COMING FULL CIRCLE:

  FROM CRIMINAL TO CHRISTIAN

It is an amazing thing to experience:  Sitting in the Prison Ministry at Mission Valley Christian Fellowship in San Diego, California, we are those that society had branded as the worst of the worst.  Certainly, by our criminal actions, we had given them fuel for their condemning fires.  We had been the hopeless.  We had been the cancers in a land full of violence and iniquity.  We were the forsaken and the forgotten.

And certainly, I was the chief sinner among them.  When I was released from my very last prison sentence on July 3rd, 1997, I had completed my fifth term of incarceration.

A drug addict who supported my drug use by committing burglaries, I had spent nineteen, long years in pententiaries all over California and Nevada.

Under the leadership of Pastor Dennis Martinez, MVCF's Prison Ministry is demonstrating to the world, what we once did, God has forgiven; who we once were, God has forgotten.  But, we are not stopping there.  We are going back into the prisons to rescue all of our fallen brothers and sisters with the same power of God that transformed each of us.

Angel Tree is a program created by the national program, Prison Fellowship.  Through Angel Tree, we each pick the child, of a man or woman who is still incarcerated, and we buy a gift for that child.  Angel Tree is just a wonderful way to let the child experience the joy of Christmas, even though their mommy or daddy will not be there.

This year is my first year in participating in Angel Tree.  What a day it was yesterday, when I went to buy my gift for my little adopted Angel.  A nine year old boy, I was given the opportunity to get him the best gift I could find.  I clenched my gift request tightly to my hand, and proudly walked into Mervyn's to buy my gift for my Angel.  Why is this such a big deal for me?

For nineteen years in prison, I had never received a Christmas present from anyone in the outside world.  I had also lived my life as a taker.  Taking from anyone and everyone I could parasite off of.  I can even remember a time, many years ago, high on drugs, breaking into someone's house at Christmas time and stealing money from the house of someone who was clearly a poor person.  Tearing off the wrappers of Christmas presents while they were not home, I am sure to this day, that I had destroyed their Christmas.

Today, like the rest of the men and women in the Prison Ministry at MVCF, I am a transformed human being.  No longer are we the wretches and the rejected fools of captive sin, but we are the redeemed of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Oh, I proudly purchased my gift at Mervyn's, getting my Angel a little extra gift and paid a little extra for it to be gift wrapped.  After I left the store and got on the bus to go home, I proudly had to make sure each passenger could see that I was carrying a gift for Christmas.  I got off the bus twelve blocks from my house, so I could parade my Mervyn's bag and gift down the street:  I was a shopper and I was gift giver now, and I wanted the whole world to know it.

Now, the world might not know how important that gift in that bag was for me, as well as my adopted Angel.

But God knows.  It represents how I had come full circle....from criminal to Christian....from being a taker to becoming a giver.  That is why the Gospel is truth and why the entire world, with all of its pain and suffering and confusion, needs the power of Jesus Christ.

Yes, it is an amazing thing to sit in the Prison Ministry and listen to a group of former takers and thieves and drug addicts, who now are planning the Angel Tree Christmas Party where hundreds of children will be given gifts.  Not just ordinary gifts.  But gifts given from the most grateful sinners that Christ has ever redeemed.