There is a man in the jail that I’ve known for many years from him coming in and out of jail multiple times, but with his current stay (he’s still in the jail now, and he’s been in for about a year), he’s mostly been in the suicide gown when I’ve seen him. When he first got in, for the first number of months, when I’d talk to him, he would say things that did not make sense, but every once-in-a-while he would ask me to read the Word of GOD to him:
“Read me the word, of GOD Chaplain,“ he would say to me in between random incoherent sentences.
So I read the Word! For months I’d go to his cell and read Scripture.
“Chaplain Jeff, read me your favorite verse,“ he said to me on multiple occasions. “Chaplain Jeff, who’s your favorite person in the Bible?“ He asked once.
“You mean besides Jesus?” I asked.
“Yah, that’s right,” he responded.
He said his favorite was Daniel. I told him mine had to be Elijah, the holy man of GOD.
Where this man has been much of his time in jail, in the suicide gown, he’s not allowed to have any possessions in his cell, for his own safety. And I learned through the months that that’s why he would want me to read the Word of God to him, because he wanted to hear the Bible again. So I kept talking to him and reading the Word to him through the months, and I would often try to get him to talk with me about the LORD.
I forgot how it came about, but one time, must’ve been last spring, maybe late spring, 8 to 10 months ago. Something that I was reading to him in the Scripture apparently triggered him to suddenly blurt out to me:
“Chaplain Jeff I have a child!“
I could tell he was fighting back tears. And I suspected this might’ve had something to do with him being in the suicide gown. That was one of the first coherent sentences that he said to me, other than when he was asking me to read the Word to him. From this point, conversation with him through the months progressively became more and more normal — and completely normal the past three months, since around Dec 1. I would say it was during that time he started talking completely normal that I noticed him becoming obsessed with Jesus. And he became really happy, with constant huge smiles, all the time, literally!
He and I talked a lot through the months, sometimes for 45 minutes at a time. We talked mostly about prayer, how to connect to GOD directly, how to feel His presence, how GOD forgives, on and on — all the basics, but really going in deep-deep-deep into the core topics. Sometimes things get so deep amidst jail ministry that I say to the inmates that it could be the case that in our discussions that we are bumping into uncharted territory, and bumping into discoveries that people haven’t talked about before, right on the jail floor. That may sound crazy, but a few breakthrough ideas that I’ve been blessed to publish in my writing career have were initially sparked in my mind from conversations on the jail floor with the inmates.
Back to this Inmate in the suicide gown… I later learned that this inmate has two very young children, and a wife. Through the months, back when I thought he just had the one child, I asked the inmate if he could talk to his children, and he said no, he could not. He acted like it was impossible, and he said that it would never happen. And I told him that it was not impossible, all we had to do is pray and have total faith (see Luke 8:50). I could tell at first he was a little skeptical, and he may have even thought this was a little weird–but when we did it, when we turned to Jesus in that absolute and total trust, I could tell that the inmate was excited about this type of radical prayer. And as we prayed, I could tell, even though my eyes were closed, that he had that huge smile while we were praying together two feet away from each other through the bars. He had big hope: the big Jesus hope!! And I believe he saw a couple inmates in the cell adjacent to his cell get their prayers answered, and in seeing that, he had the Fire in him!
He was hungry for a prayer to get answered for him, I later found out. For a number of weeks, he and I prayed that somehow there would be a miracle where he could talk to his child. Then about a month ago, this Inmate disclose to me that he had also Son, and this is when I learned he was married.
And now fast forward to late last week… I saw the inmate again, and he informed me that he had talked to his son! The second I walked up to the cell he told me, he yelled at me! He yelled at me like he was cheering in a touchdown celebration:
“Chaplain Jeff! Guess what! I talked to my son!”
“You gotta be kidding me bro!” I said back to him.
“Yah, it was awesome! But I don’t think my wife liked it.”
“No? Why?” I responded.
“I don’t know,” he said.
So we prayed for her. We prayed for her to have happiness, for her to have safety, and for her to be deeply indwelt by Jesus. We prayed for the same for the children. It was awesome! Again, all through this, I could sense the inmate smiling in joy as we prayed — I could not see him, as my eyes were closed, but I could tell he had that huge smile on his face the whole time. For an inmate like this to see an answered prayer at this level is precisely what he needed, and what he believed in.
After we celebrated the situation with his son for a bit, and now in his perfectly coherent and clear and confident voice, he said to me, out of the blue last week after all this happened:
“Chaplain Jeff will you read revelation 14?“
So I read the whole chapter to him slowly, and we discussed it as we went through it — it was some good’n deep end times theology! Then I read him all of Psalm 145 and 146. And on this day last week, there was another man in the cell with him, also in a suicide gown in this special cell for. So the scene was me reading Scripture to two men in suicide gowns in jail, where the other new fellow I could hear was praying part of the time while I was reading.
