Some phone calls end right on time.

This one did not.

After thirty minutes, I could tell we were not finished. A man we will call James had spent most of our conversation describing everything that seemed to be coming apart.

He is serving a life sentence. He is also serving time in a facility in which his son is also incarcerated at. Not only that, they are bunk mates.

James runs a program called, A Pathway to Peace, where a group of men join a few times weekly to practice forgiveness and seeing the world differently. His son recently joined the group.

Then a crisis came.

Something happened involving his son. Questions were asked. Accusations ensued. James’ son ended up in solitary confinement. James found himself caught in the pressure of it too, with staff looking closely at the situation and with his own mind moving quickly into defense.

By the time he called, it was not sadness I was hearing.

It was rage.

Not the kind of rage that wants to attack externally. The kind that comes from believing you can see exactly how things should have gone.

He kept returning to one conviction.

“I’ve already lived through all this. They should listen.”

Every time we circled back, the certainty remained.

“I know I’m right.”

“A hundred percent right.”

There was not much for me to do except stay with him and ask the questions that were given to me. Not to argue. Not to correct. Not to make the anger disappear. Just to let it have enough space that we could begin to see what it was he was protecting.

Eventually, something underneath it appeared.

He was not angry because he wanted to control people. He was angry because he loved them.

He had watched too many young men walk roads he knew too well. He knew what certain choices could lead to because he had lived through the consequences himself. He wanted to help. He wanted to spare them. He wanted his life to become useful in a way that might keep someone else from learning everything the hard way.

That love was genuine.

But somewhere along the way, love had become attached to an expectation.

They should listen.
They should choose differently.
They should learn from me.

And when those expectations were not met, love became frustration, and frustration became rage.

We stayed there together.

Other fears surfaced too. His health. The investigation. The feeling that ever since he had become serious about awakening, everything around him had started falling apart.

I have heard some version of that many times before.

Sometimes when we become serious about freedom, everything we built our identity upon begins asking for attention. Old fears get louder. Old defenses get stronger. The mind starts arguing for the life it has always known.

Not because something has gone wrong.

Perhaps because something is finally being questioned.

By the end of the first call, neither of us felt complete. So I asked him to call back.

During the second conversation, something softened.

There was no sudden breakthrough that solved every problem. Only a little more willingness.

At one point, he apologized for unloading everything he had been carrying.

I told him not to apologize.

“This is exactly what these conversations are for.”

We all need somewhere we can tell the truth before we know what the truth means.

By the time we hung up, the rage had not disappeared. But it no longer seemed to own the room.

A few hours later, a message arrived.

James wrote that the situation with his son had changed in a way he had not expected. Then he told me about a church service he attended that evening. The guest speaker had talked about identity, and one image stayed with him. Right after Jesus was baptized, the temptation came. Not before. After.

That spoke to something James had been wondering.

He had been asking whether he was going the wrong way. Whether getting closer to spiritual truth was somehow causing everything to unravel. But now he saw another possibility. Maybe the resistance was not proof that he was moving away from truth. Maybe it was appearing because something in him was moving toward it.

He had been certain his world was collapsing. Now he was asking a different question altogether.

That is often how peace enters.

Not when the circumstances suddenly make sense or when life seems to finally cooperate. But when our certainty loosens just enough for another possibility to enter.

Perhaps that is what relationship is for.

Not to convince one another.

Not to rush someone from what they feel.

Simply to remain present long enough that fear is no longer the commanding voice in the room.

A letter came from a man we will call Edward.

He had been thinking about perception.

Not as an idea, but as something that was happening to him, in his own conversation, inside the place where he lives.

He wrote about watching a teaching called The Answer to Every Problem, and one sentence had stayed with him.

“I have a perceptual problem.”

We all must come to this eventually.

It is much easier to say the problem is the other person. The problem is what they said. The problem is the pressure we are under, the place we are in, or the way someone keeps misunderstanding us.

But Edward was beginning somewhere else.

He was beginning with sight.

He told me about a conversation with someone he speaks with often. He felt safe with him, so he began to share some of what he had been learning. Before he could get to the main point, the man said something that affected him.

“You don’t have any roots, and your philosophy is always changing.”

Edward had heard something like this before.

He tried to explain that his roots were deep in Christ, and that would never change. He tried to explain that as a person goes deeper into something, their understanding changes too. But the more he explained, the more something in him tightened.

Then came the defense.

“You’re always trying to attack me,” he said. “I’m sharing with you, and instead of listening, you just take a shot at me.”

Later, when the conversation was over, Edward went back and looked.

That was the beautiful part.

He did not only replay the moment to prove himself right. He did not only collect evidence against the other man. He became willing to see his own part.

“I started to attack him by defending myself,” he wrote. “It’s like my defense was an attack.”

He had struck gold.

Most of us know what it feels like to defend ourselves. Sometimes we may need to speak clearly, set a boundary, or correct something that has been misunderstood. But there is another kind of defense that does not bring peace. It comes from fear. It comes from the belief that something true in us is being threatened.

Edward saw this.

He also saw that prison could not be used as an excuse.

“I never want to use my environment as an excuse to act out,” he wrote. “There is no difference in where I’m at now or where I’ll be in the future. I am still on Earth no matter what. The people in prison are no different than the people outside of here.”

That is the truth.

It does not deny the walls. It does not pretend the conditions are easy. But it refuses to make one place the reason love cannot be practiced there.

Then he asked the question that matters.

“How could I have perceived him differently?”

That is where something opens.

Not, “How do I get him to understand me?”

But, “How could I have perceived him differently?”

I wrote back to him about the tools that have helped me most. For me, it has often begun with a pen and a piece of paper.

There is something about writing that slows the mind down. The mind can move very fast when it is defending itself. It can build a whole courtroom in seconds. It calls witnesses. It gathers proof. It prepares its closing argument before love has even had a chance to take the stand.

But when I put pen to paper, something changes.

I have to stop.

I have to listen.

I have to let the thought become visible.

Sometimes I begin with the simplest sentence: “I am upset because…”

Then I let the private story come forward. The one I may not want to admit. The one that says, “He should listen to me.” “He should respect me.” “He should not question my path.” “He should see my sincerity.” “He should know I am doing my best.”

Once the thoughts are on paper, they are no longer hiding inside me pretending to be truth.

They can be questioned.

Is it true?

How can I know for sure?

Do I like the way I feel right now?

These questions are a way of returning to the place where another choice can be made.

Because the turning is not usually dramatic.

It may begin as a small willingness.

Maybe he was not attacking me.

Maybe I did not understand him either.

Maybe the pain I felt was touching an old belief in me.

Maybe what I defended was not the truth, but an identity I was afraid to lose.

This is where the work becomes honest.

The other person’s words may still have been clumsy. They may still have hurt. They may even still warrant a response. But now the response can come from a different place.

Not from the need to prove.

Not from the fear of being misunderstood.

Not from the old belief that I am unsafe unless everyone sees me correctly.

Something softer becomes possible.

Edward said he wanted Christ Vision. I hear that as the willingness to see beyond the first interpretation.

That kind of sight does not always come immediately.

Sometimes we miss it in the moment and find it later with a pen in our hand.

Sometimes peace begins after the conversation, when we sit alone and tell the truth.

Sometimes the gift is simply that we become willing to look.

I told Edward that I have had moments where the shift began before I even wrote a word. Just the willingness to reach for the paper the shift occurs. Just the willingness to call a brother, to ask for help, to stop building the case, was already the mind moving toward peace.

He was not asking how to appear spiritual. He was asking how to see.

He was not using prison as an excuse. He was letting the very place he lives become part of the practice.

He was not pretending the ego had not taken over. He named it plainly. And because he named it, it was no longer hidden.

The walls may still be there. The relationship may still need care. The next conversation may still be imperfect.

But something had already changed.

A man looked at his own mind and did not turn away.

And in that willingness, peace had a place to enter.

A man we will call David called me one evening after work.

He had showered and was sitting quietly, letting the day come down around him. Nothing unusual  had happened. Just a man at the end of a long day, telling the truth about what was still moving in him.

I asked what was on his mind.

He began talking about work.

There had been pressure from a supervisor. At first, he had been praised for doing good work. Then the attention shifted. A few things had been missed in the paperwork. Temperatures. Numbers. A cleaning log.

Small things, in one way.

But small things can grow quickly when they touch the place in us that wants to be seen.

He tried to explain. People had not shown up for their shifts. He had been carrying extra responsibility. He was doing the best he could with what he had.

The answer came back sharp.

No excuses.

Then came the sentence that landed deeper than the paperwork.

“You sound like a victim.”

That one stayed with him.

Most of us know something about that kind of moment. Someone says something about a task, a tone, a mistake, a deadline, and suddenly it is no longer only about what happened. It reaches somewhere old. It touches the part of us that wants someone to notice how hard we are trying, to appreciate what we are carrying, to hand us back the picture we have been holding of ourselves.

And when that place gets touched, the mind goes to work.

I am doing a good job.
They do not see what I am carrying.
This is not fair.
I am not what they are saying I am.

Maybe some of that sounds reasonable. Maybe all of it does. But I have found that proving the case rarely gives us the peace we are actually looking for.

David did not stay in the story of what had been done to him. He told the truth about how it felt. And then he told the deeper truth too.

Something in him indeed had gone straight into victimhood.

It became something he could finally see clearly.

He could see how large the situation had become in his mind. He could see how badly he wanted the world to confirm the identity he was trying to protect: responsible, hard-working, dependable, doing a good job.

This can become a familiar place.

I know what it feels like to want the outside world to testify on my behalf. To want another person to see me correctly before I can rest. To believe peace will come once someone finally understands.

But peace does not enter by being proven right.

It comes another way.

It comes when I become willing to see what I have been defending.

The next day, David told me he felt more at peace. Not because the supervisor changed or  because the work changed. The paperwork was still there. The pressure was still there. The same job was still waiting for him.

But he was not holding it the same way.

When his mind started moving back into judgment, he noticed it. When the old story tried to gather evidence, he paused. When he did not know what to do, he began asking a quieter question.

What is this moment for?

That is a simple question.

In the heat of things, the moment usually feels like it is about the other person. Their tone. Their unfairness. Their blindness. Their failure to see us clearly.

And something practical may still need to happen.. A mistake may need to be corrected. A conversation may need to be had. A boundary may need to be named.

But before any of that, there is another place to stand.

If the moment is only for defending myself, I will listen for the next thing to argue with. If it is for seeing more clearly, then something else becomes possible.

We talked about the possibility of being helpful to the very person who had gotten under his skin.

Not helpful in a false way or by pretending nothing happened.

Just willing to consider that the other person may be carrying something too.

We rarely know what someone walked in with. We do not know what happened before they opened their mouth. We do not know what fear, pressure, loneliness, or weariness may be speaking through the tone.

It can soften the hard edge of the way we see.

The facts may remain exactly as they are. And still, the person in front of us no longer has to be reduced to the part of them that bothered us.

Later in the call, David told me about another moment.

A different person was in front of him, and instead of trying to fix anything, something simple came to mind. A song from childhood. Plain, playful, almost silly.

He said it out loud.

And the other person lit up.

That was the whole thing.

Just a small point of connection, enough to let the room feel different.

Near the end of the call, we talked about a bigger decision he has been praying over.

There may be an opportunity to move into a program that could help prepare him for life beyond prison. It would mean leaving what is familiar. It might mean leaving a job he has cared about. It would be a real step into the unknown.

There was no immediate answer there. Only the same practice in another form: listening, watching what kept showing up, noticing what felt alive and what felt heavy, taking the next honest step without needing the whole map.

