Abuse, Crime, Prison. Now I Minister to the World I Came From. - Patrick Matthews

We're honored to have Patrick Matthews on for this episode. Patrick is actually the very first guest we ever recorded with. AnnoAuto's Perspectives is a listener-supported podcast, so if you appreciate what we do here, make sure you're subscribed and that you share this with others. Before we begin, this episode covers some difficult material, including violence, drugs, and sexual abuse. Please use discretion while listening or allowing others to listen. Okay, here's the conversation with Patrick.

And so I've learned to be gentle through little people. I grew up rough with big people, and I didn't understand how to be gentle with the people that I was going to church with. So I stepped on everybody's toes, and I pushed people and maligned people. And going to the desert a second time—we'll get into that in a little bit—taught me to reevaluate my life and to become a gentle person. I call you people the quiet people because your spirit is so gentle. I don't understand that. I didn't come from that.

You know, you say you didn't come from that. Like, what is your background? Like, where does your story start? Where were you born? Were you born into a Christian home? Like, yeah, what—tell me about that. I was born in Delaware County. My mother had an affair when she was 25 with a 15-year-old boy, and I'm the outcome.

When I was 18 years old, I went down to see my mother and just to discuss, you know, building a relationship. And she kind of looked off into the sky and she said, you know, during that period of time, everybody was advising me to have an abortion. I wish I did.

And so I just—gee, Mom, that's really nice. But that's the kind of relationship I had with my mother. She was pointing me back to my grandmother. She tried to raise me. I'm one of 4 children that my mother left when she went to Delaware.

She hooked up with a gentleman named Nathan Bailey, who was a truck driver, who was an alcoholic, and every time he got close to getting his license, he would get drunk, get caught, lose his license for a few more years. So he never worked. My mother was in love with this guy, and whatever rocks in his head filled the holes in hers. But they were a whole person together. But my mom—my mom just had some mental issues, and I struggled with the same kind of thing throughout my whole life.

Interpersonal relationships has always been extremely difficult for me. I either was big enough that I'd just command, or then I would shirk away. There was no in-between. I didn't become a friend. I either dominated it or just pulled away from it.

And that's plagued me my whole life. So I didn't come from a Christian home. My grandmother raised me in Drexel Hill. I had a grandfather who was a closeted homosexual, and my grandmother and grandfather did not like each other. They tolerated each other. They got married. They stayed married. I was a hyperactive child, and I would go up the streets and get into all kinds of things. One time somebody put a rollaway bed outside, and I folded it up, and I was dragging it home, and the police seen me, and they helped me. They figured, oh, this poor little kid's dragging this big bed. Well, about an hour later, they came to my grandmother's house after somebody called and said somebody stole my bed, and they knew where to get it.

But I got into all kinds of things. One time I was walking up and there was a temple, like Zulu temple or something like that. It was a shrine, or a temple, I don't know exactly what it was. And the caretaker said, do you want to take a ride? He gave me a Coca-Cola. He said, drink this. And then when I was in his car, he said, can you get in the floorboards? It was a creepy thing. It's starting to sound creepy. And then he took a book and he tossed it to me.

I was 6 years old, and it's the first time I ever seen pornography. And what he did that day—he put something into the drink. I remember waking up, and I had been abused by this guy. And that night I set a fire in a trash can behind an auto parts store about a quarter of a block away from where he dropped me off.

And the police came and they got me. They called my uncle, and my uncle drove. There were 2 bars in the neighborhood, Sharkey's and Gamble's. He was at Sharkey's drinking. He got a phone call to come get me, and he came into the police station, picked me up by my arm, and hit me.

If he looked at his hand, he would have seen blood. But he was too drunk, and he didn't care. So that's kind of how I got into homes. The Pennsylvania court system declared me incorrigible at 6.5, and I was put into— What does that mean? Incorrigible. Unable to handle.

They deemed me not controllable. And so they put me into Frontfield Hall, which was a 23-hour lockdown for about 3 months, and then they shipped me to a place called St. Gabriel's Hall. St. Gabriel's Hall was a reformatory, and about a year before I got there, they just took the wall down. It was a juvenile prison. So at 6.5, I was in a—about 6.75—I was in a juvenile prison for the next couple years. Most of the boys in that home, there were about 500 at that time. Most of them were 12, 15, 18 years old. I was the youngest guy there. And so within the first 3 or 4 months, I seen some horrendous things, and it kind of set my mentality, and it set my personality.

