12/11/2025
Prairie Faith Devotion
By Pastor Gail Hagerty
Heart River Lutheran Church
Grace to you, and peace. Today’s devotion focuses on hope, the hope that surrounds us during Advent, the hope we find in unlikely places, the times when hope seems futile, and how you can share the gift of hope.
My call as a pastor is a second career calling for me. I served as a trial court judge for 33 years, and have continued as a surrogate judge since 2020. As a surrogate judge, I’m called on very occasionally, but I need to get my continuing judicial education hours.
At the end of November, I attended a judicial conference session that involved an exercise to simulate reentry to the community following incarceration. Each judge was assigned an identity — a criminal record and conditions of release. My character was a bank robber with additional drug convictions. There were four 15-minute intervals to represent four weeks after release. We were assigned to complete tasks necessary for life in the community during each interval.
I failed miserably - as did most of my colleagues. We were in a room and surrounded by tables with folks on hand to represent the services and resources, and the requirements we were assigned to complete. My character lacked identification documents, and I spent the first week trying to get a state identification card and birth certificate. The line was long - and you had to have a transportation card to get in line. I failed to get a drug test, attend treatment, report to probation, check in at the half-way house, and eat.
The next week I did a little better - Ministry on the Margins helped me get a part-time job, but by the time I figured out transportation, I was late. I was handed a wild card - I had a migraine and needed $125 to go to the medical center. I just ignored it, because I didn’t have money or transportation. I tried to get food at a food pantry, but was turned away because I still had the few dollars I needed for probation.
Some of my colleagues went to jail when they failed at requirements. Some went to jail when they were tired of playing the game.
Part of our ministry at Heart River is an outreach called Bridges of Hope. We try to anticipate the struggles youth leaving the Youth Correctional Center and women leaving the Heart River Correctional Center will face and we try to provide a hand up. It’s a huge mission, and it would be easy to conclude we can’t do enough to make a difference. But we do what we can, trusting that we can live as Christ taught us to live even in small moments and small gifts.
During this season of hope, we’re keeping on with what we can do - share God’s unconditional love and provide toiletries, hats and gloves, access to a phone. We are gifted with community built around worship - and a lefse-making marathon, book club gatherings, bingo games, and fresh start kits. We can’t provide the range of reentry services provided by Ministry on the Margins, but we can help those returning to community find their was to Ministry on the Margins! We are so grateful for quilts from congregations around the synod which wrap folks in the warmth of God’s love and the love of the community.
If you can share a gift of kindness, hope, warmth this year, you’ll share your Advent journey with someone who needs to know that hope continues. You’ll make a difference to someone playing the reentry game in the real world, where hope is a true gift.
Corinthians 13:4 - 7, 13: Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
13 And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.