As we talked, I began to see how the day had been asking the same question in different ways.

A supervisor’s sharp word.

A childhood song.

A decision about the future.

Different moments, but one invitation: do not judge too quickly. Do not let fear speak for the whole thing. Pause long enough to ask what this is really for.

That is not only prison work.

That is being in the world.

We all have places where criticism reaches deeper than the words that were spoken. We all know what it feels like to be misunderstood. We all have moments when we want approval, certainty, or control, and instead we are given the chance to be honest.

Everything can  change when a person becomes willing to see one ordinary moment differently. 

The shift begins there.

With enough willingness to ask a quieter question:

What is this moment for?

And then listen.

A man we will call Daniel had just come from an encounter group inside the prison. During the group, another man had become emotional. He started crying. The room slowed down around him.

When it came time for Daniel to speak, he noticed something moving inside of himself.

“I wanted to fix him,” he told me.

Not out loud.

Inside.

He knew this man. They had built trust together. And as he listened, the answers started forming in his mind. He could hear the advice before he ever said it. He knew what the man should do. He had the solution ready.

Then something interrupted the pattern.

He remembered something we had talked about many times: listen without interrupting, without advising, without trying to fix.

So he stayed quiet.

Afterward, he told me the part that mattered most.

“I realized,” he said, “that even while I wasn’t speaking, I was still judging.”

I know that place all too well.

Someone begins telling me about a problem, and before they are finished, I am already preparing my answer. Sometimes I call it helping. Sometimes I call it experience. Sometimes I convince myself I am being useful.

But if I am preparing my response, I am not fully listening.

Some part of me has already left the room.

I may still be looking at the person. I may still be nodding. I may even be quiet. But inside, I have begun arranging them into a problem I can solve.

Daniel saw that in himself. And because he saw it, something softened.

There is a kind of silence that is not really silence at all. It is only speech waiting for its turn. It is the mind holding its advice just behind the smile.

But there is another kind of silence.

It listens.

It does not rush to decide what another person’s pain means. It does not make the other person smaller by turning them into a project. It does not confuse love with control.

Over the years, I have needed simpler and simpler reminders. Remember why I am here. Make room. Speak from my own experience. Let silence do what my advice cannot.

None of that is complicated.

Living it is another story.

Later in the same conversation, Daniel told me about another man he had been meeting with. They would sit together to connect, but again and again the conversation would drift back toward problem after problem.

What if they send me somewhere I cannot make it?

What if I fail?

What if nothing changes?

Daniel wondered if it was unkind to cut him off, or try and redirect him.

I understood his question.

Presence does not mean passivity. Listening does not mean we never offer direction. Sometimes love does point. Sometimes it points firmly.

But it does not argue.

Then an image came to me.

Imagine someone standing beside the road, completely lost. You approach him with a map in your hands. Instead of looking at the map, he just looks away explaining how lost he is.

You do not have to shame him for being lost or join him in his panic.

You can simply keep pointing toward the map.

That is enough.

Sometimes love is not solving another person’s problem. Sometimes love is quietly remembering where the map is.

That can be harder than it sounds.

There is a way of listening that stays close without surrendering to fear. A way of being present that does not abandon the person and does not abandon the truth.

Daniel was learning that.

We all have to learn it.

As we talked, I felt again how little I know about another person’s path. I do not know who is ready. I do not know who will hear one sentence and carry it for years. I do not know who will walk away and return later. I do not know what willingness hidden under fear looks like.

That has humbled me more than once.

It has also changed the way I think about service.

I am not here to manufacture someone else’s awakening. I am not here to drag another person into the light I think they should see. I can tell the truth about what has helped me. I can stay available. I can listen carefully enough that a person feels heard instead of managed.

And I can trust that something deeper than either of us is already at work.

I think about that far beyond prison conversations.

I think about it in every conversation where someone begins to share something real.

How quickly do we start fixing?

How quickly do we stop listening because we have already decided what the other person needs?

The deepest encounter does not happen when someone receives the perfect answer.

Maybe it happens when someone discovers they no longer have to defend themselves in order to be heard.

That kind of space changes things.

Something becomes possible there.

A man cries in a room.

Another man wants to fix him.

Then he notices the judgment inside his silence.

And for a moment, he chooses a different way.

He listens.

Maybe, more often than we think, that is where service begins.hink, that is where service begins.

A few days ago, I got on a call with a man we will call Michael.

Before we began, I set a quiet intention.

I wanted to remember the feeling from the first time we met.

I still think about that visit. Michael walked into the room, sat down, and within moments we were both laughing. We had not built a relationship yet. We had not exchanged stories. We had not earned familiarity.

It felt like two kids meeting in a sandbox.

There was joy there. A kind of recognition. Not the kind that comes from knowing the details of someone’s life, but the kind that seems to arrive before the details.

As the call began, I asked to return to that place.

And somehow, we did.

Michael had recently watched Vanilla Sky again, and this time the movie met him differently.

One line stayed with him.

“I am not a prisoner.”

For many people, that line might pass by quickly. For Michael, it could not. He is serving a life sentence and has spent years behind prison walls. So when he heard those words, they did not stay inside the movie. They came toward him.

What does it actually mean to be imprisoned?

Years ago, during one of our first conversations, I asked him a question that sounded almost impossible when it left my mouth.

“What if you didn’t commit murder?”

I was not removing responsibility. I was not pretending consequences did not seem to appear.

I was asking about identity.

What if the story we carry about who we are is not the same as the worst thing that seemed to happen?

What if something in us remains untouched, even when our lives appear to be shaped by harm, grief, and consequence?

Michael remembered that conversation while watching the movie. This time, instead of accepting the thought “I am a prisoner” as final, he began to look at it.

He wrote down what the belief meant to him. He looked at what it seemed to prove. He looked at the future it seemed to close off. He looked at where the fear in it was.

He was not trying to talk himself out of prison.

He was asking whether the prison he feared most was made only of concrete.

That kind of honesty is priceless.

During the same call, I told him about another conversation I had earlier that day. Someone I care about had received painful news about a loved one’s health. The fear was immediate and understandable. The mind did what the mind often does. It rushed ahead and tried to write the ending before love had finished speaking.

At a recovery meeting, someone had said to him, “A diagnosis is not a death sentence.”

Those words stayed with him.

They resonated with me too.

Not because bodies do not seem to suffer. Not because grief should be explained away. They resonated with me because they pointed to the same place Michael was looking.

There is what appears to happen, and then there is the meaning the mind gives it.

Those two are not always the same.

A court can determine years. A doctor can give a diagnosis. A circumstance can arrive with force. None of that has to be minimized for a new sight to enter. There is still a quieter place where meaning is either accepted without question or brought gently into the light.

That was the place Michael was entering.

The conversation eventually moved toward something much smaller.

Recently, I had an outdoor countertop installed in my backyard. When we chose it, I was convinced it would be gray. The sample looked gray. The contractor thought it would be gray. Everything in my mind had prepared for gray.

When the installation was finished, it was bright white.

I did not have a dramatic reaction, but I noticed a disturbance. The next morning, I caught myself walking outside with a hidden agenda.

I wanted to see how the countertop made me feel.

I wanted the countertop to tell me whether I was happy.

Once I saw that, I had to laugh.

Here I was, giving my peace to a piece of stone.

So I sat down and started writing. Underneath the disappointment were familiar thoughts. I could have chosen differently. I should have checked again. I got it wrong.

Then another thought came quietly.

What if it was always going to be white?

The moment that thought entered, something released immediately.

The countertop had not changed. But I had stopped fighting with it. I had stopped insisting that peace depended on the past being rewritten. When the argument ended, I could finally see what was actually there.

It was beautiful.

Michael understood immediately.

He told me about a season when his boss seemed increasingly critical and difficult. The pressure kept building until one day he saw that the deepest pain was not coming from his boss at all. It was coming from an old belief in him that said he did not deserve to be there.

Once that belief became visible, the whole experience changed. His boss may have looked the same. The workplace may have looked the same. But Michael was no longer meeting it from the same place.

These purposeful calls are memorable.

We had spoken about a movie, a prison sentence, frightening news, a difficult boss, and a white countertop. On the surface, they had almost nothing in common. Yet each one invited the same quiet question.

What if this does not mean what I think it means?

That question simply opens a little space between what appears to happen and the conclusion we have built around it.

That space is where grace begins.

Michael was still on the same phone. The same walls were still around him. The same questions about the future remained.

But something in him was looking again.

He had taken a thought most of us would treat as final and placed it where love could reinterpret it.

I am a prisoner.

What happens when even that is not protected from the light?

When the call ended, I realized the intention I had set at the beginning had quietly been answered.

For a little while, it really did feel like two kids sitting in a sandbox talking about a movie.

Only the movie had opened into life.

And life had opened into a question.

Maybe freedom begins there.

Most prison visits begin the same way. I go through security. I empty my pockets. I wait for doors to open and close. Someone checks my name and points me toward the visiting room.

Then I am given a seat.

Usually, I have fifteen or twenty minutes before the man I have come to see walks in. I have come to love that waiting.

At first, it just felt like part of the process, another delay between me and the visit. But over time, those minutes have become some of the most important of the day.

I sit down and let my breath settle. There are families waiting, children moving around, officers watching the room, vending machines, plastic chairs, and the strange mix that lives in every visiting room.

On this last trip through Texas, Ohio, and Indiana, I used those minutes to remember a line I have carried for years: whenever you meet anyone, it is a kind of holy encounter.

One thing about that line is that I know how it feels when I remember it.

It means the man walking toward me is not only his past, his sentence, his tattoos, his file, or the story people tell about him. He is someone I am being given another chance to see.

And somehow, in seeing him differently, I am given another chance to see myself differently too.

So that is what I kept asking for before each visit.

Let me see who is really here.

Because if I only look through my own fear, assumptions, and habits, I will miss people. And I do not want to miss them.

The trip started in Texas, with a man I have known for some time. When I arrived, the chaplain met me at the gate along with a few men from one of the groups inside. They already knew who I was and started telling me how well he had been doing.

By the time he and I sat down, we had a large visiting area almost to ourselves. We talked for three hours about purpose, forgiveness, responsibility, freedom, and the strange fact that a person can be inside prison and still discover something spacious within himself.

It was one of those conversations that feels like it had been waiting for you. One thing opened into the next until the time was gone.

From there I went to London, Ohio, to see a man who calls our in-person visits “Jedi Summits.” We laugh about it, but there is something sincere underneath the joke.

He is serving a very long sentence for a nonviolent crime. A thought I must hold lightly. There is a temptation to see unfairness in his story.

What has moved me this past year is his willingness to question his situation. Not to deny what happened, and not to pretend the sentence is small, but to ask what happens inside a person when I was treated unfairly becomes the place he lives from every day.

He wants freedom in his own mind. He wants to use his time, not just survive it. And now he has started sharing what he is learning with other men.

That is how change often moves. One person looks honestly at his own life, and someone nearby feels permission to look too.

In Chillicothe, I sat with a man I talk to so often that visiting almost feels like picking up a conversation already in progress. He is up for a review soon, and there is hope around that. But what stays with me is how he is living right now. He has been trusted with responsibility inside and helps lead classes each week. He is not waiting for the future to start being useful. He is doing what is in front of him.

I also sat with a man whose strength is obvious the second he walks in. He runs miles every morning and does hundreds of pushups and pullups. His body tells one story before he says a word.

But during our visit, another story came forward.

He started talking about his daughter. About betrayal. About the places in him that are still tender. There is something powerful about watching a man who looks that strong let himself be honest about hurt.

