Before Shirley left to drive by and take a look, she asked the woman what her name was. Then the miracle happened. The woman’s name was Annie, the very same Annie who had been praying for Shirley for the past two weeks at the bequest of Jessica. She offered to personally give Shirley a tour […]
Jasmine suggested Shirley get into a program for women at Adult and Teen Challenge in Minneapolis, but Shirley didn’t want to put her life on hold for three months or 13 months if she went with the long-term program. Jasmine kept suggesting; Shirley kept hesitating. One day she agreed to drive by the place in […]
As Shirley put it, she was hard-core bad and spent 13 years in prison in Texas. She kept cycling back through jail because of her addiction to drugs. She’s now a resident of Teen and Adult Challenge in Minneapolis. It’s there I heard her testimony on August 16 of last year when I gave the […]
You’ve all heard of Doubting Thomas in the Bible. Well, yesterday I met Believing Thomas at the Crow Wing County Jail in Brainerd, Minnesota. He’s an inmate there who attended one of my presentations on How To Stay Out of Jail. He sat with his arms crossed, expressionless, not saying a word for 50 minutes. […]
There was a time when I thought God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. I can no longer believe that. The world is a mess, pure and simple, and is careening toward chaos. Lying is fast becoming the norm of our society. Deceiving others has become a way of life […]
Mitch had to leave Colorado because a rival gang put a price on his head, a nice way of saying they intended to kill him. He and his girlfriend fled to Minnesota where he hooked up with a meth-selling gang and soon became a top seller in Central Minnesota. “I went from city to city,” […]
I could hardly wait to meet with Shawn the next Monday and give him the good news. The two of us sat in a small room in the program area that served as the library of the Wright County Jail, surrounded on four sides by a few hundred books. He sat on one side of […]
Six hours after I wrote last Friday’s blog about Shawn shooting Cheyenne in the back of the head, execution style, I sat down at a sturdy wooden table in a coffee shop in Buffalo, Minnesota, opposite Paul Miller of Timber Bay, a community and camping organization that works with troubled youth from middle school to […]
At 2 a.m. on June 1, 2016, Shawn Tyler Benson let a friend stick a hypodermic needle in his arm and shoot him up with methamphetamine. At 2:30 a.m. that same morning, he shot Cheyenne Clough in the back of the head, execution style, as she lay wounded on the ground in a county park […]
I’ve talked about Tyler any number of times in this blog. He’s the young man who changed his life around after he met the Real Jesus and decided to go His way instead of his own way. He’s a Christian success story. But all stories of the men I mentor are not so positive. Take […]