Early 1991 –
Christmas was over now, the new year was about to begin, and I was a year older. I was studying the words of Jesus and asking the Lord to answer many of the tough questions with which I had always grappled but had never taken the time to truly seek answers for. Now I had the time. Of course, one of the questions that still occupied my thoughts frequently was, “How long, oh Lord? How long will I have to stay in prison?”
With my appeal now in the hands of the judges, Tammy Faye was hoping and praying for a speedy release. I was not quite so optimistic. One of us was about to be proved right.
January 1991 was the beginning of one of my worst downhill slides into one of the worst periods of depression I had known since coming to prison. Although I had encouraged my family to stay away at Christmas, I missed them horribly. Despite being surrounded by hundreds of fellow prisoners, I felt alone and abandoned. It was not my family’s fault that I spent Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and my birthday alone. Yet it was the first Christmas of my life that I had not celebrated with my family. It was the first time I had not been with my family on my birthday. My emotions took a nosedive.
Adding to my depression was the news from Charleston, South Carolina, that I had lost another legal battle and I learned that I would not be receiving “good time” for the work I did in prison on a smoking cessation class. This was huge to me because “good time” could help you get out of prison sooner.
I did not want to do anything. I did not want to eat, drink, shave, or bathe. I began to allow myself to become more and more disheveled and unkempt, making little to no effort to clean up. I began to grow a beard, not because I thought it would enhance my appearance, but because I no longer cared about my appearance. Always known as a fastidious dresser – even in prison I wore sharply pressed clothes, with crisp creases in my shirts and pants – my clothes now went unpressed and often unwashed. With my hair uncombed, my body unwashed, and stubble covering my face, I looked like a homeless person. Friends and foes alike who were accustomed to seeing me on the set of PTL well dressed with every hair in place would have had difficulty recognizing me.
I was in the pits.
Surprisingly, at a time when I was at a low point in my prison experience, having lost all hope of ever getting out soon, I received one letter after another exhorting me to keep trusting God and to keep believing that He would bring me out of prison much earlier than I anticipated. As always, their words were a tremendous encouragement to me, and their rich spiritual insights were extremely helpful. Nevertheless, I could not overcome the desire to simply give up and die.
In a letter I received from Tammy Faye near the end of January, she included a list on which members of our congregation in Florida routinely wrote down their prayer requests, asking for the other members of the church to pray for them. On the last Sunday morning of January, there among all the other requests on the list, in his own handwriting, was the name “Jay Bakker.” Beside his name in the prayer request column, Jamie had printed only two words: My Dad.
When I saw the unadorned prayer request of my boy, I burst into tears.
Looking back, I can see where God always had something to keep me going when all hope was seemingly gone. This time was no different.