Not dramatic. Just real.

It reminded me how often we misread people from the outside. A body can look guarded while the heart is quietly asking to be heard.

Another visit felt like no time had passed. For months our letters had ended the same way:

God is.

He told me he walks through the facility saying it to other men.

God is.

And they answer back:

Period.

I smiled when he told me. There was joy in it, a shared language alive inside the walls.

Then he opened up about a victim panel he had been part of, with his daughter there. I mostly listened. Sometimes that is the only gift I know how to give. Not advice. Not interpretation. Just the willingness to stay present without judgment while someone tells the truth.

Later that same day, I met briefly with a man who had just been denied parole. I expected disappointment, and I am sure it was there. But what met me was humility, willingness, and a kind of openness I had not expected. Since then, he has been calling more, stepping out of his comfort zone, speaking in some of the programs, and taking a more honest look at himself.

I keep seeing this. A disappointment on the outside can become another place to practice honesty inside. Not always, and not automatically. But sometimes, when a person is willing, something begins to move.

Then there was a first visit with a man who walked in at about six-foot-five, over three hundred pounds, with a huge smile, and wrapped me in a bear hug.

Within minutes, tears were coming.

Soon he was telling me about crocheting.

It may have been the most beautiful surprise of the trip. Here was this enormous man, serving decades, talking about the peace and patience he has found with a hook and a length of yarn. The attention of it. The quiet of it. The way his hands have taught him something about life.

We sat outside for part of the visit, and a guard nearby noticed how deep the conversation had become. She asked if we wanted her to move.

We looked at each other and almost said it together:

“We have no secrets.”

That still makes me smile.

One more first visit opened slowly. Then music came into the conversation, and everything shifted. We talked about songs and bands, not just what he liked, but what the music made him feel.

As he shared the small moments of connection he had been noticing, his face changed. He became almost childlike in front of me.

Open. Amazed.

I love when that happens. When someone who has had to become hard, for seemingly justified reasons, suddenly remembers wonder.

By the end of the trip, I felt full in a way I still cannot quite describe. Not because the stories were easy. None of them are.

The walls are still there. The sentences are still there. The families seem to still be affected. The harm that brought these men to prison still seems to be felt. The grief and the consequences appear real.

But something is more real than all of that.

A man telling the truth about his daughter. A man saying God is down the hallway. A man finding peace in crocheting. A man lighting up over a song. A man walking into the room and giving me another chance to see.

Maybe that is what a holy encounter really is.

Not something separate from ordinary life. Not something announced. Just the moment we remember that the person in front of us is more than what we first assumed.

And maybe, if we stay open long enough, we find out that we are too.

“I could not have scripted it any better.”

That was the first thing he said when he called.

I could hear the joy in his voice before I understood the story. It was not loud or forced. It was the kind of joy that arrives first, before the words have caught up.

I have been connected with him for a little over two years. He is in Texas, and over that time I have watched him give himself to the practice of seeing differently. He has not kept it as an idea. He has carried it into his days, his conversations, the unit where he lives, and the lives of the men around him.

That humbles me.

It is one thing to talk about freedom when life feels open. It is another thing to find it in a place where almost everything is controlled.

He has been doing that. Not perfectly, and not as some untouchable example, but honestly, with the kind of willingness that shows up in ordinary moments.

About a month before that call, he had gone before the parole board.

By every visible measure, he had done what a person is asked to do. He had a strong record. He had spent years helping others. He had become someone men came to for support, prayer, and perspective. He had taken responsibility for his life in ways the people around him could see.

Still, the answer came back.

Two more years.

There are moments when words feel small. A person can do the work. A person can change. A person can live differently. And the outer door still does not open.

When he first wrote to me about the decision, he was honest. There was disappointment, confusion, and the old question of whether any of it mattered. How could he not feel that? Two more years was not a small thing to him.

A couple of days later, he called. And when I heard his voice, something had shifted. He was not speaking from defeat.

That morning, he had been sitting with a younger man who was carrying something heavy. He was trying to help him stay with it instead of running from it. At some point, the younger man broke down.

The tears came.

And then they came for both of them.

There are moments inside prison that are hard to explain from the outside. Not because they are complicated, but because they are so simple. Two men sitting together. One telling the truth. One staying present. A wall inside someone starting to come down.

When he told me about it, he said something I have not forgotten. He said that if this was why he had two more years, then that moment was worth it.

I sat with that. I still do.

It is not an easy thing to say. It does not erase the pain of the parole decision. It does not make prison easy. It does not pretend another two years is light.

He was not calling the delay good.

He was saying that love had found him inside it.

And that changed the way he was carrying it.

After that, our calls had a different feeling. Each week there was another story: another man who had come to him, another conversation, another moment where something opened. He was full of purpose, but not frantic. It was more like something in him had found a clear channel.

The only trouble was that more men wanted to talk than he had time to reach.

Where he lives, movement between units is limited. He could not just walk over to sit with the men asking for help. He had a small window each week, and that was it. He was willing, ready, and needed, but still held by the rules of the place.

Then something happened that none of us could have arranged.

A university connected with the prison decided to offer the men a class on thought, reality, and how we understand our lives.

When he told me, I smiled. He had already been quietly wishing he could teach that kind of class. Not for a title, and not to be important, but because these questions had become alive in him. He wanted to help other men look at their lives more honestly.

Because of the way he had been showing up, and the trust he had built inside, they chose him to teach it.

That alone would have been enough.

But there was more.

The facility gave him a new badge: Cognitive Life Skills Coach.

With that badge came permission to move into all the units whenever he needed to. The very thing that had seemed blocked became the thing that opened. The men he could not reach, he could now reach. The conversations that had been squeezed into one small window could now happen throughout the prison.

That is why he called and said he could not have scripted it any better.

And he was right.

It made me think about how quickly I decide what a delay means. A door closes, and I assume something has gone wrong. A plan changes, and I start trying to make sense of it before my heart has even caught its breath.

But sometimes life keeps moving in places we cannot see yet. Sometimes what looks like a denial becomes a doorway into something else. Sometimes freedom does not arrive first as release from a place, but as the discovery that love can move through you right where you are.

That is what I keep seeing in him.

He wanted the outer door to open. Of course he did. But when it did not, another way opened inside the walls. A younger man found him. A class appeared. A badge was given. A path opened from one unit to the next.

And all of it seemed to say: there is still work here. There is still love here. There is still something to give.

I do not want to make two more years in prison sound simple.

But I do want to focus on what happened.

A man got hard news. He told the truth about it. He stayed available. And because he stayed open, another man was reached. Then others could be.

Maybe that is what stays with me most.

He did not wait until he was free to be free.

He did not wait for the board to say yes before letting love move through him.

I could hear it in his voice. The joy of someone who did not get what he wanted, but was still given something real. The joy of someone discovering that nothing had been wasted.

I keep thinking about that. How often the story I would write is smaller than the one life is quietly unfolding. How often I am sure I know what should happen next. How often I forget to leave room for what’s next, that I cannot see.

Maybe it cannot be scripted by us. Maybe it can only be received.

And maybe, when it comes, all we can do is tell the truth, stay open, and listen.

There is an old image I have carried for years. It describes prisoners who have been bound in chains for a long time, and how they do not always leap up in joy the moment they are set free. It takes a while for them to understand what freedom is.

I have thought about that many times inside prison. Not only because of the obvious things: the doors, the count times, the uniforms, the waiting, the distance from family, and the years that pass in a place where so much is decided for you. But there is another kind of prison too.

A person can be physically confined and begin to discover freedom. And a person can be completely free on the outside and still live bound by fear, guilt, anger, shame, and the need to protect an image of himself.

That is part of what makes this work so humbling. Freedom is not always understood all at once. Sometimes it comes slowly, through one honest conversation, one shared moment, one willingness to look again.

The work in Ohio has kept deepening. The men there now meet weekly to study together, another time to question the stressful thoughts they are carrying, and twice a week to watch films and talk about them through forgiveness and seeing differently.

We have found a simple way to get the movies to them, so they can pause, reflect, and talk through what they are seeing. A film stops being just something to watch. It becomes a shared experience, a kind of mirror.

One of the men usually watches first with another brother inside, then brings it to the others. A few times a week, we talk through what came up and how it connects to their lives.

That is one of the beautiful things about sincere practice. It does not stay in a book. It starts showing up in how people speak, how they listen, how they question themselves, and how they see one another.

Recently, one of the men wrote me after they had watched several films together. He told me how engaged everyone had been. Then he described the way one character had shown up in another character’s life. And he said, in his own way, “That’s how you showed up in my life.”

That stopped me.

There are things a person says that you do not simply read. You feel them. Not because they place you above anyone, but because they reveal what connection can mean when someone feels truly met. Sometimes we do not know how much a relationship matters until another person puts words to it.

He went on to write about a film he had seen before but was seeing differently now. It was a layered story, and this time he began to recognize the characters not only as separate people, but as parts of one inner struggle: the fear, the pride, the need for control, the part of us that would rather keep suffering than release what it thinks it needs.

He watched the main character walk through his fear and let go of what had owned him. And in giving up what he thought protected him, he discovered something he had already had.

Then he wrote something that moved me. He said there are things I have told him that he only understands later. He remembered me once saying that by the time he went before the parole board, he would almost float out of there.

At the time, it may have sounded strange. But now he was beginning to understand. When a person starts to let go of the false self he has been defending, he begins to realize he already has something the world never gave him.

He begins to realize he is already free.

That is not a small thing to say from inside prison. And it can be misunderstood.

It does not mean prison is not prison. It does not mean consequences disappear. It does not mean pain, responsibility, loss, or circumstance can be bypassed.

But there is a kind of freedom that can begin before the outer conditions change. It begins when a person stops handing his whole identity to the worst thing he has done. When he can tell the truth without being destroyed by it. When he no longer needs to defend the old story. When guilt does not have to be his home.

This kind of freedom is quiet at first. It may not look like much from the outside. A man reads a lesson. A few men gather around a movie. Someone pauses the film and says, “Wait, that’s me.” Someone admits, “I saw this before, but I never saw it like this.”

These are not small things.

Inside a place where so much can feel fixed and settled, they remind me that the heart is not fixed. A life is not only what it has been. There is still movement. There is still another way to see.

What touched me most was not that he used perfect language. It was that he was applying what he saw. He was not only talking about freedom. He was starting to recognize where he had been bound.

That matters, because all of us get attached to things that keep us small. We may attach to being right, to guilt, to anger, to being misunderstood, or to a version of ourselves that no longer has to lead. We do not usually call it attachment. We call it protection. We call it identity. We call it survival.

Until something helps us see again.

It may be a conversation, a brother, a book, a film, or a sentence that finally lands. The form matters less than the opening it creates.

The men in Ohio are making a space where those moments can happen. They are not waiting for someone from the outside to carry all the light in. They are carrying it to one another. They are watching, reflecting, questioning, and practicing together.

That is what makes it beautiful.

Change is not only something delivered. It is something shared. One person sees something, and another recognizes it. One person tells the truth, and another feels safe enough to do the same. One person becomes willing, and the room changes.

Not long ago, this same man used the words “on top of the world.” That stayed with me too. A man living inside prison, speaking about freedom, seeing his life differently, feeling lifted from within.

That does not erase the difficulty of where he is. But it reveals something.

The outer door may still be locked.

The inner one may already be opening.

Maybe that is where freedom begins. Not when every condition changes. Not when the past is gone. Not when the world finally gives us permission to be new. But when we begin to recognize that what is most true in us was never fully taken.