You know, I learned to shut off. Talking about the abuse that happened to me, I learned to turn my feelings off. And then going into an environment like that, I learned to turn the feelings really off. So I was able to become a sociopathic person by turning off feelings.

I had been married, and I'm skipping ahead here. I was married for a number of years, and my wife looked at me and said, why don't you get a dresser? This is at 7 years of marriage. I'm living in milk crates.

And I said, well, that means I'm staying. But my mentality was such that everything was—nothing was permanent. And so I was always ready that if the police were knocking at the front door, I was going to run out the back door and leave my life. And when you carry yourself that way, you're not able to develop healthy relationships.

And so I was a very shallow person. That's where I came from.

So were you—like, you're putting this—did you call it a reformatory? Reformatory. St. Gabriel's Hall. So what—like, eventually you get out of there. Like, at what age do they—how does that even work? Well, I was in St. Gabriel's Hall until I was, oh, 9. And then they sent me to a place called Methodist Home for Children.

That's another place. And that's where a Black pedophile named Arthur Floyd found me favorably, and some things happened. And again, emotionally, I shut down and put people off. I left there when I was about 16.5, 17, and I chose the streets because it was safer on the streets than it was anywhere else.

Like, on the streets. So you're homeless, basically, at that point. Couch surfing. Yeah. Going over to people's houses, living on their couches. The only other option I had was to move to New Jersey and live with this guy who was a pedophile, because my mother wanted to give my custody to him. And because I didn't know how to talk about that. How do you talk about something like that when you're a little boy? How do you tell somebody, this is happening?

I didn't know how to do that. I didn't emotionally put anything together. So I found it was a lot easier to be on the streets using drugs and alcohol and avoiding things. So did that turn into, you know, things like crime or gangs or—like, where did that—what path did that take you down? Well, some of the connections that I made in St. Gabriel's Hall, I continued on when I left. And my grandmother's neighborhood, even though I wasn't living there, I kept going back. Right up the street was where the Warlocks Motorcycle Club was.

And all the kids that I would have been in school with were in the Warlocks. And so growing up, I hung with these guys. And, you know, when I say grew up, when I came back to the neighborhood, they're the people I sought out. It's like you come—you grew up in a church, you come back in a neighborhood, you look for your church buddies. I didn't have church buddies.

I had people that I knew. So I would seek them out, and I'd go hang out with them for a while. And it always turned into alcohol and drugs and crime and just doing things that I shouldn't have been doing. Because alcohol and drugs became the answer to my problems.

It made me feel normal. I didn't know what normal was, but it made me feel a lot different than I did normally. Like a numbing agent for the pain? So when it—at some point, I was sent to a rehab, and I think I was 21, and I went to Eagleville Rehabilitation Center.

And alcohol and drugs were no longer the answer. So I took away the alcohol and drugs, and I still had the problem. What do you do with it? I joined something called Alcoholics Anonymous, and they talked to me about emotional, social, and spiritual growth. I didn't know how to emotionally grow. And they talked about God, and I got in fistfights.

So the only thing that I really had was physical sobriety. And I just didn't drink. And I was the most unhappy person. My hands were clenched. I walked around biting my jaw all the time, and I just was lost. It wasn't—you know, and I was talking about Shannon.

She's the last third part of that prophecy from Alcoholics Anonymous. Physical, spiritual, and emotional. Just about 9 years ago, that little body, that little person, came into my life, broke my heart. And now I've learned what emotions are about. I never knew. Like, I had them, you know, a tear would come in my eye, but I really didn't know what that meant. I didn't understand that. That was not a language that I was versed in. The spiritual part came when I was sent to the desert the first time. I went to prison, and I often refer to prison as my first desert.

I had the alcohol, the drugs, the fast car, all that craziness in my life. And when I slowed all that noise down, and I got into a place where I couldn't run, couldn't hide, couldn't pretend anymore, then I heard God's voice.

Then when I left prison, I got involved in ministry, and I supplemented that noise with activity. I started Harkin House. I started a whole bunch of stuff. And I recreated that noise in my life. And pride hit. And I unhitched my foundation strap.

