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Just this past weekend I visited a death row inmate for the first time. I had never met him except through correspondence and prayer. He began praying daily for my 17 year old son after he attempted suicide last October. We learned of him through the hospital chaplain who visits the inmate weekly, and every week Jeff, the inmate, asks "who can I pray for this week?" 

During his 15 years on death row, this former white supremacist has raised over $100,000 for poor women and children in Darfur through "The Bakhita Project," an endeavor he and the chaplain began. He has written more than 14,000 "beggar letters" from his cell, as he calls them, where he talks of the situation in Darfur and then "God moves people's hearts and they give." 

I have always been anti-death penalty on principle, and now it has become personal for me. As my husband and I say, whether it is about addiction or depression or living on death row, "As long as there is life, there is hope."

posted 3 years, 3 months ago
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