By Zach Brown, a Missionary-athlete with the NE softball team
I have always felt a little uncomfortable sharing my testimony inside prison. Not because I don’t want to share it, but because my story is so different from what many of the men have experienced. So many of them come from broken homes, painful backgrounds, and circumstances I simply have not lived through. That is not my story.
But every once in a while, God puts someone in front of me who reminds me that brokenness can wear many different faces.
After I finished giving my testimony at FCI Fairton (NJ), I went into the stands and sat with the men while the Gospel was being presented. When that time ended, we had the opportunity we always value so much; a chance to talk with the men, answer questions, listen, and go wherever the conversation leads.
That is when a man named Nick came over to talk with me. As we talked, I learned that he had not been in prison very long at all. In fact, only a couple of months earlier, he had been serving as a Navy SEAL. He told me he had been raised in a Christian home with Christian parents, much like I was. But somewhere along the way, especially after entering the Navy, he began to drift from the faith. He started doing what the guys around him were doing, and little by little, he walked away. I asked him where his faith was now. His answer was honest and heavy; he was not even sure there was a God anymore.
His questions were the kinds of questions we hear often, but they were carrying a deep personal weight for him. Why do bad things happen to good people? How can there be so much evil in the world? How could God allow the things he had seen and experienced? As he talked, I could hear the anger in his voice. He was angry about the situations he had been put in. He was angry at the world. And underneath it all, he was angry at God.
I tried to walk with him through those questions as best I could. I talked with him about how suffering, while never easy and never something we fully understand in the moment, can often become the very place where God draws us closer to Himself. I tried to help him see that the hardest seasons of our lives do not have to be the end of faith; sometimes they become the place where faith begins again.
Because of Nick’s background and the things he has seen, I know those truths were not easy for him to receive. This was not a quick or simple conversation. But I am praying that the Lord will keep working in his heart, that he will continue to think about what we talked about, and that the questions that currently feel like barriers will become part of the path that leads him back to God.
Moments like this remind me why we go. We may never know what God is doing beneath the surface in a single conversation, but we do know He is present in those moments. Sometimes, in the stands after a testimony, He brings two very different people together so that one man can hear that he has not been forgotten.
