A Little About Me
"But the Hands are the Hands of Esau"
(the confession of a hypocrite)

The title (and subtitle) of my booklet might be confusing to some. There is a story in Genesis about the time that Jacob stole Esau’s birthright by disguising himself with animal skins to appear to be hairy like his brother, and thus tricking his nearly blind father. The Bible relates: So Jacob went near to Isaac his father, who felt him and said, "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau."

Since I spent many years acting like a Christian, fooling many in my church, I can relate to the story. I was the “perfect” hypocrite – acting Godly on Sunday, and around my family and church friends; yet all the while an unregenerate heathen, I was like Jacob – wearing Christian trappings to hide my unchristian ways. Thus the title of this booklet.

Chapter One - Meeting Nancy

I was eight years old at the time, sitting there watching the Billy Graham film, "Oiltown U.S.A." at the Youth For Christ rally. I wanted to be accepted by the church I went to, so I "accepted Christ" at the end of the movie. I was taken to a back room, led through the "sinner's prayer" and sent off with a packet of literature. I had accepted Jesus as my Savior, but had no understanding of the Lordship of Christ.

I was soon baptized and accepted into the fellowship of my local church. I did the right things, said the right words, and was soon accepted as a leader in Sunday School and Youth Groups. I was active in church functions and finally accepted as somebody in my circle of Christian friends. But, as time went on, I started leading a double life – the perfect Christian around church people, and the perfect heathen among my non-church friends.

I graduated from high school in 1963, and went to Chicago to attend Moody Bible Institute. Finally being free from my family and friends in the wild town of Chicago brought about new thrills. I had a roommate who was like me, and we went wild – spending our evenings in porno theaters, bars, and looking for sex in all the wrong places. We finally got caught breaking the rules at Moody and resigned before they could expel us, so we could have "lack of finances" rather than "removed for disciplinary reasons" on our transcripts.

I returned to Cleveland, Ohio, and resumed my double life. Not long after I returned, I fell in love with a girl five years younger than I was. She was sixteen and I was now twenty-one. We went together for about a year-and-a-half, and she finally left me for someone closer to her own age. I was devastated.

I tried to run away from myself to get over my hurt feelings. I tried alcohol, and spent most evenings drunk. Finally, a friend of mine turned me onto drugs. I tried LSD and learned how to really escape for a while! I spent the next three years sold out to drugs. LSD, Marihuana, Psilocybin, Peyote Buttons, Hashish, Amphetamines, Talwin, Neumorphan, Nembutal, Seconal, Morphine, Opium, Coke, and finally, Heroin. I got busted for Possession of LSD and Marihuana, and Possession for sale of LSD. Since the bust made the papers, I was quickly given the "Left Foot of Fellowship" by my church for "actions unbecoming a Christian."

My habit soon built up to the point where I needed about $50 a day just to keep from withdrawal. I did some Breaking and Entering, but decided that stealing merchandise and selling it wasn't very profitable for me – the fence made more than I did, and I did all the work! So I got together with my friends and turned to Armed Robbery. I had only one worry, and that was that one of my partners was trigger-happy. So the other two of us insisted that we use a toy gun, as we didn't want to get busted for Accessory to Murder. We had a Mattel "Shootin' Shell .38" with "Greeny Stickum Caps!" It was realistic enough that we used it in about 75 Armed Robberies and never had the gun challenged. In fact, using it, we were able to take real guns away from those we robbed.

I was still playing the game. I was attending another church and would go to Sunday School high on Heroin, "cook up" and shoot a booster between Sunday School and church, and then attend church. Since the church taught "eternal security" and since I had made my "profession of faith" at eight years' old, I thought I was "cool" with God and would make it to Heaven should something happen to me. I knew the Lord would be "ticked" at me, but thought He had to take me anyway.

It was inevitable – we finally got caught and, on February 17, 1972, I was sentenced to 10-25 years in the Ohio State Reformatory for Armed Robbery. Fortunately, because the earlier possession charge had not yet gone to trial, and due to the length of my sentence, the judge just processed it with a "journal entry" and let the time serve for both crimes. By the time I was arrested, my habit had grown to $100/day just to stay well – more if I wanted to get high.

I'll never forget the first time I heard the steel door close at the prison. It slammed shut just behind me and I realized that it wouldn't open for me for at least 3 ½ years – assuming everything went smoothly and I was paroled the first time I went to the board. I almost threw up, my stomach was churning, and I felt slightly weak at the knees. Reality had hit home. I was not going to be set free for a long time.

