A Fight to the Life

A Mighty Fortress

At a high-security prison in Ionia, Dave got his first exposure to Operation Starting Line^TM, an evangelistic event led by Prison Fellowship. “These guys are coming here, bodybuilders and weightlifters,” another inmate told him.

“I thought that was pretty cool,” Dave explains, “because I was lifting weights in prison. So I went.” And while watching the feats of strength the guests performed, Dave also heard the Gospel message they shared. “God was planting seeds.”

Afterward he started attending chapel services; during the week he would catch himself singing songs about God he had learned on Sunday. “The words started coming alive a little more.”

But the prison—which has since closed—“was a horrible place, with stabbings and rapes and drugs,” Dave says. And though he was able to make a break from his drug use after six months, he couldn’t evade the violence. One night as Dave lay on his bunk, another inmate hammered his head with a metal lock attached to a belt. The doctor later told Dave that the pillow had saved his skull from being crushed. Even so, he suffered a broken jaw and needed 26 staples in his head and five stitches on his mouth.

His assailant got an extra 15 to 30 years tacked on to his prison sentence. After his release from the hospital, Dave was sent to the “hole”—solitary confinement—while prison officials investigated his role in the “altercation.” After verifying his innocence, officials transferred him to another prison—Deerfield Correctional Facility.

“And that’s when heaven’s gates opened up,” Dave says. “That was where my life really began to change.”

Operation Starting Line came to Deerfield, too—an all-day yard event that featured athletes as well as musicians and even a ventriloquist, Dave remembers excitedly. “It was incredible. Why were all these people coming here?”—not only the performers, but also a slew of church volunteers who mingled with, encouraged, and prayed with the inmates. “People had a smile for me.”

At the time Dave thought, Don’t they know who I am? I’m a drug addict, a robber. I’m this person who’s no longer allowed outside prison gates because I’m a menace to society. But it didn’t seem to matter to these volunteers who came to share the love of Christ. They didn’t worry about his past. “They wanted to help me for my future.”

After that Dave plunged into reading the Bible and attending “every Christian event there was,” including Prison Fellowship programs, Keryx prison ministry programs, Catholic services, Protestant services. Prison chaplain Daniel Thompson—Chaplain Dan—“pushed me to get involved in all kinds of things. He believed in me.”

“Dave came to prison a broken man, filled with shame over having thrown his life away to drugs,” says Chaplain Dan. “When I met him, he had hit bottom and started his way back up. I gave him every opportunity to do that.”

Detecting Dave’s leadership potential, Chaplain Dan invited him to be the representative for the Catholic faith group, a liaison between Catholic prisoners and the chaplain’s office. “He took the role seriously, and the guys respected him,” says Thompson. “He certainly made up his mind he would use his gifts and services for the Lord.”

The support of the chaplain, the love of Christian volunteers, and the revelation of God’s Word all drew Dave into a deepening and transforming relationship with Christ. And in the safety of these relationships, “for the first time I started talking about being molested as a child,” he says. As he brought his dark and painful secret into the light, “it started to lose its evil power over me.”

Dave also talked about it with the psychotherapist who led the year-long Assaultive Offenders Program, which also helped him loosen the stronghold of this enemy of his past.

And one day, during a Christian program’s focus on forgiveness, Dave was able to forgive his molester. He wrote the person’s name on a piece of paper, tossed it into a barrel full of such papers, and watched the leader set it ablaze. The ashes of Dave’s pain and anger rose to God like a burnt offering, leaving Dave with the lightness of freedom.