CONNECTING THE DOTS

What a wonderful privilege to be able to witness God’s amazing work with addicts and inmates! If the story I’m about to tell you wasn’t a result of the involvement of God in time, you’d think it was straight out of the Twilight Zone.

I met Jenna last Friday afternoon in the Wright County Jail, though she was not on my radar for visits that day. The first person I met with was someone I’d been meeting with on a weekly basis for the past two months. He was stressed out and anxious about an upcoming hearing, so I spent more time with him than I normally would. That left me time to see one more person of two I had also been meeting with regularly. The first had been transferred back to the Sherburne County Jail from whence he came. The second had left just the day before for the Adult and Teen Challenge facility in Duluth.

I asked the program officer if there was anyone else on the chaplain’s list I might see. He glanced at a short list and said, “Maybe Jenna would be a good one.” So the first dot is that I was meeting with a woman that I would not have met with if either of the other two had been there. And I didn’t pick her off the list, the officer had, and she wasn’t even first on the list.

She had been arrested for drug possession in Anoka County, and here comes the second dot. Because of crowding in Anoka, they had transferred her to the Wright County Jail.

Jenna told me she had discovered a new faith in Anoka and had been going to every Bible study and church service available in our jail. She had been reading Scripture throughout each day and spending time in prayer. She was, in short, seeking God with all her heart. I asked if she were a born-again Christian and she gave me a blank look. I then asked where her sudden spiritual interest came from. She said from two female inmates in the jail in Anoka, which is the third dot.

I asked if she wanted to accept Jesus as her Savior and Lord, and she cried and said she sure did. I drew what I call my Salvation Diagram on the whiteboard in the room and went through the ABC’s of salvation with her. What surprised me is that everything I talked to her about seemed like something she already knew. It was as if someone had prepped her before we met.

Before she left, I told her I was going to get her a copy of my book called Stop Doing What You Don’t Want to Do because it covered what we’d just gone through. Amazingly enough, she said she already had a copy of it and then remembered that’s where she’d seen the diagram we’d just gone through and the ABC’s. I figured she’d gotten a copy from the library or some other inmate that had picked up an extra copy when I gave a talk in the Wright County Jail in January. She said no, so I asked how she got it.

Now comes the most incredible dot of all. I had given a talk at the Anoka County Jail on July 10th and handed out copies of my book at the end, offering additional copies for those who might want to give one to someone else. As it ends up, the two women from Anoka described in the fifth paragraph of this story had taken extra copies. Jenna was booked on July 12th. The two women were using my book as a study guide for the Bible study they were doing together. When Jenna asked what they were doing, they shared their faith with her and gave her a copy of my book. Jenna was saved last Friday by a God who intervenes in our lives more than we can imagine. Four dots connected, and I was blessed to see it. Isn’t God amazing?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 30th, 2019 at 6:48 pm and is filed under Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.