Mike was feeling dejected after his first few months in prison, when he noticed an older man struggling to push his walker around the dirt track.
“I’m trying to find a way to kill myself in prison,” the aged inmate told him.
“Do you have anyone on the outside?” Mike asked.
“No,” Ray told him — explaining that he had “lost hope completely.”
On Mike’s next call with his wife and children, he said, “Hey, there’s this guy who’s thinking of killing himself. He’s an old man; he has nobody.”
“Let’s adopt him,” his wife suggested. Despite her own heavy responsibilities at home, she began coordinating regular letters and pictures from the kids.
Ray’s hand shook, and it would take almost an hour to write a letter back. But he corresponded with the family for many months. Their adopted “Grandpa Ray” spoke often to other residents about the family and waved at Mike one day from his dorm, showing him the kids’ pictures on the wall.
Ray didn’t want to end his life anymore. And there was “light coming from him,” Mike remembers. “He had purpose — he had someone who cared about him.”
Read more about the mission of religious ministries in and out of the Utah State Correctional Facility.
More in Faith:
- How to ‘subvert the culture’ with love, according to happiness expert Arthur Brooks (Deseret News)
- Beware the ‘Dead See Scroll’ of social media, Brother Newman tells BYU students (Church News)
- William C. Duncan: What would Utah’s version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act look like? (Deseret News)