December, 2024
Hello my Beloved,
Wow! December went by quick! I’m not used to that. Before, October, November, and December seemed to be one long month. I enjoyed that. In October we had the Crab Carnival, caving and mountain climbing, the Apologetics Conference, Halloween/Fall celebrations, and of course, November and Thanksgiving. But the day after Thanksgiving was the official start of Christmas for our family and friends. While Thanksgiving always seemed magical to me because there was always a superconcentration of our closest friends and family around us, the next 30 or so days of the Christmas season was a level even beyond that.
I think it was so special because we had a month-long string of events that we did together that continually reminded us of who God is and His love for us. Some of my favorites were getting and decorating the Christmas tree, putting up decorations and lights inside the house and barn, and everywhere outside. Of course, the best of the best was reading the Christmas story with you, Sammi, Andrew, and Aly on Christmas Eve, sleeping under the tree, and opening presents early in the morning. It was so good just relaxing the whole day and enjoying the good food and company of excellent friends and family. The rest to the week that followed was great as well. Our annual Lord of the Rings/Hobbit marathon would take place. Everyone cuddled on the sofa with popcorn and other snacks. Finally, the time together, giving thanks, would culminate in a huge New Years’ Celebration with games, food, and lots of discussions about Theology, Apologetics, Philosophy, Politics, and Self-Defense. We would end the year praying with those we loved the most.
Even though I am unable to be home during this time, thank you for keeping me connected with visits, pictures, and phone calls. I am forever grateful that once again this Christmas Eve our family was able to read the Christmas story together over the phone. I took the liberty of color coding the
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passages in my Bible according to who is speaking. I also enjoyed hearing everyone’s voices on Christmas morning.
As I said last year, there are so many people here that never had the loving experiences we had during the holiday season. Many of them have a love/hate view of how we celebrate together. They love my descriptions of our past Christmases but had the fact that they never had that growing up. Others used to have it, but have lost it, seemingly forever, because their families have died or abandoned them while in prison. I do my best to spread around some of the love we shared at home with many of the guys here. I gathered my students on Christmas and had each one pick a role in the Christmas story (Noah got stuck playing Mary, he did a great and respectful job) and read through it. I then led them through a good study about the Christmas story and why it’s important. Thanks to Adam doing the bulk of the work, we did all of these things over a buffet style meal. Christmas morning, I woke up to presents of food and candy stacked beside my bed. I guess even the DOC can’t keep Santa out. 😊 We all exchanged little gifts during the day and fellowshipped together, sharing either favorite memories of past Christmases or hopes of future Christmases. It felt good connecting with the guys on that level. Some of them teared up. For them, it was their first taste of just being in a loving group during Christmas and both feeling loved while celebrating love personified being born in a stable some 2000 years ago.
I wish everyone here was seeking the Peace, Love, Hope, and Joy that I gave lessons on during Advent. For most of them, sex, drugs, violence, and anything that shows they are better than someone else, is what they seek the most. It all devolves into a concentrated form of hedonism. Adam got hit twice this month with the rotten milk attacks. This time it destroyed several of his books. I told him he needed to stop spending several hours cleaning his mattress,
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pillow, sheets, and blankets and instead drag it over to the guard booth and plop it down in front and tell them an unknown hazardous substance must have been ‘accidently’ spilled on his stuff for the second and third time and he needs the guards to go get him replacements. Hopefully it will motivate them to do something.
I had filled out a request form earlier for him to be moved because of the attacks, threats, stealing, and extortion attempts and had him sign it, but it was returned with a denial saying that inmates couldn’t asked to be moved. St. Brides move people for their benefit, not the benefit of the inmate. Again, the corruption level of the DOC is insane! Ironically, the matter was addressed by a rival gang that stepped up. The leader came to Adam and apologized for what he had been going through. He said it was going to stop now. That night they confronted two guys about the issue. Evidently, they didn’t want to stop, so the ‘conversation’ escalated to the point where both guys were left unconscious by their bunk, bruised and bleeding. There were no more attacks on Adam the rest of the month.
That wasn’t the only violence we saw this month. We spent a week locked down in 350B because there was another 7 vs 1 beatdown in the bathroom where a guy lost most of an ear. We also had a fight during breakfast the day after lockdown ended, this time it was only 2 against 1. I don’t worry about getting jumped by multiple people like that. I have spent decades training against multiple opponents, that and I know how to stay away from things that would lead to that type of engagement. The respect I have in here takes care of the rest. My fear is that if such an engagement were to ever happen, the only way to defend myself would be to cause some serious damage to one or more of my attackers. I am almost certain that DOC would hit me with very serious charges for defending myself and send me up several levels to a higher security prison, take away my ability to communicate with you guys, and extend my sentence.
