone rang too... But for just a few minutes my husband and I chose to be deaf to it all.

We ignored the kids, (I confess, I ignored them much more stubbornly than he did), the table, and the brats got a bit blackened. We were transfixed, frozen in place, watching the astounding art being painted in the sky. Unique curls of cloud caught fire ever so briefly. By the time I snatched my camera, they were mostly gone.  Fortunately, my husband was a faster snatcher than I was.

"I think life is staggering and we're just used to it. We all are like children no longer impressed with the gifts we're given - it's just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral."       Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, p. 58

I don't want to be so spoiled by the remarkable gifts God gives everyday that I become ungrateful. That sunset, with those clouds and those colors won't happen again, no matter how long this earth lasts. God unveiled that masterpiece only once, for a brief moment. I don't want to ever become so responsible, or important, or busy, that I forget what it is to be alive in this world.

The Twilight Zone: The Obsolete Man

Our local PBS station had a Twilight Zone marathon last weekend, in honor of Halloween.

I remember watching reruns back when I was a teenager, even back then the technology and effects were outdated, but the story lines were intriguing.

My family and I snuggled in to watch a few episodes of marathon Saturday evening. One episode gave me an especially creepy feeling. Listen with me to the narrator introducing the show.

You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future; not a future that will be, but one that might be.

This is not a new world: It is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advancements, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the super states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: Logic is an enemy, and truth is a menace.

(Camera switches to the convicted man) This is Mr. Romney Wordsworth, in his last forty-eight hours on Earth. He's a citizen of the State, but will soon have to be eliminated, because he's built out of flesh and because he has a mind. Mr. Romney Wordsworth, who will draw his last breaths in the Twilight Zone. 

Mr. Wordsworth, a librarian, is tried and convicted by the "state" of being obsolete. He is obsolete because the society no longer has books. The state official conducting the trial explains that librarians are obsolete, just as ministers of the church are obsolete because God does not exist.  The librarian resolutely insists that God does exist and that thinking is important. He is sentenced to die within 48 hours, but is given the choice of where, how, and when he would like to die.

Mr. Wordsworth chooses to die in his own room by a bomb blast at midnight. He asks for the state official to visit him in his room and for the execution to be broadcast. His requests are granted. The scene shifts to the librarian's room just before midnight. The room is cluttered with books. He has arranged for the door to lock trapping the state official in the doomed room with him.

As the librarian calmly prepares for death by reading a cherished Bible he has kept secret for many years, the state official grows increasingly agitated and fearful. Psalm 23 is read - the official sweats. The proverb "A fool says in his heart there is no God" is read - the official, wrings his hands. Finally, the official screams, "in the name of God let me out!" The librarian calmly says "In the name of God, I will let you out." The official runs out, the bomb explodes, and the point is made.

I watched with the uncomfortable feeling that now, about 50 years after the story first aired, we live in Rod Serling's future. I am afraid that we are increasingly becoming a society eerily similar to the "state". I pray that we will be able to maintain our minds and a grip on truth.