And I told people I was retiring pridefully, but the reality is God was sending me to the desert again. Because my heart became far from God during that period of time. And I went to Wyoming, and once again, I heard His voice.

And now you see me. I'm here now, 3 years later, and I'm learning to keep the noise out of my life. I've been to the desert twice. I don't think I have a third time. And I don't think God wants—I don't think He would be as polite as He was the first 2 times. I know He's a gentle God.

But that third visit, or the second visit to the desert, taught me how to be quiet. He started sending me in the problems and turned the lens around. I had this guy that I was working with, and every time I walked in, I didn't know what to do with him. And so one day we were working in a church, and I watched him be very gentle to his bishop. And so I'm sitting there the next day, and he's yelling at me, "Rug, rug, rug!" And I'm like, how dare he?

He wouldn't do that to his bishop. And at that precise moment, I reflected back 2 years earlier, I was doing it to people in Chambersburg Christian Fellowship, and I felt convicted. And I grabbed my phone, and I started texting people, calling people, emailing, and apologizing for my behaviors. God took the lens and flipped it around so I could see it. And He started putting me into situations where I was negotiating for people who had problems.

And through that situation, I got to see my problem. And again, everyone that I went to, I picked up my phone. I was texting people, calling people, and emailing. But I created this situation with my brothers in Pennsylvania where I stepped on their toes so much they were just gun-shy. They didn't know what to do.

And my whole life, that's how I have done things. I've pushed. I've pulled. I told you the story about Dean Taylor. Ken Hallbaker. I wanted to introduce Ken Hallbaker to Dean Taylor. And he says, "Dean, come on over. I'm busy." And I grabbed his arm, and I quite literally drug him across the rocks at Roxbury Holiness Camp. And when I turned around, I seen 2 drag marks the whole way.

And I remember going, that's not good. And, you know, when I was in Wyoming, I called Dean, and I apologized.

And he said, "We love you the way you are."

But what happened internally, I realized I didn't love who I was. I didn't like being that person. I was not meant to be a pickle.

I was meant to be a cucumber like you. But unfortunately, I grew up around people in brine juice. So every time I get around you, you go, I smell that pickle juice on you. And no matter how far you get away from that pickle juice, once you turn a cucumber into a pickle, it will always be a pickle. You can never change it.

And that's what I'm trying to do. Not reinvent, but to change the way I did things. They weren't. I didn't know any different. My life was defined by making people do things.

And now God's teaching me how to network. In prison, somebody would have a piece of string, but they wanted a piece of chewing gum. So I would take the string from that guy over in cell 8 and go over here to a guy in cell B for a bag of potato chips. And I would trade it over here to this guy for a paperclip. And then I would come back to the guy and say, "Here."

I would get him what he needed. And in prison, I learned to do that, to help people. I wasn't making anything out of it. I just enjoyed the juice. Being able to do that. But God was working with me, teaching me how to network with people to help them get what they needed.

There's a story I've been wanting to tell for years, and we finally filmed it. For the first 100 years of the Anabaptist movement, following Jesus was a death sentence. These were people who refused the sword, even when it cost them everything, who were imprisoned, drowned, and burned alive for refusing to compromise. I spent weeks traveling across Europe with historian Dean Taylor and church history teacher Stephen Russell to the actual places where the story unfolded. To Zurich, where the first adult baptisms happened in 1525, up to the Netherlands, where Menno Simons lived and wrote. The result is Anabaptist Origins, a 10-part documentary series on the first 100 years of the Anabaptist movement. It releases July 11.

Subscribe at the link down below. So you're coming from a pretty intense situation. Basically on the street, or couch surfing, I guess you could say, but was gang involvement part of this story? Like, before prison and things? Like, you know, that's kind of a natural thing, right, to try to find a group. Like you were saying, these guys you were looking up to, you know, in the biker gangs or whatever. I don't know, anything more you want to add on that?

You click up with people that are like you. Everyone needs community and connections. So if you're in a dysfunctional environment, you're going to find dysfunctional people to create your community and your connections. And as I said before, the rocks in your head and the holes in theirs somehow will make a whole person. So the people that I grew up with, the ones that I seen down the street, the Blanchard Road people, the Warlocks, the street gangs, the warlords, Toby Hoban, the Undertakers. In my neighborhood, there were 7 or 8 street gangs, and they were all breaking into drugstores. They called themselves Drugstore Cowboys. They would break into drugstores and steal all the drugs, and they would stand on corners and drink and use drugs.