I was fortunate in that I had a friend in the Reformatory who had been there a while and had "taught me the ropes" in letters while I was waiting to go to trial. I knew who to pay off to get the things I wanted. While in Orientation I put in a fix to get a good desk job in the Inside Parole Office where they processed the inmate paperwork prior to the inmate going out on parole. It was a good job in a small office where you were treated like a person, not a number. Because I paid the right inmates, I was assigned to the office without having to go through the Classification procedure – where most new inmates were assigned to the Food Service. It cost me a carton of cigarettes. Most prisons are on the "Tobacco Standard" – where cigarettes are money. Cigarettes could buy you anything. For a carton of cigarettes, a person could even hire someone to kill another inmate. Life was that cheap. (This was during 1972-1976, when smoking was allowed in Ohio prisons).

Two or three days before I left Orientation and started work, I was transferred to a different cell. I was only allowed to take my personal belongings which amounted to 5 changes of underwear and socks, a Bible, and four or five paperback science-fiction books. I had read the paperbacks a number of times, and was quite bored. I even read an advertising supplement from an old paper four or five times. I started thumbing through the Bible (which I hadn't wanted my mom to send me anyway) and, to ease the boredom, decided to see how many verses that I had learned as a kid I could remember. I went through a few and then tried to see if I could still quote all the verses in what is called "The Romans Road." (E.g. Romans 3:10; 3:23; 6:23; 5:8; 10:9-10.) I discovered that I remembered them quite well. I also discovered that the Lord used those verses to convict me of the fact that I had never really accepted Him as my Lord. I was spiraling down in a state of depression and surrender. I prayed, "Lord, I've blown it. I'm 27 years old and my entire worldly possessions don't even fill up a pillowcase. I don't care if I live or die. If there is anything left of my life that You want, take it. I'm through with it. In Jesus' Name, Amen."

I didn't hear bells or whistles or angels shouting, but I felt a sense of freedom and peace that was totally out of place in a prison cell. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus had heard my prayer and made me His child. I prayed for a Christian cellmate. The strangest thing happened! Since my job assignment started the next day, I was moved out of Orientation and into the General Population the very next morning. Since the moves are done at breakfast time, I had just enough time to throw my stuff on my bed, exchange names with my new cellmate, and leave for my new job. We would have to wait until evening to get to know each other.

I found out that my new cellmate's name was Cullen T. and that he was in on a drug charge. We exchanged "war stories" for awhile and then I decided to unpack. I noticed that he had a Bible on the desk. "Do you read that thing?" I asked, hoping to get an idea of where he was at before I exposed myself to possible harassment or ridicule. He replied that he did.

"Are you a Christian, then?" I asked. He replied, "Yeah, why?"

"I'm a Christian, too," I replied. He looked relieved. "Praise God!" he said.

We talked and I discovered that he had been praying for a Christian cellmate also! I quickly made my bed and we talked about the Lord until lights out. In fact, we were talking about the Rapture when lights out happened, and both jumped when the recorded trumpet started playing "Taps!" It proved to be a false alarm – the end was not yet!

Cullen and I shared nightly and we became close like real brothers. He told me of his dream to start a group where inmates would reach other inmates with the Gospel. He called his dream "Cons for Christ." Since the Reformatory allowed inmate-run clubs as long as they had a sponsor, we decided to apply for a charter to have a "Cons for Christ" club. We got one of the Protestant Chaplains, Rev. Ben Sorg, to agree to sponsor us. We borrowed the charter of the institution's Jaycees, and rewrote it for our use. The application was denied. We borrowed other institutional club charters and tried over and over again, but the prison officials kept denying it, and not telling us why. We finally just ran it as a Chaplain's Office program, even though it was nowhere near what we had wanted to accomplish and do.

Around that time an auto accident in the area seriously injured two Amish children. We got together and all donated money from our Commissary accounts to help with the medical bills. It amounted to $279.00, which was quite a sum considering that we only earned ten cents an hour. A local newspaper found out about the donation and wanted to do an article about it. Since the prison had received a lot of bad publicity, the thought of good publicity made them decide to allow the interview.

A few weeks later, a local TV station in Cleveland, Ohio did an exposé of the prison Food Service and general prison conditions. Although much of what was said was accurate, the station blamed the prison staff, instead of the legislators that kept reducing the prison's budget. Again, I offered to use the "Cons for Christ" group to bring some balance to the situation. The prison agreed and we arranged for the Cleveland Plain Dealer to do an article about the donation and the fact that we had started supporting an orphan through the Christian Children's Fund. At the close of the interview, the reporter asked if "Cons for Christ" was an official inmate group or not. We told him that we were awaiting a final ruling and that he should ask the Superintendent (Warden). The Superintendent knew that in order not to void the good publicity, he had to say "yes," and he told the newspaperman that we were a very respected institutional club! When the newspaper printed the article, we thanked the administration for approving us and started operating as a full-fledged institutional club. We also filed with the State of Ohio and became a non-profit corporation – as far as we know, the first time the state ever accepted an application where the original trustees were all behind bars! (A friend on the outside was our Statutory Agent – our only non-inmate member of the corporation.)

