“No, no,” I said hurriedly. “I used to like the first sort of magazines you showed me, but these days I’m trying a different path in life.”
“So what kind of path would that be?” asked Paddy.
“Well, if you really want to know, it’s the path of praying to Jesus and obeying his teachings,” I replied. “It’s a path that has changed my life.”
A long silence spread over us in that cell. It was eventually broken by Paddy who in a slow voice said the unexpected words, “You know, I’d really like to try that path myself.”
Before I could respond, the floodgates opened within Paddy, and he poured out a litany of woes describing all that was wrong with his present path of life. Much of his misery came from the kinds of complaints that are often heard in the world of freedom.
“There’s no meaning to my life . . . my wife doesn’t understand point to it . . . my relationships keep going wrong . . . my life’s just empty . . . totally unfulfilled.”
After much more in this vein Paddy ended by saying, “Me nan [grandmother] used to believe in Jesus, and she really had something. I can see that you’ve got something. So I’d like to try that path myself. I really would.”
One of my self-imposed survival rules in prison was that I had resolved never to talk about religion. Before I went inside, an ex-prisoner had warned me that “Jesus freaks sometimes get served up [beaten up].” So I had kept my prayers for the privacy of my own cell, until this moment. Now I realized that I had to respond to Paddy. So it was my turn to create a long pause between us, until I finally said, “Well, Paddy, if you feel that way, why don’t we say a prayer together?” I had moved a long way since the days when I thought that praying out loud would be worse than going to the dentist without an anesthetic.
So we prayed. First night, second night, third night. Then Paddy, who had in him the qualities of a good recruiting sergeant, decided that our two-man prayer partnership needed to be expanded. So he went off recruiting and came back with two or three of his friends, then two or three more, and then still more. Before we knew where we were, we had gathered together about twelve young men in a rather unusual prayer group—so unusual that it gave a new meaning to the Christian term “a cell group.”
We started off in considerable embarrassment. “How do we pray?” someone asked. Hesitantly I described the ACTS structure. By the time I had finished I thought no one had understood my explanation. Then a Nigerian prisoner leapt in with a passionate extempore prayer on why he adored the Lord Jesus. We were off and running.
Far from being the tutor of the group, I was its greatest learner and beneficiary. Until my time in prison I had prayed from my lips. It was my fellow prisoners who taught me how to pray from the heart.