What an awesome time our volunteers had on Saturday, February 19th, at our Hughes 12 Building outreach! Thirty volunteers participated in this outreach, with the women preparing the sack lunches and the men handing them out and ministering cell to cell.
Accompanied by field ministers and the Chaplain, our men were able to go not only into 12 Building, but also into 8 Building to minister to the men there. The lunches, consisting of 2 hotdogs, 2 chips, and all the fixings, were well received and so appreciated by all the men and opened wide the door for our guys to be able to talk with them and share the love of God! The men of these buildings cannot participate in chapel services, so…
…having people from the outside come into where they are, to talk and pray with them, meant so much.
After four hours of ministering in both buildings, our volunteers gathered for lunch where they began to share their experiences from the day. So many were quite impacted by the things they had heard from the men they talked with, and some could hardly even speak as they tried to hold back their tears. One of the men shared that he came to truly understand the grace and freedom that God extends through the shed blood of Jesus Christ, and that he knew that some of his previous decisions could have possibly landed him right where these men were at, but for God’s mercy. Another volunteer shared that one of the men asked him why they were there. His response was, “Because we love you.” As tears streamed down this man’s face, he said that through all of the hard experiences he has been through…his sentencing and death of a family member
…he had never cried…until that day….when a volunteer sharing the love of Jesus handed him a sack of hotdogs.
It is not uncommon for these men to contemplate suicide, and we know that this simple act of walking in with food and God’s love prevented that from happening for some of these men. It is rare to go into prison and not feel that you gained so much more by being there than you even gave out, and it was very true of this outreach as well. Many seeds were sown and even one man gave his heart to Jesus! Jesus always goes after “the one” so even with all the wonderful things that happened, if it had all just been for that one man to come into the Kingdom, it was worth it.
