DOING TIME OR TIME DOING ME

By:  Maurice Cook

            For about sixteen years of my 40 years-to-life-sentence, I wasn’t “doing time,” instead, time was “doing me.”  Let me tell it, although I was living it up in the way that a prisoner was “supposed to,” I did everything I could think of to make money.  I sold drugs, made pruno and moonshine, sold smokes and even offered up my “violent services” for a fee.  Despite having God-given talents that did not involve criminal behavior, I chose to engage in the aforementioned methods of making money because they were more profitable and I got a lot of what I seemed to want; attention and respect from the drug, alcohol, and tobacco users whom I sold to.  Little did I know that it wasn’t respect. Instead, only butt-kissing due to me for having what people wanted and the attention I was receiving was truly a contributing factor to “time doing me.” You see, it inflated my ego, kept my mind on things which didn’t produce any growth, and put me at risk of serious consequences that I couldn’t foresee in the future.             For my first sixteen years, I couldn’t see a future because I allowed my sentence of 40 years-to-life to cause me to only see the here and now which in turn gave me tunnel-vision, and also contributed to “time doing me.” It took away any hope of being released from prison.  I had this false belief that the things in which I was engaging in made time easy because I was a “gansta,” and a man who was providing for himself and didn’t need anybody to take care of me.  However, what I came to realize later was that the poisons I was selling and the violent behavior that I was engaging in is what caused all my problems and contributed to destroying other people’s lives.  How?  Well, when I was engaged in criminal and negative behavior, I attracted different types of criminal and negative people who would lie and cheat just to get what I had for sale.  In response to their actions, I believed that I had to respond with violence or with diplomatic threats in order to get what I was owed.  Thus, these situations caused many headaches; i.e., stress, worry, frustration, anger, agitation, loss of property, and much more.  Either I could resort to violence and lose out on making more money by going to the SHU (lock-up) or I could let it go and be thought of as a weak person and open myself up for more problems.  Letting the situation go at that time wasn’t even an option in my mind because my ego and my “prison mentality” always wanted what belonged to me, no matter what lives I contributed to destroying to attain my prison wealth.  This type of negative thinking and criminal behavior is what “time doing me” means.  I made my life and thinking become what prison wanted it to become, thus the problems in prison caused by all the criminals became my problems as well.

            After the passage of about sixteen years, I was done with engaging in all the criminal behavior.  The peace I found makes me wish that I had made such decisions a lot sooner.  It feels so good not to have to worry about chasing people down for money or not to have to worry about the guards raiding my cell because someone who owed me could tell the guards about me selling illegal things or not to have to be involved in a gang riot when it kicks off on the yard. 

            My priorities changed, so now all I must worry about is me getting out of prison and doing whatever God tells me to do.  The company I keep is completely different now because we are all focused on the same things which stem from positive and Godly thinking resulting in living a stress-free life.  Other people’s actions no longer decide my fate; instead, I follow the directions that God has given me.  I’m finally “doing time” and free of the burdens caused by a no-hope prison mentality. 

            This hope was given to me by God after I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.  Hence, is why I love the scripture in the bible from Jeremiah 29:10-14, “Hope comes only from God because it is the only hope that you can rely on.”  No longer will I let time do me, instead I rather enjoy doing time in Christ Jesus.