It may have been forgotten or covered over by years of fear and guilt.

But not destroyed.

That is why the old image stays so tender to me. A person can be set free and still need time to understand freedom. The eyes have adjusted to the dark. The heart has learned to expect chains. The mind has rehearsed the same story for years.

So when the light comes, it can take a while.

We may not leap up at first. We may only blink and look around.

Could this be true?

Maybe that is enough for today. The first honest glimpse. The willingness to see again. The quiet recognition that even here, even now, something in us is already free.

Every Wednesday at three o’clock my time, my phone rings. Almost without fail. Usually within a minute or two of the time we set for our call.

There is something about that kind of faithfulness that reaches me. Nothing big. It is ordinary: a call at the same time each week, a voice on the other end, a conversation that begins again. But after enough weeks, ordinary things start to mean something in their own quiet way.

The man who calls has been inside since he was young. He is serving a very long sentence for a nonviolent crime. This is something he carries.

There are parts of his story that could easily seem to become the center of everything: the unfairness, the years, the distance from the life he might have lived, the feeling that something was taken and cannot be given back. From that perspective, it can seem difficult to look beyond them..

Some experiences can seem painful. And sometimes the impulse is to move too quickly to an interpretation instead of first acknowledging how things appear. 

But what amazes me about him is not that he ignores what seems to be unfairness. It is that he keeps questioning what the unfairness is doing inside him.

He has been watching the belief that he was treated unfairly. Not denying it. Not pretending the facts do not matter. Just noticing how that thought can quietly become a place to live. How it can shape a day, a conversation, and the way the future feels.

How it can become a kind of prison inside the prison.

That is not easy. It takes courage to look at your circumstances and say, this is hard. It may take even more to look inward and ask, what am I doing with the hardness?

That is what I see him practicing. He studies most days. He reads, reflects, and asks real questions. He even has a name for the inner voice he is learning to trust. He calls it “Soc,” after a character from a book we have been reading together—a wise old mentor who keeps nudging a younger man awake.

It is his way of talking about the steadier part of himself. The part that can pause before reacting. The part that can see through the old story without needing to be loud about it.

And when he writes about “Soc,” it does not sound like an idea he is trying to explain. It sounds like a relationship he is learning to listen to.

A while back, a letter came from him with an update. There was plenty of news in it, the kind that comes from life inside. But what stayed with me was how he ended it.

He wrote:

“I’m just happy. I’m able to soak up some of this positivity that’s floating around me lately. Or was it ALWAYS there, just waiting for me to open myself up and receive it?”

I read lines like that repeatedly.

I’m just happy.

There are sentences that sound simple until you remember where they are being spoken from. A man inside. A man with a long sentence. A man with every reason to build a life around grievance. A man who could be waiting for the outside to change before letting himself feel anything at all.

And there he was, writing those words not as denial or performance, but as a discovery.

Then came the question underneath it.

Was it always there?

Maybe happiness is not always something that arrives from far off. Maybe peace is not always something we build from scratch. Maybe some of the good is already near us, and we are not always open enough to take it in.

I know what it feels like to be closed. To be so fixed on what is missing that I cannot feel what is present. To be sure peace is waiting on a person, an apology, a decision, or some future moment when life finally feels settled.

And sometimes those things matter. Sometimes we really are waiting for something real. But I keep learning, often from men inside, that waiting does not have to mean withholding our whole life until it comes.

We can still receive, laugh and be surprised by joy.

That does not make the walls disappear. It does not shorten the sentence. It does not erase the injustice or quiet the longing for home.

But it does mean the heart is not completely owned by the circumstance.

I am headed back to Ohio to see him soon. It will be our second in-person visit, which we refer to as a, “Jedi Summit.”

That name warms my heart, and it also feels right.

There is something playful and serious about our connection at the same time. We talk about the mind, forgiveness, old beliefs, inner guidance, and the strange work of waking up to life as it is.

But we also laugh. A lot.

That matters to me. If the work gets too heavy, it turns into another burden. If it gets too solemn, we start performing our progress instead of living it.

Sometimes the most honest thing two people can do is laugh together while still telling the truth.

I am grateful for that with him: for the calls, the letters, the way he keeps showing up, and his willingness to look at a painful story without letting it be the only story.

And I am grateful for the sentence he handed me.

I’m just happy.

Maybe happiness does not come loudly. Maybe sometimes it comes quietly, after years of believing it could only come later.

Maybe it comes when we stop gripping the old story quite so hard and finally let ourselves receive what has been near us the whole time.

And for all that, I am just happy too.

I arrived east for a few weeks of prison visits, and the trip began with two encounters that stayed with me.

The first was with a man we will call Robert. He walked into the visiting room with a kind of brightness in him. That is the simplest way I know to say it. There was a lightness, a steadiness, something unforced in the way he carried himself.

I have known pieces of his story for a while. He went inside at nineteen, and now, in his thirties, he has lived a large part of his life behind walls. For some of that time, he was tied to one of the most well-known and violent prison gangs there is.

There are identities a person takes on inside that become more than names. They become protection, reputation, and a way to survive. After enough years, the role can start to feel like the self.

But something changed in him.

Not all at once, I am sure. Change rarely works that way. It comes through consequences, weariness, honest questions, and the quiet sense that there has to be another way to live.

Not long ago, the prison created an award just for him. They called it the Guiding Light award.

Robert had given a talk to the population and the administration about his life and the change that had taken place in him. Afterward, they gave him the award, recognizing the way he had become an example for others.

A man once known for violence, now recognized as a light. A man once feared, now trusted to help younger men.

It would be easy to make that sound dramatic. But sitting across from him, it did not feel dramatic. It felt lived. It felt like a man who had been through enough to know the cost of the old way, and humble enough to keep choosing something different.

What moved me even more is that he now helps lead classes for younger men alongside another man I will call Christopher.

In another life, under other identities, these two would have been enemies. The old prison lines would have told them exactly who they were allowed to be to each other. The old loyalties would have made the friendship impossible.

And yet there they are, mentoring men together.

You cannot make that up.

There are some things I do not want to explain too quickly. I would rather just sit with the wonder of them. An old hatred becomes a friendship. A man who might once have been an enemy becomes a brother. Two men who could have stood on opposite sides of a line now stand together, helping other men find another way.

That is not an idea to me.

It is something I witnessed.

Later that day, I had a visit scheduled with Christopher. Every time he walks into the room, it feels like we have known each other forever. We are smiling before we say much, laughing almost right away. Some relationships do not need a long history to feel old.

Christopher has been inside for more than thirty years, though you would never guess it. He looks far younger than he is, and he carries himself with a calm strength people notice. He is deeply respected there, not because he asks for it, but because of how he lives.

He has a daily practice. He reads, studies, reflects, and brings real questions to our conversations. He was raised in one tradition and has since given himself fully to a path of forgiveness and seeing differently.

Every Friday he calls me, and he does not waste much time. He starts with a question. Not a casual one, but the kind that opens the whole conversation.

He wants to understand. He wants to apply the truth in his life. He wants to see where fear is still running the show, where pride is hiding, where guilt is pretending to be truth.

There is a hunger in him that feels alive. Not restless or anxious, just sincere. He is not studying to sound spiritual. He is studying because he wants to live differently. He wants his own mind free, and he wants to help other men find freedom too.

That afternoon, Christopher told me something that brought a smile to my day. He said that after my morning visit, Robert had come straight back to his area to find him. The two of them started going over everything Robert and I had talked about.

Robert had set down his book open to one of the sections we had been looking at together and this led to a discussion between them.

This is connection in practice.

Because that is how this work often moves. Not always through a big event or a formal class, but from one visit to the next, from one table to another, from a conversation in the morning to a conversation in the afternoon. Sometimes it speaks through a book left open.

What I keep noticing. I do not bring anything into the prison.

The light is already there.

It moves through men who have been through unimaginable circumstances, men who have seemed to cause great suffering, and men who are learning to tell the truth about their stories without getting lost in them. It moves through friendships that should not exist by the old rules. It moves through men who talk about forgiveness as if their lives depend on it, because in a real way, they do.

It also moves through younger men who now have examples in front of them. Men who show them that change is not just something people talk about. It is something a person can become.

I left those visits with a full heart.

A new kind of brotherhood is forming in a place where old divisions used to rule. Men are starting to see one another beyond the lines they inherited. They are helping each other remember what is still possible.

That is what stays with me.

A man walks into a visiting room with light in his face. Another walks in, and it feels like we have known each other for years. Two men who could have been enemies are helping others together. A book is left open to spark conversation. And the conversation continues after I have gone.

I do not know what else to call that but grace.

And I do not know what else to do but be grateful I was close enough to see it.

Sometimes a door opens quietly. Not with a plan or a sign, but with a question that looks ordinary on the surface and asks you to slow down.

Yesterday morning, a man I have been talking with for a long time asked me a careful question. There was a woman in a prison in his state reading the same book that has shaped so much of my own life. She was looking for real conversation, and for relationships with some depth to them.

Would it be all right, he asked, if he passed my information along to her?

I did not answer right away. Almost everyone I sit with is a man. The few times someone has asked me to connect with a woman inside, not much ever came of it. I could have left it there. I could have filed it under something I had already tried.

But I noticed myself listening. Not forcing an answer. Not building a plan. Just paying attention to whether there was any openness in me.

And something felt different.

Something felt like it was time to expand.

So I said yes.

That same afternoon, I was scheduled to walk into a prison here in Nevada for the first time, to offer a small group built around that same book. It was a new facility, a new room, a new rhythm. And I could feel my mind doing what minds do at the edge of something unfamiliar. It reached into the past to predict the future.

I had set up for groups before and had no one come. I knew what it was like to arrive, make the call, wait, and then learn nobody was coming.

So as I walked in, I felt the old thought move through me. Not loud. Just familiar.

Maybe no one will come.

The process was simple. I went to the program room, called down to the unit, said what was being offered, and waited.

On my own, I can take ten people at most. So I set out the chairs.

I set out four.

Four felt safe. Four felt possible. Four felt like being open without expecting too much.

I can see it now for what it was. I had taken my hope, measured it, and arranged it in furniture.

Then I sat down in the quiet and waited.

A few minutes before the start time, I called back. The officer said something I had never heard in all my years of doing this. He said he had to choose which ones to send.

Then he added, “You’ll be getting ten.”

Ten. And more wanting to come.

I was amazed before the door even opened.

Then the door opened.

And they were women.

Not just women. Women who walked in lit up.

They told me there had been more than twenty who wanted to come down. The ten who made it carried a sincere, wide-open curiosity I do not always see right away in a room like that.

One of them said right away, “I love this book.”

Another walked straight up to me, guard half raised, and asked, “This isn’t religious, is it? Because I already have a religion.”

I told her no, and that I would explain exactly what it was once everyone was settled. I liked her honesty. The rest looked at me with real interest. Not suspicion or boredom, and not the careful distance a prison room can hold at the beginning. They were simply there.

And honestly, it was almost too much.

I caught myself grinning so wide that I asked if we could take a minute and just get quiet together before we began.

So we did.

Ten women. A circle of chairs. Some books. And a shared pause inside a prison.

That pause mattered. It let us begin not as a class, but as people.

From the moment I started talking, I felt carried by the room: by the awake eyes, the nodding heads, and a kind of safety I had not built by myself. We were meeting each other there.

That is one of the quiet surprises of this work. You walk in thinking you are the one bringing something, and the room gives something back. The people who come in are not empty. They are not projects. They bring hunger, questions, humor, pain, and courage. And when people bring themselves honestly, a room can change quickly.

