After two weeks on the road with The Gospel Echoes on their Spring Banquet Fund Raising Tour, where I was the speaker (they have enough singers), I will share one of the stories I told every night on the tour. If you’ve heard it, you probably attended one of the banquets, or you have read my book, Showing Up. (this story is on page 88.)

In the Kentucky State Reformatory in 1999, I saw a man with a dirty makeshift two inch strip of cloth across his face, tied ear to ear, sort of like eyeglasses. I was trying not to stare at him when it dawned on me that he wouldn’t notice anyway. As I looked closer, his face didn’t seem to have a normal shape. I then noticed that he didn’t have any eyes or nose! Volunteer Sandy Fatow talked to him. She asked him what happened. “I got shot in the face with a shotgun,” he said. Sandy has been in prison work for years. She asked him, “Were you on your way to church when this happened?” The man laughed. I did, too. Sandy then led him through The Four Spiritual Laws and asked him if he would like to commit his life to Jesus. After a pause, he replied, “Naw, I don’t think so.” When Sandy asked him why, he replied, “I’m just not ready to give it all up.”

That reminded me of Frank Constantino, who got the same answer from an inmate in Florida several years ago. He went into the solitary confinement unit (the “hole”) at a maximum security prison. The hallway between two rows of cells was littered with human waste (sewage), garbage, vomit, food scraps, paper plates, empty cups… The smell of sewage and garbage was enough to choke him. He walked down the hall looking into the cells. The first inmate was under his covers and didn’t move. The second man pulled his blanket up over his head. At the third or fourth cell a man was sitting on his bunk, looking at Frank.

“How ya doing?” Frank asked.
 “Not so good.” he responded. 
“Why don’t you give your life to Christ?”

The inmate, Bill, cussing and yelling, said, “Don’t give me that religious !@#*@…”
So Frank changed his approach. “Do you have a sister?”


“WHY DO YOU WANT TO KNOW IF I HAVE A SISTER?!”


“I just want to know,” Frank said.
“Yeah, I got a sister.”


“What would you tell her if she wrote you a letter and told you that she is dating a man just like you?”

“She better not date someone like me. I’ll bust his head. I’ll slap some sense into her…” Bill said.

“You got a brother?”


“Yeah.”


“What if he wrote you a letter and said, ‘Bill, I want to be just like you.’”


“He knows better than that. He’d better not grow up to be like me. Look where I am!”


“Looks like you’re not satisfied with the way your life has turned out, Bill. Why don’t you consider committing your life to Jesus Christ?”


“You know,” Bill said, now getting serious, “you’re probably right. Maybe I should… But…” Bill paused. “I’m just not ready to give it all up.”


Frank looked around the filty, satanic grafitti on the walls, written in human blood and human excrement; the garbage and sewage on the floor; the maggots and vermin that were moving in the water at his feet… Then he looked up at Bill and said, “You know, Bill, you have point…” He waved his arm at the walls and floor and the maggots and the sewage. “Who would want to give this up?!”

Sound ridiculous? It ought to, because it is. And yet, that was me. I was outwardly fine. Well respected, working a good job, “behaving” myself… But I was clinging to things that in reality were garbage and sewage. Wood, hay and stubble. I was not ready to “give it all up.” When I finally did “give it all up,” the words of the hymn became real to me, “And the things of this world will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.”

Suggestion: Give it all up!