What the Walls Cannot Touch

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.