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 […]
A friend of Tyler’s died of an overdose of heroin two days ago. As Tyler told me, he had lost all hope that he could ever get his life back again. When I speak to inmates in jails throughout Minnesota, as I did yesterday at the Sherburne County Jail, and I mention that I have […]
Tyler has his eyes set on bringing salvation to his old school chum Eric, who has been in and out of jail for the past year and is best friends with John Barleycorn (look that up on Google). One night, in a drunken stupor, Eric jumped out of a moving car, hit his head on […]
“Yawn! The start of another day in jail. Day after day after day in jail, one week after another in jail.” That’s the interior dialogue of sleepy Christians in the Wright County Jail, or any other jail or prison for that matter. Below will be my opening statement when I give two talks at the […]
My wife and I dashed off to the Great Southwest for the past two weeks, a welcome relief from a steady procession of bleak and wintry days in Minnesota. We stayed with my sister and her husband in Palm Desert, CA, for a week. Every day was in the 80s. Then off to Phoenix for […]
Check out the article I wrote for Best For Christ magazine entitled Battling Depression. You may also be interested in other articles in this online magazine. Here’s some information the publisher sent to me upon my request. BestForChrist’s goal is to help our readers to live and grow as Jesus’ disciples not only during sacred […]