The Road Home

The Father's love—and the helping hands of PF volunteers—puts ex-prisoner on the right path.

Becky Beane

 

 

Deborah McBride hunched over her cards, analyzing her hand and wondering if she could recoup her previous losses. Here in an Alabama prison, she didn’t have a lot of resources to begin with, but gambling lured her not principally as money maker but as another hollow attempt to fill her inner emptiness. She had already tried alcohol…drugs…even bisexual relationships—often for money to support her $1,000–a-day crack addiction. “If you keep this up, it’s going to catch up with you,” a drug counselor had warned her.

It already has, Deborah mourned.

 

By 1995—age 31, mother of four children by four different fathers, and 2 years into an 18-year sentence for theft—“I was dead” Deborah recalls solemnly. “My body was walking around, but inside I was dead.”

 

Then she heard music from the other side of the room: a group of Prison Fellowship volunteers and inmates singing an old gospel song, “Victory in Jesus.”

 

I heard an old, old story, how a Savior came from glory! How He gave His life on Calvary to save a wretch like me. . .

“That song just filled and warmed my body,” says Deborah, who left her cards on the table to join the singers. “My hands went up in the air, tears starting coming out of my eyes, and I asked God to please help me.” Later, with one of the PF volunteers, she prayed to commit her life to Christ.

 

“I was like the Prodigal Son down in that pig slime,” she says. “And then the son ‘came to himself.’ I was like that: I came to myself and said, “I’m going to my Father.’”