A Heart for Hurting Prisoners
A Heart for Hurting Prisoners
Ron Humphrey
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She’s 70, a cancer survivor, and her feet hurt, but that doesn’t stop Helena Carpenter from going to prison every week. No, she’s been at it 14 years now and still shows up at the tough federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, every Monday night to bring encouragement, good cheer, and lessons from the Bible to inmates who call her “our spiritual mother.”
A Sunday school teacher the past 20 years—“that is where my heart is”—Helena and her late husband, Clarence, were challenged in 1990 to visit men in prison by their pastor, Glen Kennedy, then with Washington Presbyterian Church of Allenwood.
“What am I going to do in a men’s prison?” Helena asked. Answered Rev. Kennedy, “You are going to share the love of Jesus as it can be found in your own heart.”
Gordon Barnes, the Prison Fellowship area director at the time, personally provided Helena and Clarence with their training and then made the arrangements for the Carpenters to make weekly visits to the men at the federal camp in Allenwood. When a massive federal complex was opened at White Deer in 1992, they began visiting the medium-security institutions there. Three years later, when Helena’s feet troubled her too much for the long walks about the White Deer complex, they started weekly visits at the United States Penitentiary at Lewisburg. Other volunteers purchased a used wheelchair so that they could easily wheel Helena through the facility.
During her first year of prison ministry at Allenwood in 1990, Helena was diagnosed with cancer. When she visited the prison the following week, one of the inmates—“Dickie”—asked how she was. She couldn’t lie, so she told him of her disease. After the evening program, Dickie shared with the other prisoners, who surrounded Helena, laid hands on her, and prayed for healing. She left the prison “with peace in my heart.”
Chaplain Manny Cordero then stayed in touch, and when Helena was scheduled for her cancer operation, he asked for the date and time. Unknown to her, Cordero arranged with the prison warden for some of the inmates in her program to be released from their work assignments during the actual time of the operation to go to the chapel and pray as a group for God’s healing of Helena. Others prayed at their work stations. Chaplain Cordero heard one inmate pray, “Please, God, take me, not Helena.”
When the doctor visited Helena the day following her surgery, she was up and eager to go home. When told of the inmate prayers the doctor said, “Yes, I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit in that operating room.” The cancer is gone, in remission or whatever happens to it, but it has not been seen since the operation.