About halfway in, the woman who had asked if it was religious raised her hand. I nodded to her.

She said, “Will you come to Smiley Road?”

I laughed. “Where’s Smiley Road?”

She told me it was in Las Vegas. She was being transferred there soon.

Then she said, “I want you and this book there.”

It touched me. Not because I knew what it meant, and not because I had a plan, but because I could feel how sincere it was. She was not asking for a program. She was asking for the same kind of space to exist where she was headed. A place where people could ask real questions. A place where no one would be talked down to. A place where honesty could be safe.

When the time was up, no one wanted to leave.

Including me.

There are moments in this work when the time itself seems reluctant to end. Not because anything dramatic happened, but because something real was shared and people could feel the difference.

The gratitude I carried out was nothing I had earned or expected.

I kept thinking about the yes I had given that morning. I still do not know what will come of that first question from the other state, or whether that connection will open into anything more. But it prepared something in me. It asked me to listen for the next opening without deciding too quickly what it could or could not become.

And then, a few hours later, I was standing in a room I had never been in before, watching the chairs I had set out become too few.

Most of us spend a lot of energy trying to see the whole path before we take one step. We want to know where it leads, what it will cost, whether we are ready, whether we will be enough. But some doors do not open that way. Sometimes we are only given the next room, the next call, the next honest conversation.

I do not pretend to know what any of it is for. I do not know if it means Las Vegas, more women’s facilities, the woman in another state, or simply one afternoon that asked me to see differently.

What I felt was simpler than that.

An invitation to stay available.

Not a forced yes. Not an ambitious one. A quiet one. The kind that only says, I am here.

There is a prayer I return to often. Stripped down, it asks to be truly helpful, to not worry so much about what to say or do, to be content to be wherever I am needed, and to be helped myself in the very act of trying to be helpful.

That is the part I keep returning to.

I walked in thinking I was bringing something to those women. I walked out knowing they had given something to me.

Maybe we call it helping because we do not have a better word for being changed together.

I am not sure what opened yesterday. I am not sure where it leads.

I only know I want to stay available long enough to find out.

I have been writing back and forth with a man in prison who went inside when he was young. He is serving a very long sentence.

There is no way to say that lightly. A long sentence does something to a person’s sense of time. It changes how the future feels. It can make ordinary dreams feel far away. It can leave a person wondering whether life is happening somewhere else without him.

He has told me, in different ways, that he feels he missed out on a lot. And I understand why he would feel that.

There are things most people get to stumble through in the open world: work, travel, friendships, love, mistakes, long drives, random conversations, the simple freedom of deciding where to go on a Saturday. Even the awkwardness of becoming an adult in public.

When someone goes inside young, much of that happens behind walls. Or it does not happen at all.

That kind of loss feels real.

I do not want to rush past it. I do not want to explain it too quickly or cover it with a spiritual answer. Some grief needs to be seen before anything else can.

But what has moved me about him is his willingness to look again. He is not only looking at what was lost. He is beginning to ask whether there is another way to live even now. Another way to meet the life that is here, without pretending the life that did not happen was not real to him.

In one of his recent letters, he wrote something that stayed with me. He said this new outlook was something he had wanted all along, though he did not really know it until he began reading about it and understanding it through our conversations.

Then he wrote that, at times, just knowing there is another way to live and experience things has brought him to a new kind of happiness.

“Just knowing that there is a new way to live,” he wrote, “feels like I am on the way to getting closer to life.”

I read that line more than once.

Getting closer to life.

That is such a beautiful way to say it. Not escaping life. Not pretending life has been easy. Not waiting for every circumstance to change before something opens.

Just getting closer to life.

I think many of us know what it feels like to be far from our own lives. We can be busy and still far from it. We can be surrounded by people and still far from it. We can be out in the open world and still feel like we are watching life from a distance.

Pain can do that. Shame can do that. Regret can do that. So can the long ache of believing we were treated unfairly, or the quiet belief that we are only what happened to us, or only the worst thing we ever did.

It creates distance. Not always on the outside, but inside.

A person can be breathing, working, talking, surviving, and still feel cut off from the life he is in.

So when he wrote that a new way of seeing was bringing him closer to life, I felt grateful. Not because anything was fixed. The sentence did not disappear. The past did not become simple.

But an opening had appeared.

And sometimes an opening is enough to begin.

Later in that same letter, he started telling me what he would do if he were ever released. He talked about traveling, seeing the national parks, picking up hitchhikers, cooking for people living on the street, and getting it all on film.

There was a wildness and generosity in it that made me smile. It was not a polished plan. It was not a careful list of goals. It was more like a heart imagining itself in motion.

Open roads. Food shared. Strangers met along the way. A life that gives something back.

Then he wrote that the main thing he would want to show people is that nobody is all bad. That we all have good in us. That a person is far more than the worst thing they have ever done.

That will always stay with me.

A person is far more than the worst thing they have ever done.

I have heard different versions of that from men inside. Sometimes directly. Sometimes underneath the words. Sometimes in tears. Sometimes in silence.

It is one of the deepest cries of the human heart.

Please do not reduce me to that.

Please do not make one act, one season, one failure, one wound the whole truth of who I am.

That does not mean we erase responsibility. It does not mean harm is ignored. It does not mean consequences do not seem real.

It means the person is still more.

And if we cannot hold that, I do not know how real change happens.

We have to be able to tell the truth about what happened without making a person only what happened. That is hard. It is hard for the one who seemed to cause harm. It is hard for the one who believed they were harmed. It is hard for families and communities. It is hard for all involved.

We want simple boxes: good people and bad people, guilty and innocent, worthy and unworthy. But real life keeps exposing those boxes for what they are.

I have sat across from men who have done serious harm and watched them speak about their children with tenderness. I have read letters from men carrying deep regret who are trying to help someone younger not repeat their path. I have seen people who were once feared become gentle.

In the very place where the world may only know them by their worst day, I have seen men become listeners, artists, mentors, and friends.

You cannot witness that for long and keep seeing the way you used to.

His letter reminded me that a new way of seeing is not only an idea. It can become a way back into life.

Even inside. Even while serving a long sentence. Even while carrying a story that still hurts.

He is discovering that his mind does not have to stay locked in the same place forever. He can question what he has believed. He can listen for something quieter. He can imagine a life of giving. He can come closer to life right where he is.

And maybe that is where a better way begins.

Not in a perfect future. Not after everything is understood. Not after the world finally sees us exactly as we hope to be seen.

But in the small willingness to ask whether there is another way to look, another way to live from here, another way to remember what is still good.

I see that in his letter. I see it in the longing to travel and feed people and tell the story differently. I see it in the hope that others might come to know they are more than their worst moment.

And when I read his words, something in me answers quietly.

Yes.

There is a better way.

And maybe we find it together.

Some visits remain with you, not because something big happens or anything is resolved.. Sometimes it is just one honest sentence that keeps returning to you long after you have left.

This trip, that sentence came while I was sitting with a man who is thirty-two years old who has spent half of his life inside prison. He came in as a kid, a youthful offender, so much of his growing up has happened behind walls.

And yet he has been looking for real answers. Not the kind that make a person sound spiritual or wise, but the kind that come from sitting with your own life and asking questions you cannot easily put down. How did I get here? Could it have gone differently? What was happening in me then? Can I still change?

During a stretch in solitary, something began to open in him. Solitary became a place where the mind is met without distraction. For some, that kind of isolation can break something. For others, and sometimes for the same person, it can bring questions to the surface that have been waiting for years.

He kept going back to the event that brought him to prison. He kept turning it over through one thought: it could have been different. One moment. One choice. One pause in the chain of events.

That kind of question can torment a person. It can also wake someone up.

I was able to get the movie The Butterfly Effect in for him to watch. Something in the idea reached him: the way small moments can ripple outward in ways we could not see at the time.

It became a way of looking at his own life.

He started to see that a life is not only made of the big events we remember. It is also made of small turns: the thoughts we follow, the reactions we never question, the moments when pain moves through us before we know what is happening.

Since then, he has been working through a process, one lesson at a time. During our visit, he said something I have thought about many times since.

He said, “I’ve read the Bible, and I’ve read the Quran, and it only left me with more questions. I’m reading A Course in Miracles, and it’s answering all my questions.”

I could feel how sincere he was. He was not comparing religions. He was simply describing what it feels like when something finally reaches the place in you that has been asking.

That certainly resonated. Of course it did. That same book has meant a great deal in my own life. But I also have to remember something else.

It is called A Course in Miracles.

A course. Not the course.

That distinction matters. There are many ways a person begins to hear what he has been waiting for. For one person it may come through scripture. For another, through silence, recovery, loss, friendship, or a book that arrives at the right time. The form is not always the same, but we know when something true begins to reach us.

We do not all have to use the same words to recognize honesty, forgiveness, responsibility, and love. We do not have to come through the same doorway to know when peace has entered the room.

It would be easy to make the book the point. Or the method. Or the language.

But the point is the experience. The point is the opening. The point is what happens when someone begins to see himself differently, maybe for the first time ever.

When he told me the Course was answering his questions, I did not hear concepts or labels. I heard relief. I heard a man saying, something is finally making sense.

So many of us are carrying questions, even when we do not say them out loud. We tuck them under our opinions, our business, our personality. But underneath, many of us are asking the same things in different forms: Can I be forgiven? Am I more than what I did? Is there another way?

And then something lands. A sentence. A film. A visit. A page in a book. A quiet moment in a place no one would choose.

Something says, look again.

That is what I felt sitting with him. I was watching a man willing to keep looking.

Not every question gets answered the moment we ask it. We are being made ready to receive what we could not have understood before.That visit reminded me that answers do come, though rarely on command and rarely in the form we expected. Often they come quietly, with just enough clarity for the next step.

Maybe that is enough for today: to keep looking, to stay willing, and to leave space for what is already on its way.

The answers are coming.

Sometimes the work speaks for itself. Not through a report or a number, and not through anything polished or prepared. 

It comes in a letter, handwritten pages, tablet messages, or a note written after count clears late.

Recently, a few letters came.

One was from a man only just beginning to deepen on his spiritual journey. Another was from someone at a different facility, also just beginning. A third came from a man who has been on the path for a while and has now started helping facilitate a class inside.

Different letters, same movement. Something is opening. Something is being remembered. Something is being shared.

The first man started by apologizing that he could not call. His tablet was not charging, and he was waiting on a repair. Even that small detail says something about life inside. Connection can hang on a battery, a charger, a cleared count, or a device that works long enough for a voice to come through.

But even without the call, the letter carried his presence.

He wrote about understanding something with more clarity lately. Then he began reflecting on his life. He wondered what his life might have become if he had not been brought back to faith during a prison retreat years ago. He wondered what might have happened if his mother had not died when he was young.

He shared, honestly, that after she died, something in him pushed God away. As he put it, there was nothing left to hold him to what he had believed before.

One moment changed the course of his life.

Sometimes a moment seems to define everything that follows. We keep returning to it, looking at life through it, and measuring ourselves against it.

And then, slowly, if we are willing, we begin to see that the moment was not the end of us. 

It did not have the final word.

He wrote that he wanted the same grace that once lifted him out of despair to keep carrying him into a fuller life. He was paying attention to his own life.

That is no small thing.

To see the old pain without becoming the old pain. To notice you are changing. He put it like this: sometimes it takes a while to catch up with our own development.

That line is great. We can spend a long time seeing ourselves and others through old ideas. And sometimes we keep seeing people as they were, not as they are.

And without meaning to, we can become blind to who is actually in front of us now.

Perhaps that is why he wrote that we should love everyone, especially the ones we are with.

