If you’ll remember, Shawn Tyler Benson is the young man I’m mentoring who murdered a woman execution-style at 3 a.m. on June 1, 2016, in a park south of Buffalo, Minnesota. On October 11 of that same year, Shawn pulled a small Gideon New Testament off a book cart in the Wright County Jail and […]
Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth. A good sleep is grace and so are good […]
A couple of blogs ago, I told you about a man in his 40’s named Aaron, who is about as hopeless a case as I’ve dealt with. He reads the Bible and talks about God in his life, but at the front of the stage of life is always Aaron. And that Aaron is a […]
On August 2nd, I gave chapel at the Minneapolis Adult and Teen Challenge to some 300 men and women. I’ve always felt I don’t have as close a connection with drug addicts as I would have if I’d been an addict at one time myself. As I sat in a front chair listening to the […]
Do you remember my telling you about an inmate I mentored who came out of Stillwater Prison into a half-way house where he was under something called ISR (intensive supervised release). They monitored when he went out and where he went and when he came back. He told me, “I can’t handle this. I’d just […]
I thought I’d never know what happened to Mitch, one of the men I’m mentoring. He’s the gang member I’ve spoken of before who became saved in the Wright County Jail. He wanted desperately to get into treatment but couldn’t. You see, the crime he committed was being in possession of stolen property, not the […]
WE CAN’T SEE LIGHT ITSELF. We can see only what light lights up, like the little circle of night where the candle flickers—a sheen of mahogany, a wineglass, a face leaning toward us out of the shadows. When Jesus says that he is the Light of the World (John 8:12), maybe something like that is […]
THE KINGDOM OF GOD is not a place, of course, but a condition. Kingship might be a better word. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” Jesus prayed. The two are in apposition. Insofar as here and there, and now and then, God’s kingly will is being done in various odd ways among us even at this […]
I gave two talks on How to Stay Out of Jail yesterday at the Stearns County Jail in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and handed out 37 copies of my book by the same name. I’ve given 56 such talks in the past two years up to today. Most often, I give more than one talk per […]
I visited a new inmate yesterday. His name is Jeremy, and his story is all too familiar. “I started using drugs at the age of 14. I accepted Christ in 1997 in an Assemblies of God church and was clean of drugs at the age of 20, and that lasted for six years. Then the […]