The first time God visited Darren*, he was fourteen years old and doing time in the Young Offenders Centre. As he sat alone in his cell preparing a noose out of a bed sheet, intent on ending his life, he heard a voice calling his name.
“I got up and looked out the window expecting a guard to be there, but there was no one,” Darren remembers.
Writing it off as the wind Darren went back to his bed and again took up his project only to be interrupted moments later by the same voice gently calling out his name. Once again Darren got up and looked out the window and then out into the hallway, but still there was no one to be seen.
Darren went back to his bed and worked at his noose until he was convinced that he had fashioned something that wouldn’t let him down: a bed sheet that would hold and a knot and slip that would tighten without fail. Looking over his finished product he heard the voice a third and final time. This time, however, when Darren looked up the cell was enveloped in a bright light and the voice that had called his name continued, “Son,” it said. “Get on your knees before me.” Casting the noose aside, Darren immediately fell to his knees. “Son,” the voice continued. “I am with you. Do not worry about anything, for if you believe in me, I will end your suffering.”
That night Darren accepted Jesus into his heart. “If it wasn’t for him, I would not be here right now,” Darren attests.
But this wasn’t the end of Darren’s journey with God. Like so many others, accepting Jesus didn’t mean an instantaneously “fix” for, although Jesus was in Darren’s heart, the enemies great lie still lingered stubbornly: “I always believed that God … let bad things happen to me,” Darren admits.
It wasn’t until many years later when, as an adult, Darren read the story of Joseph in Genesis that the walls in his heart truly began to fall. As he read the words “Now therefore do not be grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life” (Genesis 45:5) Darren felt a deeper understanding of God’s love taking place within hm.
“Reading that,” Darren recalls. “Made me realize that what others have done to me, God has used for good.”
Soon the great lie that God allowed bad things to happen to him dissolved for Darren and the experiences of his past that had gradually cast doubt upon his original life-saving encounter with God as a teenager were reformatted and transformed.
“I’d always had Jesus in my heart,” Darren says. “But I never really let him change me.” Because of our dedicated mentors and the grace of God, Darren is now ready to let Jesus change him.
Will you journey alongside people like Darren as they search for the truth found in Jesus? Sign up to be a Crossroads mentor.
* subjects name has been changed for privacy reason.