While running recently, I listened to a recording of the Book of Nehemiah. It takes about 9 ½ kilometers to listen to the whole book (unless I skip some of the genealogical parts).

Two things jumped out at me. First, Nehemiah confesses that “God put on his heart” the call to rebuild the wall of the devastated city of Jerusalem.

There seemed to be nothing good about the imprisonment of the biblical character Joseph. For years, he languished in Pharaoh’s dungeon, seemingly with no hope or purpose for his life. But God had not forgotten Joseph. He used those years of captivity to humble him and build up his character, and when the time was right, God called him to lead.

Recently my email program kept telling me that it could not connect to the server. After some tinkering, one of our hard-working IT specialists found the problem: My laptop was trying to find two networks and was connecting to neither. It was confused and stuck in a futile cycle of searching.

Daniel is enrolled in the Prisoners to Pastors program (also known as The Urban Ministry Institute) at his prison. That means he is a committed, engaged follower of Jesus. He spends hours every week in the classroom, going through rigorous, seminary-level classes.

“It seems like all the happy people are the ones inside the prison,” observed a member of our board on a recent trip to Michigan correctional facilities, where we attended seminary-level classes with inmate students and later shared a meal in their cafeteria.

In the first days of the government shutdown, four young soldiers – barely older than my own kids – were killed in action in Afghanistan. At first it seemed that the Department of Defense would not pay out death benefits or funeral expenses to the soldiers’ families; the Pentagon had no authority to make the payments, a spokesman said.

There are two basic ways of approaching our lives. One has to do with borders. When we are preoccupied with borders, we constantly ask ourselves, How close can I get to the edge? How fast can I drive and not get pulled over?

My wife Cathy and I always tried to make sure that our home was a place where our kids and their friends could hang out. We had a system – as long as our garage door was open, our kids’ friends were free to come in.

Restoration is all about seeing God’s Kingdom come in the lives of our neighbors and in the culture, bringing them back to the whole, joyful state He originally intended. But that restoration must happen in us before it happens through us.

At an Angel Tree summer camp, I was walking down the beach with a boy named Jackson.*

Jackson, about 12 years old, was eager to engage me. He told me all about school and his likes and dislikes. When I asked him about camp, he responded, “Camp is awesome … but my foster home is not.

In a recent edition of Inside Journal®, Prison Fellowship’s newspaper for men and women behind bars, I asked our readers this question: What should we do to make our streets safer from gun violence?

You might be thinking, What would criminals know or care about stopping violence?

The following article originally appeared on the Worldview Church website, a ministry of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview that is part of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

In Shawshank Redemption, “Red,” the character played by Morgan Freeman, calmly tells new inmate Andy Dufresne, “Haven’t you heard?

Antoinette Tuff was sitting at the front desk of the elementary school where she worked when a mentally unstable young man entered with an assault rifle and a bag full of ammunition. But instead of the too-familiar narrative of a tragic school shooting, another drama played out.

Every individual is addicted to something, and every individual has an opportunity to be restored. In the most recent Frontlines, Prison Fellowship CEO Jim Liske recounts the story of a current PF volunteer and former methamphetamine addict who has become a part of the restoration process in the lives of others.

Things tend to work most effectively when they most closely follow the intent of their designer. A German roadster is at its best when it’s hugging the asphalt of the Autobahn, but it wasn’t designed to take a family of six to soccer practice – at least not comfortably.