Am I willing to see this person as they are today? Am I willing to notice where I am holding someone, including myself, inside an old story?

That sounds simple, but it may be one of the hardest places to practice. It can be easier to offer grace to someone far away than to someone whose words touch us every day. The daily relationship is where love stops being an idea and becomes a practice — a tone, a pause, the humility to apologize, the willingness not to make someone pay for our own discomfort.

Then he described love like water or sunlight. Always present, but not always felt. If you stand under a shower wearing a raincoat, he said, you will not get wet. But that does not mean the water is not falling.

In the same way, if we cover ourselves with fear and doubt, we may not feel love. But that does not mean love is absent.

I smiled when I read that. It was simple. Clear. Lived. That is why it landed. So much of change is learning to take off what blocks us from receiving what has already been there the whole time.

The second letter had a different energy. It came right after a group meeting inside. He apologized for missing a call. Count had cleared late, and he had to get ready for the group.

Then he wrote that he could hardly describe the fulfillment he felt afterward.

They had twelve people. Then someone announced the group earlier that day and invited anyone interested to come. Forty people signed up.

Forty.

“Shortly,” he wrote, “we will need a bigger room.”

I could feel the joy in that sentence. Not because bigger is better. Not because numbers are the point. But because something was being shared.

This is not only about someone from the outside bringing something in. It is taking root inside. The men are beginning to hold it, share it, invite others into it, and make room for it in their own way.

It means the whole thing no longer depends on one person. It is becoming relational. It is becoming shared.

And that is how real change often moves. Not by force or pressure, but by one person becoming honest enough that another feels safe. By one person finding words for his experience, and another saying, I know something about that too.

At the end, he thanked me and said the feeling could only be described in one word.

Love.

That word gets used easily. But sometimes it is the only one that fits.

Not love as an idea. Love as the feeling of being joined in something real. Love as a room of men gathering inside a prison to look at their lives honestly. Love as a man who once seemed to suffer deeply now telling others to take off the raincoat and let what is already raining down reach them.

These letters remind me again that the work is not mine. It moves through friendship, willingness, the men themselves, and anyone honest enough to look, humble enough to listen, and willing enough to share what has helped them.

Inside a place where the mind can be tempted to feel controlled, delayed, and limited, something still seems moving. A tablet that will not charge cannot stop it. A late count cannot detain it. A small room cannot contain it.

The letters keep arriving.

And with them comes the reminder that change is not always loud. It can look like a man looking back on his life in a new way. It can look like forty names on a list, a group that needs more books, or one word written from the heart.

Love.

And maybe that is enough to keep opening the door.

I had a video call with a man in Texas who had just been denied parole for the sixth time.

Some sentences feel heavy before anything else is said. Denied parole for the sixth time.

I try not to rush past that. I try not to make it spiritual too quickly. I let the disappointment be felt before looking for meaning in it. Because it seems like  a lot.

A person can do the work, change, become honest, responsible, helpful, and devoted—and still hear no. Still be told not yet. Still have to turn around and walk back into the same unit, the same routine, the same walls, the same waiting.

Before the call, he had sent me a letter. He gave me his blessing to share part of it.

In the letter, he named a few of the things pressing on him: the parole denial, some money worries, and the ordinary pressures that can get very loud inside a place where choices already seem few.

Then, after only a few lines, he wrote something that stopped me.

“I can only put it in God’s hands from this point and pray. So gratitude list.”

So gratitude list.

I loved the plainness of that. Not because gratitude makes everything easy, cancels disappointment, or removes the need to grieve what hurts. 

But because something in him refused to let the disappointment become the whole story.

He did not deny what was happening, pretend the parole decision did not matter, or brush aside the money worries.  He simply turned his attention, on purpose, toward what was still there.

Still given. Still his.

That takes more strength than people sometimes realize. It is easy to be grateful when life is arranged the way we hoped. It is another thing to be grateful when the answer is no.

As I read his list, one thing especially moved me. One of the very things that had appeared a few lines earlier as a problem showed up again, this time among the things he was thankful for.

Same situation.

Nothing about it had changed except the way he was looking at it.

Most of us know how fast the mind builds its case. Something happens and we decide, almost instantly, what it means. This is bad. This is unfair. This is proof nothing is changing. This is proof I cannot be happy yet.

And sometimes it all seems painful and unfair, with apparent consequences that can’t be ignored. 

But every now and then, someone shows you that another way of seeing is possible. Not by preaching it, but by living it.

That is what his letter did for me. He wrote down the troubles. Then he turned toward gratitude. And in that shift, his mind seemed to change.

He wrote that he had T-shirts and shoes.

T-shirts and shoes.

So ordinary. So easy to overlook.

And right after naming those two plain things, he described a feeling of peace coming over him. That is what got me. Not a grand spiritual event. Not a dramatic rescue. Just a man in prison, after a sixth parole denial, noticing he had T-shirts and shoes, and finding peace. I sat with that for a while.

How many times have I been sure peace was waiting somewhere up ahead? After the decision. After the apology. After the problem is solved. After I finally know how everything turns out.

But here was a man reminding me, from inside prison, that peace can arrive before the circumstance changes. It can come in the middle, while the problem is still unresolved, while the answer is still no, when a person stops long enough to notice what has not been taken.

On the video call, he was in a different place than in the letter. There was joy in him. Not the kind that pretends pain is not real. A clearer kind. The kind that comes when someone has seen something for himself and could not turn away from..

At one point he said, “My happiness is not outside these walls. It’s not outside me.”

Then he said, “I don’t have to wait to be happy.”

I could tell he had touched something real.

There is a difference.

Anyone can say happiness comes from within. It can turn into a slogan very quickly. But when a man says it from inside prison, after being told no for the sixth time, it carries a different weight.

He was not saying he did not want to go home, that freedom outside the walls did not matter, or that the denial did not hurt him.

He was saying his life did not have to stay on hold until the outer door opened.

That is a powerful thing, because so many of us live postponed lives. We tell ourselves we will be at peace later, once the relationship changes, the money comes, the past makes sense, or the person finally sees us.

And sometimes we really do have to wait. Some things cannot be forced. Some timelines are not ours. Some decisions belong to other people.

But maybe we do not have to wait for the life that is already here. Maybe we do not have to wait to notice the good, or to not overlook one honest moment.

Gratitude does not always feel like a spiritual practice to me. Most of the time, it feels more simple than that. A hand on the wall in the dark. A way to remember where you are when the mind starts to spiral.

Not a denial of pain.

Just a small opening where something kinder can get in.

That is what I saw in him. Not perfectly. Not in a way that erased the struggle. But enough to let peace come back.

Our hour went by fast. It felt less like a call and more like sitting near a fire someone else had found in the cold.

I got on thinking I was there to encourage him. And maybe I did, a little. But mostly he encouraged me.

I keep hearing his words.

I don’t have to wait to be happy.

Maybe that is not something to understand all at once. Maybe it is something to try on in the middle of an ordinary day, when the answer is not what we hoped, the problem is still there, and the future is still unclear.

Maybe the most honest thing we can say is simpler than we thought.

I have this breath. I have this moment.

I have T-shirts and shoes.

And maybe, somehow, peace is not as far away as I thought.

Sometimes a conversation begins before anyone says what is really happening.

A message came in from one of the men I stay connected with. His father was coming to visit the next day. They had not seen each other in many years.

Most of my calls with the men happen at set times. There is usually a rhythm to them, a day and a purpose. But this message felt different. It had a quiet weight to it, even in just a few words.

So I wrote back something simple.

Call me.

Not long after, he did.

At first, he said he was doing well and he was looking forward to the visit. He said he and his father had healed a lot over the years. I believed him. But I also waited.

Sometimes we say we are fine because part of us is fine, while another part of us has not yet been invited to speak.

So I asked, “Are you sure there isn’t anything else?”

There was a pause.

Then he said, “Well, this morning he said something that triggered me. He said, ‘I know my son.’ And I felt some anger come up.”

That was where the real conversation began. Not with the visit, not with the long history, and not with him saying everything was okay. It began with one honest sentence.

“I felt some anger come up.”

Most of us know what that is like. Someone says something simple, maybe something they did not mean as hurtful, and suddenly we feel something much larger than the moment. The body tightens. The mind starts moving. An old story comes back. We may not even know why we are upset at first. We only know something in us has been touched.

For him, it was four words: “I know my son.”

On the surface, they may sound harmless. A father talking about his child. But they landed somewhere deeper. They seemed to carry history with them. They touched the fear that his father still saw him as the person he used to be. They touched the ache of not being fully known and the wish to be understood by someone whose opinion had mattered for so long.

So we slowed down.

We did not try to fix the visit before it happened or decide whether his father was right or wrong. We did not take apart the whole relationship. We stayed with what had come up.

What did those words feel like? What did they bring back? What was he afraid might happen when his father arrived? What did he want his father to see?

The questions were not meant to force an answer. They were an invitation to pause long enough to notice what was actually going on.

That kind of pause can change everything.

When hurt is experienced, it can seem as if it comes from another person. The words, tone, and timing appear to define it. And sometimes it seems very real. In that moment, the mind can notice how quickly it gives cause and meaning, and gently question what it is believing.

As he stayed with the anger, he started to see what was beneath it. It was not only anger. It was a desire. He wanted his father to understand that he had changed. He wanted to be seen as he is now, not only as he used to be. He wanted to be free of old labels, old roles, and old expectations.

Most of us have someone we long to be seen differently by: a parent, a partner, a child, a friend, someone from an earlier part of our life. We want them to know we have changed. We want them to understand what it took to get here. We want them to stop using the old image of us.

We want to be met in the present.

And when that does not seem to be happening, something in us seems to ache.

But there is a trap in needing another person to confirm our change before we are free to live it. If I need you to see me clearly before I can be at peace, then my peace is in your hands. If I need you to release the past before I can meet you with an open heart, then I may still be carrying the very thing I want to be free of.

That takes honesty. It takes a willingness to ask: What am I bringing into this room before the other person even arrives?

That was the gift of the call. He began to see that he did not have to walk into the visit trying to prove anything. He did not have to convince his father he had changed or to defend the man he had become. He could notice the anger, honor what had been hurt, tell the truth about the desire underneath it, and then loosen his grip.

Not because the relationship was perfect or because the past did not matter or because his father would say everything exactly right. But because he wanted to be free to meet him without carrying the weight of yesterday into the room.

That is a quiet kind of freedom.

The whole call lasted about thirty minutes. It is easy to underestimate what can happen in a simple conversation when one person is willing to be honest and another person is willing to stay present.

Later, he sent me a message.

“That was really helpful for me. I’ve never felt that. The fact that I can recall a memory and make it now. I can do that with anything. I guess that’s what I’ve been doing unconsciously anyway.”

That stays with me.

I can recall a memory and make it now.

There is so much truth in that. A resentment is not only a memory. It is a memory being felt again.

The event may not be happening now, but the body does not always know that. The mind brings it forward. The old wound starts speaking through the present relationship. That is why it can feel so powerful. We are not just remembering what happened. We are re-feeling it.

We carry it into our voice, our face, our assumptions, our defenses, our silence. Then we wonder why the present feels so much like what came before.

But if the pain is being felt now, then something can also be seen now. The memory can be questioned in the place where it is arising. The wound can be met in the moment it is being relived. What was unconscious can become conscious.

That does not mean we deny what may have been experienced as harm. Forgiveness is not pretending.

Honesty still matters. 

This is where connection becomes practice. One person becomes willing to look. Another listens without rushing to fix. Together, they make enough room for something honest to surface.

