Jeffery Hopper has a picture of himself and his daughter, Amanda, sitting on the couch when she was just a little girl.
“She adored me. I was her world,” Jeffery remembers. “I destroyed it by going to prison.”
“We’ll All Go Down Together”
Jeffery grew up in Port Neches, Texas, where he adopted a criminal lifestyle early on.
“I had no Christian upbringing whatsoever,” he recalls. “Bibles were not allowed in my house.” Instead, his father taught him to have a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, taking whatever he wanted.
“If I wanted a bicycle or a car,” he says, “I had to buy it or steal it. I stole it.”
Despite spending a week in jail at age 14, Jeffery mostly avoided the consequences of his actions, until he graduated to drug trafficking. A few years after his daughter was born, he got in over his head, and his entire family relocated to Las Vegas, Nev., to protect his life.
Jeffery had gotten divorced from Amanda’s mother, and he didn’t see his daughter as often as he wanted. Amanda was the only good thing in his life. He fantasized about making enough money to take her somewhere they could live in peace, but his dream of a big score backfired.
Jeffery, his father, and one of his brothers stole $1.1 million from the Stardust Casino in a heist that made headlines in April 1992. But they were soon caught, and authorities threatened to charge the entire Hopper family – including Jeffery’s uninvolved mother and sisters – with crimes.
“My dad said, ‘Fine, we’ll all go down together,’” Jeffery remembers, but he knew he couldn’t let that happen. “I realized that what we do hurts other people – my daughter, my family… I pled guilty and agreed to testify.”
Jeffery entered prison. In part, he was relieved to stop looking over his shoulder – to stop dodging death.
“When I look back on it, I was rescued when I was arrested,” he muses.
But it didn’t feel like rescue to five-year-old Amanda. When her daddy went to prison, she was devastated.
A Victory for Love
Jeffery’s testimony spared his mother and sisters, but his decision didn’t yet reflect a change in his heart. He was still “angry at the world.”
“I kept a list of people I was going to get even with – snitches, liars, people who betrayed me. [I wrote down] what they had done and the punishment I thought they deserved,” he says.
At the Seagoville, Texas, prison where Jeffery was incarcerated, temperatures rose unbearably high in the summer. The only room with air conditioning was the prison chapel.
Jeffery and other inmates used to sit in the back of the chapel. Many slept through the service. Jeffery thought the religious volunteers were a “joke.” He tuned out their words about God – until the chaplain talked about Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree® program. Jeffery thought about Amanda, and how nice it would be for her to receive a Christmas gift that said he still loved her. He signed her up.
In December, Jeffery received a note from Amanda, her childish letters written in pencil. She thanked him for the gifts and told him that she loved him.
When he opened her note after mail call, Jeffery fought tears. “Where I was, in prison, you don’t cry. It says you’re weak and a victim … The only way God got to me was through my daughter – the only weak spot I had,” he says.
God had broken through Jeffery’s defenses of hatred.
On Christmas Eve, Jeffery’s sister brought Amanda to visit him. The little girl gushed about the Angel Tree volunteers who had brought gifts to her home, and who had told her about the love and forgiveness of God. Amanda said that she loved and forgave her dad.
“I went to chapel after that,” remembers Jeffery, “and fell apart.”
“God Told Me To”
Jeffery studied his Bible behind bars, but he struggled to follow God after release. He wasn’t breaking the law and he still read Scripture, but he didn’t understand how it applied to his life, and he didn’t know how to find a church to help him grow.
Things changed when Jeffery was mangled by a five-ton machine at work in 1999. While he was in the hospital, a Christian co-worker and his pastor came to visit him.
“Why do you care? Why do you visit me? I’m not giving anything [to your church],” Jeffery said.
“God told me to,” the pastor answered.
The pastor’s answer rekindled Jeffery’s faith. He realized that God could speak to him and guide his steps, too – as long as Jeffery was listening. Wanting to grow more, Jeffery enrolled in seminary and studied to become a hospice chaplain. From 2010 to 2012, he comforted the dying with the forgiveness and peace of God. When he lost his hospice job, he went back to construction work with a smile on his face. He knew God had a plan for him, and he could serve Him wherever he was working.
He takes great joy in his role as a father to his two boys, Liam and Abel, and to grown-up Amanda, who followed in his footsteps.
“She started going to church, began to study, and will now challenge me on what my interpretation of Scripture is,” Jeffery laughs. Now the married mother of a baby girl, she has even ministered to the women in a local jail.
Jeffery still has a list, but a different kind. This year Jeffery has worked his way through a call list of local churches, recruiting them for the Angel Tree Christmas program. He has a compelling testimony to persuade them.
“I know what it does,” he says. “I know how far it goes.”