They were the people that I ascribed to be. I was a cucumber. They were pickles. So when I hung with them, I smelled like a pickle now. But that's not who God wanted me to be. I had no choice in this.

And that's not to say that at some point I didn't choose to do it, but initially I didn't have a choice. I was immersed in something, and a cucumber absorbs anything around it to become like it. It's a medium.

And I use that as a part of the story just to say, you know, I wasn't supposed to be this person. But see, falling into that sickness and drugs and alcohol and unchecked emotional problems and pornography, that not fixing that stuff created a secret life and a secret identity. And it just got worse and worse and more pervasive.

And I'm now, at the end of my life, trying to figure out how to renew my heart and my mind and my spirit. And the only thing that I can think to do. There's a song that Motley Crue put out called Kickstart My Heart, and it's a story about Nicky Sticks did a shot of heroin, and he was OD'ing, and they rushed in and they gave him a shot of adrenaline, straight in his heart.

And he came back to life. You used the expression in John Brew's interview about Conrad Grebel. He was a playboy. He was out there. He was doing some things. It was when they opened the scriptures that their mind and their heart changed. And that gave me a datum. And I'm wondering, how can I get this in my life? I'm getting older, and I'm starting to think, you know, I have people that Harkin House, Rick, and he's got dementia.

And some of the things that come out of his mouth, and it terrifies me now that I'm this gentle person or learning to be. I'm terrified of what will come out of my mouth as I need care. And it's scaring me. It was the whole Anabaptist people. See, John Brew's interview, like, was really—he was a historian that lived it. Like, I found out the backstory to John Brew, and he was the last of the Franconian conference that stayed plain and wore the plain suit to his church, even though everybody fled.

But he knew history, and he chased it down. And I just became interested in his story in that interview, and I found frailty. Here's this hero of our Anabaptist faith, and he has a past. And that made me feel like, if he has a past, maybe I can make it.

You know, I keep looking for commonalities. I don't find too many people like myself. And, you know, like, I hear somebody, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah. But I don't feel the inclusion. And in that little story, just hearing how he messed everything up. I have this tendency of setting myself up for failure all the time. And it's like a clock that goes off in me. I just do stupid things, and I find myself in a place, and I go, here I am again.

And I don't mean to do it. And as I've been reading through the Old Testament, I've been finding there's an entire generation of people that once again find themselves lost because they forget where they came from. I've never forgotten where I came from.

Like, one of the big things in a neighborhood that I used to hang is if somebody grew up in the ghetto, when they got out, they never came back. Well, my heart's never left the ghetto. And I have—that's why I'm into Tent Makers Travels, because I'm going back to the same people that I came from, and I'm backing them to come. There is a chance for someone like you. If they can see what I've seen, and their hearts can change, but then are the churches ready for that?

That's the problem. Like, that was so interesting, though, because you were here, you know, a couple days ago, and you were sending me some messages of like, hey, here we are, you know, feeding the homeless people under a bridge, you know, off the interstate. And I'm like, that's like, you know, right down the road from me. You know, and you were getting access into a whole world of the homeless or the out-and-outs, I guess you could say, the ghetto, that for someone like me, it's so alien that I might—I've driven over that overpass more times than I can count, probably hundreds of times. I've never seen those people that live under there. And you did.

Well, see, the story about leaving the hundred for the one.

There's a lot of churches I've talked to about this. And let's—the best way I describe it is if each one of them hundred of sheep costs $5, we have to be willing to invest $495 to get a dividend on a $5 investment.

And that's not a kingdom paradigm at times, because we're so efficient in building, buying, selling, that that doesn't make sense. We lose perspective. But as I read the gospels, Christ was willing to sell everything just to find that one person. And I keep looking for that one person, because if I find that one person, then everything that I've tried to do or I've been involved with is worth it, and I have validity to my Christian experience.

So I want to back up a little in your story here. Yep. You know, where you end up in prison. Yeah. What can you tell me about that? Like, how long were you in prison? And you found Christ in prison.

