Like Brittney Griner, a minister - my friend - was jailed in Russia

I can only imagine the helplessness, the fear family and friends of Brittney Griner are feeling after word spread the WNBA star has been transferred to a Russian penal colony. Her lawyers and representatives don’t know where she is. Not too many years ago, the Myrtle Beach and Conway area got a small taste of what Griner’s loved ones are experiencing now.

In 2008, Phillip Miles, then pastor of Christ Community Church, traveled to Russia on a humanitarian trip to help Christians there establish and maintain churches to further spread the word of God. Miles had visited the country several times over 12 years in conjunction with an outreach organization his father founded. On that fateful trip, against his wife’s wishes, he decided to take a $25 box of hunting rounds he bought from Walmart as a gift for a Russian preacher he’d be working with in Perm in the Ural Mountains region. He was arrested and charged with failing to declare the ammunition, which was required by law. He was sentenced to more than three years in a Russian prison.

“It’s a strange sentence for one box of hunting bullets,” Miles said at the time.

I was a member of his church, and a friend. The dread we felt after he was sentenced hovered like a dark cloud over everything we thought, every word we uttered. The prayer chains, the vigils, the letters to the editor, our offering assistance to his lawyers, including a fellow member of Christ Community Church and State Department officials, was nonstop even though many of us really didn’t believe there was anything we could do other than pray that our prayers didn’t fall on deaf ears. It felt that way every day until his sentence was surprisingly reduced and he was released after about five months.

I had been holding out hope that something similar would happen in Griner’s case. I hoped that after she was convicted, like Miles was convicted, she would be let go on appeal for an offense no worse than trying to take a $25 box of bullets to a friend. Griner was found guilty of trying to smuggle narcotics into Russia because she had two vape cartridges containing hashish oil, something her lawyers said her doctor recommended to treat pain from injuries playing professional basketball.

I sent up silent prayers for her like I had sent up silent prayers up for Miles some 14 years earlier. But I knew that Griner had been jailed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a war widely condemned around the world, and that Griner represented a public relations coup for Vladimir Putin. While Miles was important to us, his family and friends, and generated lots of headlines in our region, Griner is higher-profile, a better bargaining chip. She may be more valuable to Russia as a celebrity prisoner toiling away in a penal colony possibly in Siberia than the positive headlines Putin might receive by doing the right thing, which is to let her come home.

That’s why the odds seem long that this will turn out well. That’s why Griner’s fate seems bleak. But there was a time we felt the same about Miles, whom we thought would be away from us for more than three years after a Russian judge admonished him. That time passed.

Miles was a heterosexual white pastor of an evangelical church in the South married to a woman who loved him when he was imprisoned by Russia. Griner is a lesbian WNBA whose wife is concerned for her safety. Despite their differences, each of them is an American. Miles returned home. This country shouldn’t rest until Griner does, too.