When you work at a prison, one of the most important people to know and meet is the warden. Since this is the city jail, what he says goes, and if he doesn’t want a group of missionaries in his jail, then they won’t be allowed. For the first few weeks, we’ve flown under the radar and tried to stay unnoticed by the guards and officers because the last thing we wanted was to be kicked out for teaching the Bible to men and women that are hungry for it. However, there comes a time to take a risk sometimes.
We’ve been wanting to expand the ministry in the prison, and one of those ways is by having daily classes with the minors and actually taking them out of their cell. We may not even have a shot of doing this with the men and women, but the young ones are a good place to start. So we approached Officer Reyes, the prison warden, to build a friendship and hopefully make a very powerful connection.
In one conversation, we found out that Officer Reyes’ biggest dream is to have all the prisoners come to know the Lord because that will be the greatest transforming act in their walk into freedom. He longs for all the inmates to hear the Bible taught regularly by men and women of faith that know what the Bible says. Many of these men are “longshots” or huge outcasts in this society, but Officer Reyes, along with us, believe these men can be transformed.
I had such a wonderful conversation with Officer Reyes and a few of the prison guards and it was such a blessing to see how the man longs for these men to be transformed. I asked him if it would be ok if we came on a more regular basis and even brought gifts from time to time for the men. He told me that nearly 80 percent of these men and women will never have a visitor their entire time inside and that the more time we wanted to spend with them the better. He also told us, “You become who you hang around, so you’ve got many years to make up for in the lives of these. Come as often as you want.”
Today, we will start a program with the minors where we will teach English, play games, and just love on these boys. We have been blessed to have a fellow World Racer, Jodi Greenlee, join for the next two weeks to help get this program off the ground. Meanwhile, I’ll spend as much time as I can with the men I’ve grown to love and cannot wait to see truly transformed.
Officer Reyes has helped open some doors for us that I didn’t expect to walk through. It’s exciting to think about what is to come and the ministry that can may launch out of this prison. As weird as it may sound, even the prison is transforming and looking more and more like a church…