So obviously a transformative experience, but I'm sure that was a dark time in your life as well. Well, like I said, from 6 and a half until 16 and a half, I was in juvenile prison. So that was the first 10 years of incarceration in my life.

I became institutionalized. And so the fact that I eventually went back to prison isn't a surprise. The surprise is I didn't do the rest of my life in prison, because that's how I lived. Prison was just—it's a residual of a lifestyle that I leave. You know, I knew that eventually I'd go to jail.

But, you know, don't get upset about it. Don't argue because you're in jail. Just realize that's part of the business. Okay, let me take a nap.

I mean, that's how my mentality was. And I even said to my first wife one time, "Everybody I know goes to jail." And she looked at me and said, "Nobody I know has ever been to jail." That's the first time I ever came face to face with there are people living differently than I do. And I didn't know that. And it's not that I was—I was just naive to it. I just didn't see it.

I didn't pay attention to it. I was so self-absorbed. But anyway, I went to prison 2006. I was sentenced to 2 and a half to 10 years. And— 2 and a half to 10? How does that— It's a sentencing guideline. You know, the minimum was 2 and a half years, but they suggested that I could stay up to 10 years in prison. And so being 46 years old in prison, and I had gotten married a second time. I'm not advocating to marriages. The scriptures didn't make sense to me. I'll get back to that later on, because the scriptures weren't in my life. Nobody ever said to me, "Have you ever thought of one marriage, the covenant?"

I'll get to it now. Clyde Lehman, when I joined Chambersburg, said, "So you're done with getting married?" And I said, "Yeah. I've destroyed two perfectly good women. I'm not doing it again." "You believe in divorce and remarriage?" I said, "No. I wrecked two people. I'm tired of hurting people."

And then he explained the scriptures to me, and slowly but surely, as I opened it, it was revealed to me that I shouldn't have been married a second time.

But I was in—now I'm going to switch over. I was in prison, and my second wife called me, and she said I was up in a special room and got the phone call, and she said, "I want a divorce." And I said, "But I don't." And I heard the phone go down.

I ran out of money. I couldn't call her. I didn't know where to call her. I lost all control to everything that I had at that point, and I fell on the ground, and I crawled around the prison for three months. I was insane.

Start raving crazy. I couldn't talk to people. I didn't know what to say.

Everything I had stopped that day. And so I sat in that prison for 2 and a half years, and at some point I wanted to grow long hair. And the only way to grow long hair in prison is you have to join the Native American hoop.

So I went there, and they asked me what tribe I belonged to, and I said, "The Tuber tribe." And they accepted me for being a member of the Tuber tribe. Tuber is the botanical name for potato. I'm not Indian. I'm Irish. But they were so Indian, they didn't know that. That's my sarcasm.

Anyway, so I grew long hair there. And as I would go to the church for the hoop once a week, I would sit and listen to the pastor. He would open his door, and he would talk, and he would spread love by opening his door, a passive way of witnessing the people.

And I started to see some things. And I had a guy down the row. We were in a bunkhouse. He was down the way, and he'd play his radio real loud, and he'd play Heralds of Hope. And I would just sit there, shut up.

And you know, a number of times I wanted to throw him out the window and whatever. But every Saturday he would play Heralds of Hope, and I would listen to it. And I found myself waiting for it to come the Saturday to listen to it. Prison is routines. You get ready. You get used to waking up, going to eat, doing whatever yard time. You look for routines, and you look for things to break up the routines. And it became something that was breaking up my routine. And I started listening to it. At first I was mad at it.

But it started to make a little bit of sense to me. And I had the pastors at the church talking to me, not directly. They would open their door, and they would spread love in a way I'd never seen before. They weren't telling me I needed to do something. They were showing me a way to do something.

Reverend Clink was the main guy that did this. He'd let me sit in the back room with a computer and play with it. And I was doing whatever I was doing there to keep track of the hoop and who came. And he would open the door, and he would just talk about God to other people.

And slowly but surely, it just started seeping in. And one day I went up into my bunk, and I had seen the movie, The Shawshank Redemption: Either Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying. And that's a big reason why I started to think about my life, and it was all percolating around, and things were happening. And at that moment, I thought about that line. Either you get busy living or you get busy dying. And for 2 and a half years, I thought about killing myself every single day.

And every single day I had to talk myself off the ledge. I'll do it tomorrow. Well, I had came to a place where that ledge had no more room, and I was either going to do it or I was going to stop complaining about it.

