This post is an addendum to the one above for those who have read the above post and wish to go a bit deeper.

Paul is in prison because of his allegiance to Christ whom he has experienced as risen and alive. Note that Paul is not passionate because he believes in a religious doctrine about Christ, he is passionate because he has experienced something that has changed his life. It is his allegiance that makes him different.  He is imprisoned not for violence, but for being perceived as a threat to society because he is different and passionately vocal about it.  This is unjust; at the same time, Paul notes that this confinement is being used by God in order that Paul’s life and work may have even greater effectiveness.

We live in a society where those who are different and are passionate about it are also oppressed and at times arrested.  This is at the root of recent events in Ferguson, Missouri and our national response to that.  Blackness is one kind of difference, so is sexual orientation and disability (or being differently abled).  Also, it is still true today that to say - out there in the world - that you are taking on some form of deprivation for Christ’s sake (standing up for justice, or giving up something significant for or through a church) is perceived by many as either weird, naïve, or rooted in some judgmental Christian fundamentalism.  Do this and it will limit in someway what is presented by our culture as ‘the good life.’

Yet God is a work, always within the limitations.  In the birth of Jesus, God chose to re-create the world through the limits of human flesh.  In the life of Paul, God uses the confinement of his imprisnment to further Christ’s missions which he describes as ushering in the Kingdom of God – a state of justice where all are connected, all are valued, and all have enough.  Part of the surprise of life is that we actually can be more effective with limits than with unbounded time and choices.   As Paul will say later, it is when I was most aware of my limits, my weakness, and my constraints that I most clearly perceived the power of God at work in and through me.  So we may thank God for the limits, and get to work as partners in Christ’s work of blessing this broken world where everyone is in some way constrained.