Roberto and I had never met before, but neither that—nor the prison regulations against physical contact with visitors—kept him from giving me a bone-crushing hug.

“I’m so thankful you are here,” Roberto said, towering over me while a grin stretched across his face.

In the community where I grew up, my father had a friend named Albert. Albert was known throughout town as a drunk, but my father stuck by him, anyway. He saw not who Albert was, but who he could be—a child of God full of love and joy.

The greatest gift in Zachary’s life is his daughter. Like many new dads, his whole world changed when she was born. “She was the light in my world of endless darkness. She made me see,” he wrote in a recent letter to Prison Fellowship.

When I was growing up my father had a favorite saying. “There are two types of people in the world,” he would say, “those who need to share the Gospel, and those who need to hear it. So if you’re not sharing it …”

The words he left unsaid did most of the talking, and I always knew he meant it sincerely.

“Restore us, LORD God Almighty; make your face shine on us, that we may be saved.” – Psalm 80:19

To restore something, in a spiritual sense, is to return it to the state God intended for it. God created men and women in His image and gave us the privilege of loving Him and one another.

In a major criminal justice reform speech this week, President Obama brought attention to the steep rise in America’s prison population over the last few decades—and its collateral consequences for prisoners’ children.

“Around one million fathers are behind bars,” the president said.

I sat recently with a state-level corrections leader who had made time in his busy schedule to have lunch. He was feeling the need for prayer. Though he is a man with an impressive career of leadership, he is new to his job and new to the entire field of corrections.

I’ve only ever been a member of one prison gang. Some time ago I was made an honorary member of “God’s Gang for Change,” the faith-based dorm at a correctional facility in Alabama.

On a recent visit I had the privilege of celebrating a worship service with my fellow “gang members.”

It was uncanny. The prisoner standing in front of me shared my first name. Like me, he was raised on a farm in Michigan. In fact, our homes were so close together that we frequented the same ice cream parlor and hamburger joint growing up.

When I was still a pastor in Michigan, Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson came up for a visit. He attended a lunch celebrating those involved in a church-based reentry program for the formerly incarcerated. Men and women came up to thank Chuck for his work with prisoners, and as they did so, tears sprang to his eyes.

Brother Potts will never go home. Because of the crimes he has committed, he will spend the rest of his days on earth locked behind prison bars. But he is also one of the most joyful people I know. He is humble, gentle, and caring.

By God’s grace, I have never served a sentence, but the men and women I am blessed to encounter in prison always teach me about following Jesus.

Recently, I was privileged to spend an entire day in prison with hundreds of prisoners and their families.

This winter I saw a prison leader do something that almost never happens. At a Midwest prison, where men are enrolled in a Prison Fellowship seminary-level training program, the warden allowed close to 400 prisoners to gather in the gymnasium to drink coffee, have cookies, sing, hear the Gospel, and interact with 30 volunteers.

Archeologists working in Jerusalem think they might have excavated the site of Jesus’ trial (Mark 15). Fifteen years ago, a team began digging through the layers of an abandoned building near the Tower of David. They believe they have uncovered the foundations of Herod’s Palace, a probable site for Jesus’ famous audience with Pontius Pilate.

In the Gospels, we get a sense of the profound, loving relationship between God the Father and His Son, Jesus.

Only once do we see the Father and Son separated. As Jesus hangs on the cross between two thieves, with the weight of the world’s sin on His shoulders, He feels the agony of parental absence.