And I found myself thinking about David Eby. Where will I spend eternity? And I started thinking about, I know which way this goes. I don't know which way that goes. And at that moment, I fell off my bunk, and I hit the floor. I can't. You can help. I didn't know what I was asking for, because I'd never seen anything different than what I was used to. But I knew that I was broken, and I was willing to sell my life for glass beads, because it's got to be better than what I have.

And I'm thinking at that time, you know, I read about Paul and Cyrus in the prison. They were singing in a jail opened up, and I'm like, maybe that will happen. Well, it didn't happen. Two and a half years later, I walked out of that prison. But I walked out of that prison a different person than I walked into that prison.

And the guards and the captains, they all seen a difference in me. They started treating me different. No longer were they rough and abrasive. They became a little more gentle, and they trusted a little more. I mean, they wouldn't give me a set of keys or anything like that, but if I asked to do something, they always found a way to do it for me.

And the kindnesses just showed me that I was on the right track. But I was walking around just emotionally and spiritually torn up. I didn't know how to make this all fit in my life. And then I left prison.

There was a guy that was in jail with. His name's Adolph Calhoun. First of all, Adolph is not a good name. And if you're an African-American, name Adolph. His parents didn't like him. I don't know. You never call. And I would harass him about his name all the time. But Adolph, or Coot Hooney, as we called him, I took my home plan and I threw it in the trash. He pulled it out, filled it out, and sent it in the mail for me. I resigned myself to spend the next 2 and a half years in, well, no, next 5 years in prison, because I did 5 years.

And they were going to parole me, and I wasn't getting any place that would let me out. I wasn't finding a place to go to, and I had given up. And so when the application for this one place came in, I threw it in the trash. Well, he went over, filled it out, and sent it for me. And I got paroled to Chambersburg.

And I was in a place called Second Chance Ministries, and it wasn't very good. And I would walk on Sundays from where I was to Pastor Andy's church, and I would pass at Chambersburg Christian Fellowship. And after a couple times, I just looked over, and I seen valings going into the church. And I peeked my head in and looked. I knew what valings were, and I walked in. And after a period of time, Clyde Lehman said to me, "You can stay for a whole service." So you would, like, duck in for a little and then just leave? Half an hour, go in, listen, because I was going up the street to my church.

And Clyde said, "You can stay for a whole service." It had been a long time since anybody invited me anywhere, let alone to say, "You can come back." So it was the love that he displayed. It wasn't the theology. It wasn't the doctrine.

It was a plain, simple love of feeling included in those two points I talked about. Everybody needs community, and everybody needs connectivity. And by him inviting me back, he offered those two things to me. And there was a time where Pastor Andy, who was connected to Second Chance Ministry, he said to me, "You have to choose. It's either me or those people." And in this little room that I started called the room, and I said, "It's a very easy choice. Let me get your books. I'll put them in your truck for you." But I literally had to make a choice between a Protestant church and an Anabaptist church.

And I made that because it has two points: community and connectivity.

I was lacking that. I needed that. I wasn't looking to discuss doctrine.

I didn't even know what it was. And theology, what's theology? I had this simple, childlike faith. Jesus said to do it. Okay. Let's do it. And there was no shame in that. I didn't need anything more. Since I've been around the churches, I've learned it's a lot more than that. But initially, I just needed milk.

And they were feeding me gently. Well, I got a little bit of a pull myself, and I started pushing people. And I created a problem. And I had to flee Chambersburg, go to the desert, hear God's voice, to come back, a different version of who I was.

So looking at your life now, how does your story inform the ministry and the things you're doing today? That connectivity to community is what I do. This is what I feel. You can evaluate it for yourself.

If somebody can see what I've seen in your people, the Anabaptist people, I think people would be converted. I believe they have the answer. Not the culture, but the Christian faith. And sometimes we can't separate the two. I'll probably get in trouble for that one. But anyway, if I could build a lighthouse tall enough to show the light of the churches that I found, so it can beam into places that you don't go, because you don't know how to get in there.

But they did that one time. It was called a Tower of Babel.

So I have a second choice. I can just take you into the streets and introduce you to people just like me.

