The Heart of a Movement
If you want to learn about movements, follow the stories of changed lives. If there’s no stories, it may not be a movement of God. This story comes from my interview with Troop.
Troop admits, “Most of my life has been a calamity of drug addiction and alcoholism, gangs and prison. My gang was the Aryan Brotherhood.”
“When I got out of prison I tried to build a life without God. But I would always go back to drugs, looking to fill the void. My parents, my wife, would ask, ‘Why do you do that? Why do you come out, climb back on a mountain, and just jump back up in a grave?’ I had no answer.
When he committed a capital offense, two jurors blocked the death penalty and the judged sentenced him to 40 years. He’ll come up for parole when he’s 77.
For joining the Aryan Brotherhood, Terry was put in solitary for eight years. He lived in a concrete cell, for twenty-three hours each day. He got one hour a day alone in the day room.
While he was in jail his mother passed away and his sixteen-year-old son passed away. Troop felt alone in the world with no reason to go on. He thought about suicide but then he remembered Jesus from his youth. His parents never went to church, but they had sent him. Alone in his cell he knelt and prayed, “God you’re going to have to do this. I can’t do it. If you’re real, show me.”
He laid back in his bunk. Something changed.
“I felt God say, ‘You've been saying you know me for a long time but you ain't never followed me.’ So I got up from my bunk and I just started throwing sin out under my door. Dozens of pornographic magazines.”
“My neighbors called out, ‘What you doing?’ I yelled, ‘Leave me alone!’ I had surrendered.”
He began reading God’s Word and his life started changing. The desire for drugs was gone. He knew His whole life he’d been missing a relationship with his Creator.
To get out of solitary a gang member has to go through a program called Gang Renunciation And Disassociation (GRAD). There’s a long waiting list. It took Troop another six years to get in.
During that time he was diagnosed with stage four cancer. He spent a year in the prison hospital and weighed just 120 pounds. The cancer was all over his body. He was placed in the hospice.
Cancer didn’t bother Troop. “Even though I was struggling with chemotherapy and throwing up every day, lost all my hair, even my teeth started falling out from nerve damage from the chemo. I was at peace for the first time in my life. I wanted to go and be with Jesus.”
“But my praying grandmother showed up and she said, ‘You're not going to quit! I don't care what the doctor said. You're going to go back and get treatment and let Jesus do what Jesus does.’” He agreed.
Troop remembers, “When my cancer was cured, I wasn't happy. I told God, I don’t deserve this! Why not heal some child that hasn't done anything wrong?
When he finished the GRAD program, and after eight years in solitary, he was released back into prison life. It was hard.
“Solitary felt like Jonah in the belly of a whale. When the whale finally spat me out, I had some choices to make. I was still in prison. I didn't know about discipleship. I didn't know that God had a plan for my life. I didn’t know that God wanted me to tell others about him.”
“Then I heard that was a seminary starting in the Darrington unit. I could earn a bachelor’s degree in Biblical studies. This is what I’d been praying for, a chance to grow in my understanding of the Bible.”
“The studies answered so many of my questions and taught me, some of my questions don’t even have answers. I caught a vision to change the prison through spreading the gospel.”
“I was a poor high school student, but God gave me a desire to study and I made good grades at seminary. God was molding and shaping me. He gave me a group of brothers who invested in me. They loved me. Something I’d never experienced.”
“The whole time, I knew what I wanted to do. God was leading me back where I’d come from — to the gang members in solitary.”
Three years later, I was one of the first tier walkers ministering to the guys in solitary — the troublemakers, the gang leaders, the drug dealers, the violent men. Just like I’d was.”