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As the violence level continues to rise, it caused one of my students, Keys, to request an emergency move to protective custody. This means he will spend the remainder of his time here in solitary.
As I said many times before, God has uniquely equipped me to serve Him in this environment. I don’t fear the violence of the intellectual attacks on Christianity. And, because I see EVERYONE as being made in the image of God in here, I treat them accordingly. I try to be a very bright light in a very dark place. The fruit of that continues to spring forth. Not only do I continue to gain new members to my group, I have other groups coming to me now as well. One of the leaders in the Asatru faith came to me this month and asked for my help. Practitioners of Asatru claim to worship the Norse Gods like Odin, Thor, and others. They are also a white supremacist group. They live by the creed of ‘survival of the fittest.’ Anyway, one of their leaders came to me and said he always saw me teaching on wisdom, could I give him some quotes of very wise people for him and the rest of this practitioners to study during their worship services? Ha! So, I filled up several pages with quotes from people like Stu Weber, CS Lewis, GK Chesterton, Francis Bacon, Blaise Pascal, Dorothy Sayers, Geisler, and many others including Proverbs. The topics ranged from God’s design for us as men to the importance of pursuing the truth about God. I was so funny the first time I walked into the rec room where they hold their services and see a quote from Christian author Stu Weber written on their white board, on how to fulfill Biblical manhood (from his book Tender Warrior). You can’t make this stuff up! God has sent the leaders of a white supremacist cult to me to give them wisdom to study. So now they spent their time studying Christian wisdom. Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor! 😊
Sadly, around the same time, I got word from one of my other students
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in another dorm that one of the leaders of the Protestant Church here made a remark that the only reason he could think of as to why God hasn’t moved me to a less violent and less chaotic dorm where there was far less evil is that I must have committed some horrible, secret sin while in 350B, so God is punishing me. I have no patience for that level of arrogance from a fellow believer. Much of the reason that the moral fabric of America is in a free fall at the moment is that Christians think their only ‘mission field’ is the ‘safe places’ around them. They have no concept of going through the ‘gates of Hell’ (Matthey 16:18), to rescue those who are being taken away to death or are stumbling to the slaughter (Proverbs 24:11-12). Are only their neighbors living in ‘safe places’ worthy of their love (Mark 12:28-31)? Do I long for less chaos sometimes? Yes. But I am honored that God continues to use me in the midst of such darkness. I am thankful that He has deemed this humble Paladin a useful vessel to serve in this very dark place (2 Timothy 2:21). Every time He uses me to rescue someone from this darkness and bring them into the light; I am blown away that He can do so much with so little (me).
Continue to pray for my wisdom and protection my Beloved. The danger sadly exists from all sides. I was informed by the DOC that I was now enrolled in a drug rehab program. I was threatened with a charge if I failed to attend. Thankfully, after several days I showed the order to the counselor in our dorm who quickly got mad and told me she would take care of the ‘#!?#’s’ that put someone in a drug rehab program that has never taken drugs in his life, not does he have any drug charges. I was thankful for that. Speaking of drug problems, we also had a guy take some sort of drug and flipped out. The guards had to come in and subdue him. As of this writing he is still in medical.
As December wound down, I was able to get the head of the Muslim group to bring his Muslim students to my Worldview Analysis and Construction class and teach my students about Islam since we were
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studying all of the worldviews under the Theistic category. He did a good job until we got to the part of the class where I got him to field worldview questions like; What is our purpose in life? Is there a right and wrong? Why does it seem like the world is not as it should be? What happens after we die? What is a human being? They were shocked to find out Allah makes evil things happen, that right and wrong were based on his will and that was arbitrary, that humans were not made in his image, thus their value was arbitrary, and that they had not eternal security because even if their good deeds outweighed their bad, he could still send them to Hell. They then asked what the Christian view was. As I walked through all of the questions you could see they were drawn much more to Christianity and its answers rather than Islam’s. I closed the class with an admonition to follow the evidence wherever it led because Islam and Christianity couldn’t both be true. Someone asked me for our evidence, so I took 2 minutes to give them a cross section of about 10 arguments. I invited their leader to do the same for Islam. He gave 1, the predictable perfection of the Arabic the Quran was written in. You could see he was rattled by the public comparison. Please pray that the Holy Spirit works with the seeds we planted.
I love you so very much my Beloved. Thank you again for the pictures, devotions, and prayers. Thank you also for getting everything set up for the Christmas story on Christmas Eve. I can’t wait to see what 2025 has in store for us. Love you!!!
Love,
Me
LAAF!
SCRAP!
GELPOY!
ILYSOOOM!
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