That is often where something begins.

Not in a perfect conversation. Not in someone finally saying everything we hoped they would say. It begins with a pause before reacting, or the willingness to to notice the presence of hurt. It can also begin with a simple question: what am I afraid of right now?

His willingness moved me. Anger could have been held, justified, and carried into the visit. Instead, there was a willingness to look again at what was there.

Most of us have done that. We build our case before the conversation even starts.

But he chose to look. He chose to tell the truth. He chose to question what he was carrying. And because of that, the visit had a chance to become something new.

We often think change asks more of us than we have. But sometimes what is needed is very simple: a message, a call, a pause, a question, and someone willing to stay present long enough for the truth to come forward.

We learn about ourselves in relationship. We find out what we are still carrying there. And if we are willing, we can find some freedom there too.

Maybe we do not have to prove we have changed in order to quietly live from the change that has already begun.

It starts with a simple question:

What am I bringing into this moment?

And is it still true?

Freedom starts in the mind.

I know how simple that can sound, especially to someone sitting behind a wall, a fence, a sentence, or a situation that is not changing anytime soon. But I keep seeing it, not as an idea, but as something lived.

In 2019, I was flying home from Brazil and watched a movie based on a true story. It was about a young man wrongly imprisoned and the older man he met inside who became a mentor to him.

Every time the mentor spoke, it felt like he was pointing the younger man back to the only place freedom could begin. Not outside. Not later. Not after everything was corrected.

In his own mind.

At one point, he tells him that happiness begins and ends in the mind, and that he has to free his mind first. I remember sitting on that plane and feeling those words land. There are some things we hear before we understand why they matter.

At the time, I had no idea how much of my life would soon move toward men in prison. I did not know how many visiting rooms I would sit in, how many letters I would read, or how many phone calls would come from units in Ohio, Texas, Nevada, and other places. But something in that film stayed with me.

The mentor says, in essence, that the young man may have seemed  wronged, but he is there now. And if he is ever going to leave that place, he has to begin leaving it on the inside.

That has never really left me. Before you walk out physically, you have to begin walking out in your mind.

I have thought about that with men who may be going home soon. I have thought about it with men who may never go home. I have thought about it in my own life too, because prison is not the only place a person can stay locked up.

We can stay shut inside an old injury, an old identity, an old resentment, or an old story about what happened and what it means. We can be standing in the open air and still be staring through bars.

In that same movie, the mentor shares an old saying:

Two men looked out through the same prison bars. One saw mud. The other saw stars.

Perspective, he tells them.

Mud or stars?

I could not shake it.

It is such a simple image. Two men in the same place, looking through the same bars, and seeing different worlds. The bars have not moved. The place has not changed. But something in the seeing is different.

Two years later, in 2021, I was at a meditation retreat in Mexico when I met a man whose story had one of those quiet turns life sometimes makes.

He had spent years as a high-level coach, helping people change their lives. Then, through events he never could have planned, he found himself in a prison in London.

While he was there, he wrote a short parable. No name on it. He called it Mud or Stars?

It was simple. A story about choice, but not the shallow kind. Not “just think positive.” Not denying that things can feel difficult.  It was about the quiet place in the mind where we begin to notice what we are looking at, what we are listening to, and what story we are letting lead us.

He was able to print copies inside and hand them to other men. Before long, he could hear it being called from cell to cell.

Mud or stars?

That moved me.

I could picture it. One man reminding another, not with a sermon or a long explanation, but with a question.

What are you looking at right now? Where is your mind living?

When he told me the story, something opened. I asked if I could turn the parable into a small booklet to send into prisons as a simple doorway into deeper conversation. He gave it freely. He even pointed me toward a publisher.

And what started as a conversation became something we could place in a person’s hands.

For a while, I waited to hear whether the booklets had made it inside. Anyone who has done this kind of work knows that getting material into a prison is not always simple. Sometimes it moves slowly. Sometimes it disappears into a process you cannot see. Sometimes you just wait.

Then a message came from one of the men inside.

He wrote:

“The shift is happening.”

That line stayed with me. Not the whole world changing at once. Not every problem solved. Just something shifting. One person reads. Another asks. A conversation starts. A small story moves from hand to hand.

Mud or stars?

The next morning, as I sat down to write about it, a message came in from the man I had met in Mexico. I had not heard from him in months. He mentioned new contacts in this work and then noticed that a note he had meant to send long before had never gone through.

So he sent it right then.

I smiled when I saw it. The timing felt too hard to ignore.

I do not always know what to do with moments like that. I try not to turn every coincidence into a conclusion. But I also try not to miss quiet encouragement when it comes. There are times when life seems to whisper, keep going. Not loudly. Not with proof. Just enough to take the next step.

What began as a movie on a plane became a line I carried. That line met a man in Mexico who had written a parable in a cell. The parable became a booklet. The booklet made its way inside. Then a man wrote back:

“The shift is happening.”

Somewhere in all of it, I was reminded again that change often moves through small things. A sentence that stays. A conversation that opens. A letter that finds its way back. A question that gives someone a little room to choose again.

Mud or stars?

I do not hear that question as pressure. I hear it as an invitation.

Because sometimes all we can see is mud. Sometimes the grief is real. The consequences are real. The unfairness is real. A person may have every reason to be tired. Because sometimes all that seems visible is mud. Grief appears real. Consequences appear real. Unfairness appears real. A person can feel completely exhausted by what seems to be happening.

I do not want to stand outside anyone’s pain and tell them to look up too quickly.

But I have sat with enough men inside to know that something can happen when a person becomes willing, even for a moment, to see a little differently. The room or  the sentence do not change.

But our relationship to it can.

A man can begin to see that he is more than what appears to have happened to him. He can notice that the anger he has been carrying has kept him company, but it has not given him peace. He can remember that the old story does not have to be the only story.

One man can say to another, mud or stars, and something in the room can soften.

That is the part I keep trusting. I keep seeing it.

What starts as one relationship becomes a small circle. Then another letter. Then another man asking for a book. And slowly, something loosens. The old weight of not being good enough gets a little thinner. Something kinder gets a little room to grow.

I do not know where any of it is going. I rarely do. But I know what it feels like when a simple question travels farther than I could have carried it on my own.

Mud or stars?

Maybe that is enough for today. To notice where I am looking. To be honest when all I can see is mud. To be gentle enough not to force the stars.

And to stay open to the possibility that even from behind bars, some part of us can still look up.

On my first trip to northern Ohio, the last visit was with a man I had not seen in person since he had been moved from one facility to another.

He had been moved months earlier, and I was glad to finally sit across from him again. We had stayed connected, but it is different in person. You hear more than the words. You notice the eyes, the pauses, the way a person carries himself. You can feel what has changed.

Almost as soon as we sat down, things started unfolding around us. He wanted me to meet his art teacher, someone who had meant a lot to him. As it happened, he was getting a visit at the very next table, close enough for an introduction neither of us could have arranged.

Then, on the other side of us, sat the man who helps run one of the groups he attends. He introduced me to him too. That man invited me to speak to the group by video sometime. Then moments later he turned to us again and said they had been talking about the man I was visiting that very morning. He asked him to become a mentor in the program.

I just sat there watching it all happen.

There are moments when life feels arranged in a way I cannot explain. It all felt given.

What moved me most was watching him be recognized beyond the past, for what was present in him now. 

At this new place, we did not have as much time as usual, and the visit seemed to move faster. We talked about his art, the group, the chance to mentor, and a desire to start a meditation group for other men inside.

I loved hearing that. I know what it can mean in a place like that.

Silence in prison can be a challenge at times. There is the silence we seek, the silence that feels forced upon us, the silence heard after a sentence is handed down, and the silence at the end of a phone call. But a choice for silence is different. Shared silence is different. It can become a refuge, a way of saying together, where we are more than all the noise.

As we kept talking, the time started slipping away. 

He looked up and saw we were almost out of time. Then he said, “Man, we gotta meditate.”

Without hesitating, we both closed our eyes.

Right there.

For the last five minutes of the visit, we sat together in stillness.

I can still feel it. It would have been easy to say we did not have enough time. It would have been easy to skip it. It would have been easy to decide the room was too loud, too public, too busy, too much like a prison visitation room.

And somehow, in the middle of all that noise, the room went quiet.

Not on the outside. Inside.

That is the kind of peace I keep learning about in this work. It is not always the peace of better circumstances. It is not the peace that waits until the room is calm, the relationship is easy, or that life finally makes sense.

Sometimes peace comes in the middle of what has not changed.

The prison was still the prison. The visit was still ending. The clock was still moving. The situation still seemed real.

And yet, for a few minutes, something deeper was much more real.

We opened our eyes at the same time.

He looked at me and said, “Now that’s peace.”

I smiled, because there was nothing to add. He had said it.

That was peace.

I have thought about that moment many times since. How often I look for peace somewhere else, after things are resolved, after people understand me, after life feels secure. But sometimes it comes in a much smaller way. For a few breaths, nothing needs to be different.

A man asked to mentor. A shared silence. A sentence spoken with a smile.

Now that’s peace.

On my most recent trip east, my first visit was with a man I’ll call Joseph.

He gave me permission to share part of what he told me.

Not long before the visit, he had sent me a photo of a new tattoo on his throat. It was a lamb, a lion, and a cross. When I first saw the picture, I noticed it. Of course I did. It was bold, and in a place he could not hide. But I did not really feel the weight of it until he was sitting across from me.

Something on a person’s body can tell a story before they say a word. A scar, a name, a date, a tattoo. Something chosen. Something carried.

As Joseph sat there with the lamb and the lion on his throat, I felt something the photo had not given me. I looked at him and said, “It’s beautiful.”

And I meant it.

Then he told me what had happened.

Soon after he got the tattoo, he woke up around three in the morning. He was not sure why he was awake or what he was supposed to do. He only knew he felt stirred, like something wanted his attention.

So he turned on the television.

He landed on a preacher channel, where a man he liked listening to was just finishing. He thought the same program might come back after the commercials. Instead, a different show started.

It was called Your Story.

The episode was about a young man who had gone to prison for killing someone in a car accident, and about the conversations that slowly began between the young man and the mother of the person who had died.

Joseph could not dismiss it. It was too close to his own life. He knew what it was to carry harm that could not be undone. He knew what it was to live with everything changed by one night, one chain of events, one terrible outcome.

The difference was that he had never had any contact with the mother of the man he had killed.

He thought the timing was strange. Then he went back to bed.

The next morning, he checked his messages. There was a name he did not recognize. Someone had sent him five stamps.

No note. Just the stamps.

It took him a while to realize who she was.

She was the mother of the young man who had died.

He waited. He prayed. He sat with it.

A few days later, he went to write. When he checked again, there was a message from her. She told him she had rewritten it many times.

That detail stayed with me.

I can picture her sitting with those words, writing and deleting, starting again. How do you begin a message like that? How do you reach toward the person tied to the worst pain of your life? How do you ask what you need to ask when you have no idea what will come back?

She told him what the last five years had been like. She said she was not in a good place. She wanted to hear his side of what happened. And she wanted to know that her son’s life had not been wasted.

Some questions do not come from curiosity. They come from grief. They come from a mother trying to live with what cannot be changed.

Joseph wrote back.

He promised to be as honest as he could. He told her the truth of that night. He told her he had been very drunk. He told her he had been walking down the middle of the street wanting to die. He told her he got frightened that someone was following him, hid behind a truck, saw keys inside, took it, and was chased by police before the accident happened.

As he told me this, there was no performance in him. No attempt to make it smaller. No attempt to make himself sound better.

