One of the chaplains at Parchman once shared a story with me that I have not been able to forget. He had been asked by a man on death row to spend the final moments with him before his execution. When the appointed time came, the chaplain sat with him, talked with him, and simply remained present. Eventually, a correctional officer entered the room and quietly told them it was time. Their conversation had to end. The chaplain told the man he wanted to pray for him before

Yesterday, one of the men on Mississippi's death row handed me the beginning of a reflection I had asked them to write. The question was simple: If you were only known by your sentence, what would be missing? He was excited for me to read what he had written so far. It was only a page and a half, but one sentence immediately stopped me. "To know me, you have to get past the fear." I haven't read the rest yet. He's still writing. But I have thought a great deal about that one

November and December are coming. For most of us, those months mean family. Thanksgiving tables. Christmas mornings. Children and grandchildren coming home. Familiar voices in familiar rooms. Traditions repeated so many times that we hardly think about them until someone who does not have them reminds us what they mean. For Marvin, November and December mean something different. They are reminders of what he does not have. Marvin is the man I have written about before as the

Most mornings begin the same way. A cup of coffee on the back porch as the sun begins to rise. There was a time, though, when Saturday mornings looked a little different. When my daughter and two sons were little, we'd often begin the day by heading to Shipley's Donuts. Everyone had their favorite, packed in their own little bag, along with a carton of chocolate milk. Before the day became busy, we'd gather around the table, laugh, talk, and simply enjoy being together. Those

For a long time, I thought ministry meant improvement. Not in a crude way. I didn’t walk into rooms thinking I was better than anyone else. But I did carry a quiet assumption: if I showed up, something should get better. Pain should lessen. Understanding should increase. Change should follow. I didn’t call it fixing. I called it helping. That instinct followed me everywhere—into churches, into prison units, across borders on the World Race. Different contexts, same reflex. Li

Most of us don’t realize how much of our faith is built around improvement. We trust God, but we expect movement. We pray, but we assume direction. Even when we talk about endurance or suffering, there’s usually an unspoken horizon—eventually this will change. Eventually doors will open. Eventually relief will come. Hope, as we tend to practice it, almost always includes an exit. I didn’t recognize how deeply that assumption shaped me until I started spending time with people

There is a kind of invisibility that doesn’t come from being ignored. It comes from being seen only as a category. In prison, men are counted constantly. Their movements are tracked. Their names are written down, called out, logged. And yet many of them live with a deep sense of not being known at all. They are visible, but not recognized. I didn’t understand that distinction until I started noticing how much weight even small moments of attention seemed to carry. A name reme

For a long time, I thought ministry meant improvement. Not in a crude way. I didn’t walk into rooms thinking I was better than anyone else. But I did carry a quiet assumption: if I showed up, something should get better. Pain should lessen. Understanding should increase. Change should follow. I didn’t call it fixing. I called it helping. That instinct followed me everywhere—into churches, into prison units, across borders on the World Race. Different contexts, same reflex. Li

It’s harder to keep people at a distance once you know their names. That may sound obvious, but it took me longer than I’d like to admit to learn it. For a long time, I was comfortable holding people at arm’s length—not in cruelty, but in abstraction. Distance makes things simpler. It keeps the possibility of getting hurt at a minimum. It allows for categories. It lets us decide who belongs where without having to listen too closely. Before I spent time inside prison, the me

The first thing that unsettled me about prison wasn’t the bars or the gates. It was the kindness. I wasn’t prepared for it. I had walked in carrying all the images I’d absorbed from movies and television—gray walls, hard men, constant threat. What I found instead were handshakes, polite conversation, men asking how my family was doing, and genuine concern for one another. That moment stayed with me, because it didn’t fit the story I thought I already knew. For most of my life