No one ever imagines themselves being sent to jail. It’s a motif of movies, regulated to plot lines and twists. Or if it does happen in real life, it’s reserved for the scum-of-the-earth type, riffraff and hooligans. On March 13th, 1999, I become all of those adjectives and amazingly found myself in handcuffs in the backseat of a black and white Sacramento Sherriff squad car. The store I was working at the time had caught me red handed giving free stuff away whenever my friends happened to come around. A CD player here and a pair of designer jeans there, it did not matter. “It’s a perk of the job.” I thought. “They treat me unfairly, so I deserve to pilfer from their rich cooperate pockets.” I rationalized my theft, proudly violating God’s very 8th commandment that “Thou shall not steal.” I did not care.

Many things cross your mind when you’re sitting in jail. You wonder how you ever got there, even though deep down inside you know what you did was wrong. Yet somehow your pride easily makes you blame everything and everyone else but you. That night was different; I was brutally honest with myself for the first time. Maybe it was the Holy Spirit pricking my conscience? Or maybe it was the bad jail food that they served us for dinner on a thick, cream-colored plastic tray? Whatever it was, I asked myself the big existential questions of life that hardships tend to bring to the surface: What is the true meaning of my life? Where is my life going? But the one question that finally broke through my deafness was when I seriously asked myself: “If everything that I have worked so hard to achieve up to this point could be taken away in a single day, what is real?” Once I asked myself that question, it was as if someone had just kicked open the dark shades of a window and let in the summer light. I saw how superficial and shallow my life had become. All that I held in such high regard was as concrete as the ocean mist, gone with a mere puff of air.

What is real? That question reverberated in my bones. I would have screamed it from the top of my lungs in that jail cell but I was afraid the night guards would burst through my door and taze me. As what I can only ascribe to the Holy Spirit, a fresh thought suddenly came exploding in--The one thing that can never be truly taken away from me is a relationship with God. I was stunned. God to me was a nuisance, an obstacle to my happiness. He was someone you tolerate at special occasions and family get-togethers, like a crazy aunt who wears too much perfume. From that moment on, I vowed to push earthly things aside and focus on what eternally endures. The sad thing was, however, I did not have a relationship with the almighty. That day, at age eighteen, sitting in a cramped cell in the downtown Sacramento County Jail, I made the decision to make God the most important relationship in my life. How true are St. Paul’s words in our Second Reading for this Sunday: “Seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.” (See Colossians 3:1-5)