Just the weight of a man telling the truth about the worst night of his life.

He told her that prison had taken on new meaning for him. He told her he wanted to live with purpose when he gets out. And he told her something he knew might be hard to hear: that her son, in a way he could barely explain, had saved his life.

Then he asked her to tell him who Anthony was.

Not just his name. Not just what happened.

Who he was.

Joseph wanted to carry Anthony’s story honestly, and tell it to others.

That part moved me. Because harm has a way of turning people into roles: the offender, the victim, the case, the sentence, the loss. But something begins to change when people become people again. A grieving mother. Her son. A man in prison. A young life that mattered. A person trying to tell the truth without hiding from responsibility.

The courage in that exchange is hard to overstate. Her courage to write at all. His courage to answer honestly. Both of them willing to stay with it.

And then, somewhere in the middle of it, she offered to put a little money on his commissary account.

I do not know what to do with that except sit quietly before it.

There are gestures that remind you the human heart is bigger than the stories we usually tell about it.

None of this erases anything. It does not undo the loss. It does not make grief simple. It does not make responsibility disappear.

But something happened there.

A line that could have stayed a wall became a place where two people could speak. Two stories that had been bound together by pain began to meet through honesty.

When Joseph finished, I looked again at the tattoo on his throat.

The lamb. The lion. The cross.

It seemed less like decoration now and more like a prayer. For gentleness and strength to live in the same body. For a voice to be used differently. For communication where there had only been silence.

For the lion and the lamb to meet.

I told him that was how I saw it.

And maybe that is what stayed with me most. Not the tattoo by itself, and not even the strange timing of the program and the message the next morning. What stayed with me was the possibility that something can begin when two people are willing to move toward each other without knowing what will happen.

Not to fix everything. Not to make the pain disappear. Not to force forgiveness.

Just to tell the truth. To listen. To ask, who was he? To ask, what happened? To ask whether something meaningful can still come from this.

I do not know all that will unfold between them. I would not want to rush it or name it too soon. Some things need room and silence. Some things need many small acts of courage before anyone knows what they are becoming.

But I left that visit feeling that something very deep had happened.

A man woke in the middle of the night. A mother rewrote a message again and again. A show on television opened a door. Five stamps arrived. A reply was sent.

And two lives, forever connected by pain, began to speak.

Maybe repair begins like that. Not with certainty, and not with a clean ending, but with the willingness to move one step closer to the truth.

And one step closer to each other.

I had just gotten off a call with a friend in prison. He was telling me about a conversation he had inside the prison auditorium. He had recently been moved into that area, and there was a stage there. While he was waiting to use the kiosk, he walked up and sat on it.

That is where the conversation happened.

A younger man came and sat beside him. There did not seem to be any reason for it. No introduction. No setup. Just two people near each other in a large room that had probably held all kinds of sounds over the years: programs, meetings, announcements, music, and long stretches of quiet.

Then the younger man pointed toward a room nearby and mentioned a box of old movie reels.

My friend looked, and there they were. Dusty. Stored away. Probably useless now.

Then the younger man started talking about the projector room. He said the light in there was too bright. So bright that the images could not show up on the screen. You would not be able to watch the movie at all.

At first, it did not make much sense. Why this conversation? Why old reels? Why the projector room?

But something in it stayed with him.

That happens sometimes. A person says something ordinary, almost random, and later it opens into something else. You do not know why you are hearing it while it is happening. You only know it has a deeper meaning.

My friend started thinking about the old image of the mind as a projector. I have always loved that image too.

There is the light. There is the film. There is the screen.

The light shines through the film, and whatever is on the film appears on the screen. If the film is scratched, the picture comes out scratched. If the film is dark, the whole movie looks dark.

And most of the time, we are sure the problem is on the screen.

We stare at what is showing there and try to fix it. We argue with it. We defend against it. We blame it. We try to rearrange a movie that has already been projected.

But the quieter question is underneath.

What is the film I am looking through?

What am I bringing to this moment before I even know I am bringing it?

That is not easy to catch. It is much easier to believe I am simply seeing things as they are. But I keep learning that my vision is not as clean as I think. I come to people and situations carrying memories, expectations, defenses, old wounds, and conclusions I reached years ago.

Then I call the result reality.

This is where the projector image helps. Not because it explains everything. It can, but at first it gives way to a pause and a reflection.

When I am upset, can I look gently at the film instead of only reacting to the screen? When I am certain I know what someone meant, can I ask what I might be adding? When an old story starts again, can I notice that maybe I am watching something from the past being thrown onto the present?

My friend took it one step further. He said that if the light were bright enough, if it were fully present, maybe no picture could form at all.

No old film. No distance between the light and what it touches.

Just light.

So often I am busy trying to clean up the movie. I want the scenes to become more peaceful. I want people to act differently. I want the past to change its tone. I want the future to stop threatening me.

So I have to ask what lens I am looking through.

Maybe what I am really longing for is something deeper than a better image. Maybe I want to come closer to what is true before the story begins. Before the defense rises. Before the old interpretation takes over. Before I decide what everything means.

I do not live there all the time. I can still get caught in the movie. I still react to the screen at times. I still believe things before I remember to question them.

But every now and then, there is a pause. A strange little moment on a stage. A younger man talking about old movie reels. A sentence that does not make sense until later.

And something opens.

That is the part I loved about my friend’s story. It did not happen in a quiet room built for reflection. It happened in a prison auditorium while he was waiting for a kiosk, next to a box of forgotten reels.

That feels important to me.

Maybe the reminders are everywhere. Maybe life is always offering some small doorway into seeing differently. Maybe the person beside us, without even knowing it, is carrying the exact image we need for the day.

And maybe that is what makes an encounter matter. Not that it looks special. Not that anyone announces it. Just that two people end up near each other in the same space, something gets said, and one of them walks away, seeing a little more clearly.

I think about those old reels now. How many of us carry whole boxes of them inside? Old scenes, old mistakes, old betrayals, old versions of ourselves and other people. We keep them stored nearby. Sometimes we do not even know they are there until the light passes through them again and we find ourselves watching the same movie.

Then someone says something. Or a room goes quiet. Or we finally notice what is playing.

That noticing is the beginning of freedom.

Not because the whole movie disappears at once, but because, for a moment, we remember there is light behind it. There is something in us untouched by the old film. Something steady. Something present. Something that does not need the story to keep repeating.

It takes practice to stay there for good. I am still learning. But I know what it feels like when the projector slows down. When the scene softens. When the picture loses some of its grip. When two people talk honestly and the room feels a little lighter.

That is enough to keep me listening. Enough to keep watching my own mind with a little more kindness. Enough to remember that the next ordinary moment may carry something I could not have planned.

A stage. A younger man. A box of old reels. A projector room too bright to show the movie.

Maybe sometimes the light is the whole message.

Maybe peace begins when we stop trying to fix the screen and turn, quietly, toward what has been shining behind it all along.

As I look back on my visit to a prison in Chillicothe, Ohio, I keep returning to the same two words.

God is.

When I arrived, the sun was shining over the visitation building. The light came through in a way that was hard to miss. I stood there for a moment before going in, looking at the building, the grass, and the path ahead of me.

I had come to visit several men over the course of a few days. Each one had a different story, a different background, a different way of seeing his life. Before I went in, I set a simple intention: peace, understanding, and connection.

I did not know what would happen. I only knew I wanted to be shown how to see.

The first visit, on Sunday, was with a friend. It seemed to set the tone for everything that followed. There was warmth and trust, and a sense that these meetings were not something I was arranging on my own. Each visit felt connected to the next, as if something was being quietly prepared.

But the moment that stayed with me most came on the final day.

That morning I was scheduled to visit a man we will call Oscar. In the afternoon, I would visit Saddiq. I had been in contact with both of them, but I had never met either one in person.

The visiting room is usually full of people and noise, but that morning it was nearly empty. An officer. One other visitor. And me, waiting.

That is how these visits usually begin. I arrive first. I sit. I wait for the person I have come to see.

Then Oscar walked in.

He is a large man, about six foot, strong in build, with a presence you feel right away. Until then, our contact had been brief — a phone call, a letter, a few emails. Still, I felt close to him.

Oscar had been inside for forty years. He had been told he would never be released. Later, I would learn that in all that time, he had received only three visits.

Forty years.

Three visits.

A whole life measured, in part, by how rarely someone came to sit across from him.

Before we sat down, Oscar asked if I would look at something with him near the front of the room. There was a display of artwork the men had entered for Black History Month, and one of the pieces was his. It had placed among the winners.

His drawing showed Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, with a poem beneath it. He read the poem aloud to me. He was proud, but not in a loud way. It was more like he was offering me something that mattered to him.

Then he pointed to another piece nearby. It had received honorable mention. It showed the back of a familiar figure, with silhouettes around him. It was striking.

Oscar said he really liked that one.

I looked at the name in the corner.

It was the man I was visiting that afternoon.

Out of thousands of men in that institution, Oscar was standing there showing me the artwork of the very person I would meet a few hours later. He did not know him yet.

They have since connected.

That is how connection often seems to move: quietly, ahead of us, laying a path we could not have planned.

We sat down with the glass between us, and the visit began with thanks. Oscar thanked me for coming. I thanked him for allowing me to visit. Visits were limited then, and each man was allowed only one visit a month. I felt honored to be given that time.

From the start, gratitude seemed to lead us.

We talked about regret, fear, the people we love, the years behind him, and the unknown ahead. There were tears and prayer, and the kind of honesty that does not need much introduction.

At one point, two words came out of my mouth before I had time to think about them.

God is.

That was all.

Not an argument. Not an explanation. Nothing to prove.

Just something that seemed to land between us.

Oscar began to cry. Then, after a moment, he began to sing. Right there in the visiting room, in a deep, steady voice, he sang about wanting to follow Jesus.

I closed my eyes.

For a little while, the room seemed to fall away. The glass was still there. The walls were still there. The prison was still there.

But love was there too.

Two men across from each other. A shared prayer. A presence that did not need the room to change in order to be real.

That moment stayed with me because nothing about it erased the facts. Oscar was still in prison. The glass still separated us. His sentence was still his sentence. The years were still there.

And yet, for a while, none of that had the final word.

This is something I keep learning in these visitation rooms. Connection does not always remove the walls.

But it can reveal what the walls cannot touch.

It can remind us that a person is far more than the place where we meet him. Far more than his sentence. Far more than the story the world has kept about him.

After a few hours, we both seemed to know the visit was complete. We prayed once more. Then I stood up, with tears in my eyes, and embraced him before I left.

I told him I loved him.

Later, I heard that after I walked out, Oscar sat back down and cried for twenty minutes. When someone asked if he was all right, he said they were tears of joy.

To leave the visitation building, you pass through a small garden between security and the visiting room. I stepped into it and noticed the grass.

It was so green.

The same light that had met me on the way in was still there on the way out. And a quiet thought came.

The grass is not greener on the outside.

It was greener right here.

I do not say that to make prison sound beautiful. I do not say it to make a long sentence lighter than it is.

I say it because that day I saw something I do not want to forget.

We often think freedom is always somewhere else: outside the wall, beyond the sentence, in another life, under better conditions. And sometimes the conditions matter deeply.

But there is also a kind of freedom that begins when two people meet honestly. When gratitude leads. When prayer opens the heart. When love becomes present in a place we did not expect to find it.

That does not fix everything.

But it changes what we see.

It changed what I saw that day.

I came to visit a man who had spent forty years inside. I left having been visited by something too simple to explain.

God is.

Maybe that is the whole of it.

Not that the walls came down.

But that love was there too.