Woman working to connect prisoners with their children
BATAVIA, Ill. — As a lifelong volunteer, Jill Runke has donated her time to literacy centers, nursing homes and a domestic violence center.
For the last five years, Runke also has donated her time to helping incarcerated individuals maintain a connection to their family.
“To be truthful, I had never imagined myself volunteering in a jail,” Runke shared.
Volunteering for Aunt Mary’s Storybook Project, Runke records incarcerated individuals reading books or sections of books.
The books along with the recording are then mailed to the incarcerated individuals’ children.
Each time she volunteers, Runke said, it “not only helps someone else, but also, at the same time, helps me feel better about myself.”
A firm believer in restorative justice, she said, “I believe in a God of second chances, and many of the incarcerated need another chance.”
Giving them the opportunity to connect with their children while in prison by reading and recording a story to their children is really quite an amazing experience for both the prisoner and the volunteer, Runke added.
“Society focuses on the victim of the crime, but we too often forget that the children are also victims of the situation. The prisoners are sending their children several important messages: I love you and think about you even if I can’t be with you, and reading is important. This is often the only way they may have of staying connected with their children.”
Aunt Mary’s Storybook Project is the brainchild of Jana Minor, one of three founders of Companions Journeying Together, a nonprofit formed in 1986.
Minor, who previously had worked in a prison ministry, said the storybook reading program began in 1993 as part of a Christmas project for the children of women incarcerated in Cook County jail in Chicago.
The program was so successful, the group decided to expand to other jails and correctional facilities in Illinois under the name of Minor’s Aunt Mary. Aunt Mary was an elementary school teacher, Minor said.
“She spent her life teaching kids how to read,” she said.
The program has grown tremendously and now through Aunt Mary’s Storybook Project, volunteers visit 16 correction facilities — seven county jails and nine state prisons in Illinois — to record inmates reading books. Similar programs have been created in other parts of the country.
The word contemplative is not greatly used in our day.
It certainly means to study or contemplate something and if it is used in a religious context, it sounds like something done on a religious retreat or at a monastery.
In the noise and rush of daily life it is difficult to take the time your soul needs to commune with God.
In our age, we are met by electronic screens and unending bad news.
The internet calls and it is like we must answer.
I’ve always been astounded by anyone who leaves the radio or television on all day and all night.
It seems so insensitive to life’s depths, a muffling of the Holy, and the biblical verse, “Be still and know that I am God.”
A minister friend of mine, who studied my prayer books, told this story in Craddock Stories:
“I went to see a lady in our church who was facing surgery. I went to see her in the hospital. She had never been in the hospital before, and the surgery was major. I walked in there.
“She was a nervous wreck, and she started crying.
“She wanted me to pray with her, which I did.
“By her bed there was a stack of books and magazines: True Love, Mirror, Hollywood Today, stuff about Elizabeth Taylor and folk.
“She just had a stack of the them, and she was a wreck.
“It occurred to me, there’s not a calorie in that whole stack to help her through her experience.
“She had no place to dip down into a reservoir and come up with something — a word, a phrase, a thought, an idea, a memory, a person. “Just empty.” Rise above the mundane and transitory. Seek the voice of God above all else.
No contemplative ever found it easy.
It’s all in the listening, the quietude, the expectant, until you find the prayer you seek, seeks you.
As you find, you are found.
Some things come only by prayer.
Some battles must wrestle with temptation — to wander after the attractive but empty — that which promises what it cannot deliver for it is built on sin’s transitory quicksand. Obedience to God’s commands shapes the depths of Christian character found in no other way.
Trust God, love God, pause in expectant quietude before the God of our savior, Jesus Christ, then you will marshal the forces of Heaven to defeat the temptations of Earth.
Many a bended knee has found the power to overcome ... and so can you.