His mother died young and his father is a "functioning alcoholic", working during the day and drinking at night and all weekend.   Guy has three brothers and one sister and all five of them have been in prison.   Guy was thrown out of school permanently in the fifth grade for cutting the principal with a knife.  When Guy was 14, he robbed and killed a man. Guy was drunk.   He wanted more money for whiskey.   While in prison, Guy got in a fight with an inmate and killed him with his fists.  

 

Guy has been in prison 35 years and 6 months.   When I met him 10 years ago, his fellow prisoners called him "Stone Cold" because he was cold-hearted and mean and violent.   He told me, "It doesn't matter what I do; I have nothing to lose and nothing to gain."    He knew he was never going to get out of prison.

 

The Lord had to work a good while on Guy, but Guy finally gave in to God's love.   I had the rare privilege of baptizing Guy in prison.   Guy is the most tattooed man I know with tattoos on his cheeks and his ears and his arms and his chest and his legs.   He's got marijuana leaves, spiders, naked women, swords, demons, and other kinds of tattoos.    Before I baptized him he said nervously, "You're not going to hold me under the water too long are you?"    I said, "Guy, I'm going to hold you under till every one of those tattoos washes off."

 

 When I met Guy 10 years ago, there was never an inmate I've met with a harder hard or colder heart.   But then Jesus came into his heart and Guy became a different man.   For 10 years not a trouble-maker but a peacemaker, a true "ambassador for Christ."  In the last 10 years, Guy has grown and grown as a Christian.   He prays with inmates, preaches to and fusses at the young guys when they sneak in drugs, comforts those whose loved one dies, and is a Mentor and Helper in our Celebrate Recovery Ministry.   Unexpectedly and gloriously, the State of Alabama commuted his sentence last week and I picked him up and carried him to a halfway house in Birmingham. I can not describe to you the difference I see in Guy today from who he was 10 years ago.   Only Jesus can make that kind of change in a person!

 

It was such a privilege when the prison called and said Guy wanted me to be the one to "sign him out".  

 

When I asked Guy what he wanted to eat first, he replied, "Real eggs.  And orange juice."

 

As we drove to Birmingham, Guy got jittery.   He had never seen an interstate highway.   He has never driven a car.   He kept saying, "How am I going to get around.  What if I get lost?" We took him to Wal-Mart to buy necessities-- and he really was overwhelmed and bewildered at all the stuff he had never seen before. When we got to the halfway house and he got to pet a dog, and we bought him a cell phone to call if he had problems, and the people there took him he could ride the bus to work and back and they would help him, he started to feel much better.

 

This weekend, Father’s Day weekend, I’m taking Guy to see his father whom he has not seen in 35 ½ years.   Pray for this reunion to go well.   The next Sunday, June 22, Guy plans to come to church with me here at TCAT.