This is one of my favorite Bible passages, and I have personally experienced it many times. I saw it at work this last Kairos weekend in the Hughes maximum security prison. At our request the men this weekend were from the ‘closed custody’ section of the prison. These men do eight hours of hard labor building rock walls, like you see in England, then tearing them down and moving them to a new location. They are allowed two hours a day on a concrete "recreation yard" and spend all the rest of their time in two man cells. They are closed mouthed men and their leaders are not easy to spot. Yet as the weekend progressed it was clear that we did indeed have many of the leaders of those hard men. At the closing man after man came forward to tell how his life had been changed by the weekend and man after man said some variation of "I didn’t want to come, I didn’t hold with church and I didn’t want to be taking advantage of nice folks when I had no intention of changing. But this guy kept coming by my cell or talking to me on the rec yard saying I was exactly what Kairos wanted so I came!"

It is the story of that one man that caught my attention. He was a candidate on Hughes #1, and had become very active in Kairos. He had attained the highest status in the prison system, "commercial traveler" which meant he was allowed to don civilian clothes, leave the prison for days at a time to hang curtains manufactured by the prison in schools and other government building. He had a food allowance and could eat at nice restaurants. He spent the night in county jails where he had access to a telephone and many other ‘perks.’ This man had it all, but he had one problem, he still smoked. He was caught smuggling three cigarettes back into the unit and he would not admit that the officer assigned to the detail ‘looked the other way’ while the men on the detail bought the cigarettes. He lost his job, a year was effectively added to his sentence, he was sent to solitary confinement for thirty days and moved to hard and dangerous ‘closed custody’ section. There he went to the leaders and urged them to attend a Kairos.

I have no doubt that God didn’t want this man to break the rules, I am sure he felt sorrow as I did at the terrible punishment that he received, but God used this man to help others in a way that would have been impossible otherwise. We all make mistakes, and sometimes we face the consequences of those mistakes, but I do pray that when we do, we will be willing to allow God to work for the good in that situation like this man did.