“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life, for there I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity, as we are made to believe but the maturing of the soul.” —Solzhenitsyn

EVERYMAN FOUNDER—GERALD HENRY TALKS ABOUT THE IMPACT THE LIFE OF CHUCK COLSON HAD ON HIS BEING, HIS PRISON EXPERIENCE AND EVERYMAN FOUNDATION:

Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to President Richard Nixon, began Prison Fellowship after serving a sentence in federal prison for Watergate-related crimes. It is now the largest prison outreach program in the world, operating a network of ministries in 110 countries. His organization has made substantial gains in breaking the cycle of crime and recidivism.

Chuck Colson’s personal transformation and epiphany, as well as his Prison Fellowship foundation and Angel Tree gift program, had a profound and direct impact on me. We are indebted to him for if it were not for his example and inspiration, Everyman Foundation may well not exist today.

The following are inspirational extracts taken from a speech Chuck Colson made on the 20th anniversary of Watergate about his prison experience and the resulting personal transformation:

“Thank God for Watergate” because I learned the greatest lessons of my life.

I have to tell you that if my life stands for anything it is the truth of what Jesus taught his disciples:

“He who seeks to save his life will lose it. He who loses his life for My sake shall find it."

Chuck Colson speaks about his own epiphany that occurred prior to his imprisonment as a powerful businessman friend described to Chuck his own conversion to Christianity.

Well my friend wanted to pray with me that night but I didn’t do it.

I was too proud.

Friend of the president, big time lawyer in Washington D.C. He wanted to pray sitting in his living room. I’d never done anything like that so I said, “No, thank you.”

His friend gave him a book to read called “Mere Christianity” written by C.S. Lewis.

One chapter in that little book is called “The Great Vice, Pride”—that which we always see in everybody else and never see in ourselves.

A proud man is always walking around in life looking down on other people and other things and when you’re looking down you don’t see something above yourself, a measurably, superior God.

C.S. Lewis didn’t know it when he wrote those words back in the forties but he was writing them for Chuck Colson.

I sat listening to my friend that night realizing that pride had driven me all those years. I thought I was looking for security. I thought I was looking for power and influence because I wanted to take care of my family and I was idealistic about service in government but I was really being driven by my own pride.

I left my friend that evening and I have to tell you that I was known as the toughest of Nixon tough guys. The White House hatchet man, I was called in the newspapers, ex-marine captain. I found that evening that I couldn’t drive the automobile out of the driveway of my friend’s house because I couldn’t get the keys into the ignition. I was crying too hard. Something I would never do.

I sat there for a long time in that driveway thinking about my life, thinking about what he had told me about Jesus and wanting more than anything else in the world to know God and be at peace with Him.

I cried out that night, I’m not even sure of the words, “Just take me God, take me the way I am”.

I sat in that car for a long time that evening and the next morning I was sure when I woke up I would feel embarrassed. I didn’t. I felt a wonderful, wonderful, sense of peace.

I received a one to three year sentence to prison.

I have to tell you that it was in prison that I learned the two greatest lessons of my life.

LESSON ONE:

It was in prison where I discovered where the real power was.

In prison I was part of a little prayer group. The terrible thing for me about prison was not so much the physical depravation. I’d been in the marines. I’d lived in just about everything. You can get used to that. You can get used to just about everything. But I could never get used to men lying on their bunks staring into the emptiness. Nothing to do, no place to go, nobody caring about them. Their bodies atrophying, their souls literally corroded.

We formed a little prayer group. There was seven of us. There were three blacks, four whites, two convicted dope pushers, a car thief, a stock swindler, and the former special counsel for the President of the United States down on our knees at night, praying and studying our Bibles together.

In the little room where we used to meet to pray there were men who were lying on their bunks literally corpses.

I can see why prisons don’t work. They don’t rehabilitate. They can’t. Nobody cares about those people inside. There’s nothing that’s going to change them.

But we would see them come in and we would talk to them and they would ask us what it was we were doing. We would tell them what it meant to repent of their sins, not the crime that got them into prison, usually that’s the least of their sins, but what it meant to really know Jesus Christ.

To turn their lives around, to be transformed.

We’d see those men give their lives to Christ and the next day, no more shuffling and walking around the prison yard like this.

They were up with their heads up transformed by the power of the living God.

The only power that really matters was when you change the human heart.

You do that through Jesus Christ the living God.