Thought Quotient

Is it any wonder that the Gospel literally means ‘good news’? Just think about it - no matter who we are, or what we’ve done - hope, healing, and salvation is offered by God! God wants to have a relationship with us. Here’s another testimony to the power of the Gospel and God’s love for us…

…Ron Gruber is one of those who easily could have been written off as a lost cause. From the time of his parents’ divorce in high school, Ron had always hung out with a very rough group of guys. They were the kind who if they wanted to fight you would grab a brick, a bottle, or a steel bar. When the law finally caught up to him in 1977, after a bar brawl, a murder, and charges of multiple assaults, not much had changed. And in 1979 at the Iowa State Penitentiary, Gruber, leader of the national outlaw gang. Sons of Silence, was a prisoner looking for a head to bust. Terry Mapes, a young correctional officer, was simply in the way. “They’d found alcohol in Ron’s cell. I was told to go up and separate them,” explains Terry. But when he got there Ron and another gang member — both roaring drunk — started beating Terry senseless. Ron and his cell-mate pulled out Terry’s hair, beat him to the floor, tried to throw him from the third floor tier, but somehow Terry held on and survived. Two years later, Ron was released and went right back to his old lifestyle. But the past hadn’t finished catching up to him. In 1994, he was charged with a murder he’d committed 10 years earlier. On the run, for two weeks out in the woods he finally gave up on his old way of life. He turned himself over to God, and then turned himself in to the police. Years later, Ron signed up for Prison Fellowship’s faith-based prison program, the InnerChange Freedom Initiative in Newton, Iowa. Isn’t it just like God that there, Ron, a born-again Christian would meet up again with Terry Mapes, the man he’d nearly beaten to death, who was now the warden at that facility? When Terry walked in, Ron breathed a prayer … and walked over to him. “Mr. Mapes,” he said, extending his hand, “I want to tell you I’m sorry for the pain I put in your life. I’m a Christian now, and I don’t expect you to believe my mouth. But my actions will speak for the One I now serve.” Terry looked at him hard. Should he believe him? Then he took Ron’s hand and said, “I said I’d never do this, but I forgive you.” Years have gone by now, and Terry has seen Ron’s actions prove his words. Ron has continued to grow in Christ. In fact, the officials at the Newton facility saw what a profound effect Ron had on other inmates that they asked him this year to spend time with the inmates in the maximum security Incorrigible Unit. Now Ron, still an inmate, goes to this most dreaded of units three times a week to visit and pray with those prisoners who are the most difficult to handle.

Imagine, a man whom anyone else would have written off, now transformed by the Gospel, and ministering to others who are society’s cast-offs. As Ron puts it, “I was a soldier for Satan in the darkness, but because of the blood of Jesus Christ, I’m a soldier for God in the light.”

Related Links:
Prison Fellowship Ministries

Tags: News and Media, Theology

This entry was posted by Roger on Thursday, December 29th, 2005 at 5:22 pm and is filed under News and Media, Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.