We signed a contract to put about $350 worth of Christian paperback literature into the Chaplain's Office library – while we only had $10 in our bank account. When the contract payments came due, the money was there and at the completion of the contract our bank balance was back to $10! We took that as a sign that it was a God thing! About this time, we started receiving some teachings from a variety of sources and started studying what the Bible said about the New Testament church. We discovered that, in fact, that is what Cons for Christ had become. We had a 2 ½ hour service in the chapel every Saturday during the time set aside for the weekly recreational movie. We ran over twenty hours of inmate-led Bible Study Classes in the Chaplain's Office each week. We were, in every sense of the word, doing church!

After much research in God's Word about the structure of the New Testament church and it's leadership, we decided to eliminate the titles of President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer that were the governing body of the club, and we reformed as a board of elders, deciding that nothing would ever be done without unanimity. We decided that this would be a sign that we were operating with the Mind of Christ in each matter that we voted on. Because of my Bible background and the trust that the leadership placed in me, I was elected to be the "Head Elder." By this time, our membership had grown phenomenally as many were being led to the Lord, and we soon had well over 200 inmates attending the services each Saturday afternoon. It was about this time that I got a call from the Associate Superintendent of Treatment and was informed that we could not go over 239 attendees, as that was 10% of the institutional population and over that would be a security risk. We trimmed our membership down to that figure, and instituted a waiting list and a series of mandatory Bible Classes before being considered for membership. There were times when the inmates had to wait about six months to be allowed into our church, and some were paroled before they could attend!

Due to some additional publicity, my list of people who I wrote to on a regular basis was around 200, and it was draining me of time I needed to spend on study and sermon preparation. I wrote most of the people and told them that I would no longer be able to write regularly. I trimmed the list down to about ten people. A few days later, one of our members came to me with a request. His fiancee was living near Warren, Ohio, and was sharing a trailer with another girl, named Nancy. Nancy was a new Christian with a handicapped son, and had just broken up with her boyfriend. I was asked to write Nancy and cheer her up. I answered, "No!"

After much begging and pleading, I finally agreed to write her. I had no idea what the Lord was planning on doing in my life. I wrote a number of letters all in the same day to cheer her up, and asked about things like her likes and dislikes as I needed information to keep this letter-writing campaign going. She replied, and I noticed that we had a lot in common. We corresponded for about a month, then she came to visit me. She had mentioned her height, 4' 10 ½", but I couldn't picture that compared to my own 6'. When the visit started, Nancy and Barb, my friend's fiancee, were already seated. The girls had brought us some food, and my friend and I ate like there was no tomorrow!

Soon the visit was terminated due to the number of visits and the available space. We stood up to leave, and I looked around for Nancy. "Where did she go?" I asked. Just then, I heard a voice coming from in front of me, "I'm right here!" I discovered just how short she really was! I went back to my cell and was in a quandary. I had been developing mild feelings for Nancy, and now they were full-blown. The real problem in my mind was the fact that Nancy had been married and divorced before coming to Christ and my background led me to believe that she could never scripturally marry again – and I wanted to ask her to marry me! I sought the Lord. The Lord brought a passage in the Bible to mind: 2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. "How many things become new?" the Lord seemed to be asking me.

"ALL things, Lord." I responded. "All things, or all things except divorce?" He asked. "But Lord, You said that what You had put together, no man should put asunder, and that divorce was only for adultery, and the person then couldn't remarry." "Your talking about passages that refer to Christian marriage where two people are making a vow before Me. Do you think I even listen to vows made by those who don't know Me? They are not joined together by Me, but by their own passions. When a person comes to the cross, they die. Arising from the cross is a new creature – one who never existed before. The Nancy that was divorced is dead. The Nancy you know is a new creature, and don't you ever put someone in bondage for something I have delivered them from!"

"Then it would be OK to ask her to marry me?" I asked. It seemed as if He said, "I have brought you two together and this is My will for you two." I wrote a long letter and asked her to marry me!

Remember, this was after just a month of correspondence, and only one visit! I didn't hear from her for a month. I later found out that I scared her so that she didn't know what to do – except pray. She did, and the Lord gave her the release after a month to say "Yes."