LIFE’S FINAL EXAM

By Jim Jackson

Jim's Daily Awakenings
January 7, 2020

A little over 20 years ago, a friend of mine attended an Anti-Death Penalty Conference in San Antonio. He attended because he had come to oppose capital punishment for various reasons, including his faith and fiscal conservatism (because of mandatory appeals, capital cases cost the state millions of dollars more than non-capital cases). My friend wanted to be better informed. But on that day in 1999, he could not have known where the journey he was beginning would take him.

He left the conference and asked to be assigned a death-row pen pal. He was given the name and address of a prisoner in Florida. After writing for a year, my friend began traveling from Texas to Florida semi-annually to visit.

In 2012, my friend retired from his Texas job and moved to Alabama, in part to shorten to distance to his Florida pen pal. The prison visits increased to three times a year.

Finally, in 2017, my friend relocated to central Florida, only an hour away from his pen pal. Today the two men visit on the third Saturday of each month, plus on holidays.

Does it strike you as odd that a thoroughly normal man would organize his life around visiting a convicted murderer? If so, consider that Moses, David, and Paul were murderers, and they became men “after God’s own heart.”

In addition, Jesus’ parable of the last judgment (Matthew 25:31-46) says that when life is over, we will all be asked a series of questions. One of the questions on the final exam will be whether we visited and cared for people in prison. When my friend dies, he will pass that test.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I would never choose a prison inmate as a pen pal, especially not one sitting on death row. But if I had, I would have chosen that model inmate, Charlie Manson.