Highlight - Looking up when you can't look out

Brett had his rock bottom. A combination opiate and meth addiction finally landed him in jail, but this low point would be the beginning of Brett’s transformation.

“I’ve always believed in God and I knew as soon as I hit that jail cell…I knew where I needed to be and I just cried out to God. Of course, at first it was pretty selfish like, ‘God, if you’ll get me out of this I promise I’ll do this, that or whatever.’”

At first, God didn’t show up the way Brett would have liked, but Brett learned that God was teaching him and growing his faith.

“(I said) I’ll do this and that, but it didn’t happen. It just kept getting more complex, but what was happening was as I was learning. I was learning to trust, I was learning to be patient, and God knew exactly what I needed to go through.”

“I believe that God prepares us through our experiences, and God knows exactly what I needed to go through to be able to get me where he needed me to be.”

“I started reading the Bible. We started having Bible studies together, and there’s a lot of religion in incarceration because there’s a lot of people that have lost hope in the world, and it’s pretty normal when you get put behind walls to look up because you can’t look out.”

George sums up why it’s so important that God show us when we’re off track instead of just speaking to us directly.

“He allows us to go through what we do because he’s got to show us – he can’t just tell us, ‘you’re going down the wrong path,’ because we already know that. All of the sudden the reality comes to us, my only hope is God. Nothing’s changed there, but we’ve changed, and we’ve been given the gift of desperation.”

Looking up when you can't look out