I don't have a problem starting a conversation. Some of the people I know do. I'm a great starter. I'm a terrible finisher. And if I can take you out and show you maybe, maybe, maybe, just maybe, empathy will begin. When I started Harkin House, I have men who came out of prison, and the Anabaptists were looking at them, and they didn't know what to do with them. So I had to create a program designed to face each other. And if they faced each other, empathy began. So what I did is I said, "Hey, we're doing devotions every morning out of besides still water. Do you want to come in?" And I found people at first were very hesitant because they didn't know the people.

But then I landed one, two, and then pretty soon they started asking to come in. You build empathy by looking at the people that you're trying to, or the people group that you're working with. So I learned to develop empathy by putting crooks and Christians together, and they love each other. Out of that experiment, Chambersburg Christian Fellowship took Ray Addis, who was in Harkin House, and now he's a member.

But Ray wouldn't have gotten there unless we started crook and Christian to look at each other. Ray's doing a fantastic job. He lacked community and connectivity. Chambersburg offered it to him. He did a preaching for Chambersburg, and it was based on Harkin House. It was really good. I really enjoyed it. But I realized my personality was too strong. And sometimes there are people in the Bible like Moses, and I'm not saying I'm like him, but I can start something, but I'm not going to take it all the way home.

It's not in my forte. And I passed Harkin House off to Earl Eby. And Earl has the legacy that other Anabaptists feel comfortable with. They like the sparks that come off of me, but they don't know what to do with it. So it's learning where my strengths and my liabilities are and passing the strengths and liabilities off to other people. And Earl's doing a fantastic job. Out of that, Richard Hicks, he's a quasi-member at Chambersburg. He has dementia. So he couldn't do all the steps, but they gave him a pass. They let him there. I don't think he takes communion, but he's a member. Do you know what that did to me? Like, I feel like I found number two.

I found number three. I was willing to invest $495 to get a dividend on a $5 investment. And that's how I look at this thing. I go after those who are broken, because people who are broken want to change. Everybody in the streets that I meet, unless they're cracked out or crazy, they all know something about the Bible. They've heard 75 different versions of the Bible, but they don't see the hands and feet, the living Bible. And that's what I try to do. I go in there and I hug people. I was in Chattanooga yesterday. I drove down there and I took some pictures, and I met, like, eight people, and I bought a guy a pizza.

And I'm not saying that, like, look what I did. But I had conversations with them, and I'm asking them, "Well, where'd you from?" And I have these conversations. I ask them about Jesus Christ by not saying his name. "Yeah, you know, I follow this guy." He had 12 guys that hung around with him.

They were fish eaters. You know, like, I have these indecisive conversations because most of the people in the street are so beat up by God, they're ready to defend themselves. As soon as you say Jesus, they don't want to hear it.

So I learned not to say his name, but allude to him. And ultimately, at the end of the conversation, give these people hugs.

They're missing community and connectivity. Now, I can't build a community with them, but I can give them connectivity. And just like David Eby asked me, "Where would I spend eternity?" and my response to him, "Why do you care if I don't?" 28 years after he asked me that question, I'm in prison. I fell on the floor.

I'm thinking that one of these people I talked to 28 years from now maybe wake up and fall and call out to the Lord.

I'm willing to invest $495 to get a dividend of $5. That means I don't have very much money, and I don't worry about it. Recently, I've been riding around in something called the Tent Makers Travels. I was in Wyoming, and God was talking to me, and I was worrying about being homeless. And I'm asking him one thing I didn't get to. If you don't have fear of the Lord, and you know somebody that doesn't have the fear of the Lord, don't tell them to pray for fear of the Lord, because one day it shows up, and you're afraid to go outside. And with that, other things came. And that's all that my desert experience. I prayed for fear of the Lord.

It came.

And then at one point, I had this fear because of the instability of things in Wyoming that I was going to be homeless. And I'm asking God, "What do I do about this?" And I pull up into a Walmart in Cheyenne, and there's an RV, and I pulled up crooked to it. He's parked this way out. And I get out and I start looking at his RV. He popped his head out. His name's Matt.

I said, "Can I help you?" I said, "Well, I've been looking at these on the internet." And I literally was looking at him trying to find a $1,000 RV. And Matt said to me, "Well, come on in. Let me show it to you." And he started telling me him and his girls were going across the United States. They were going to Yellowstone, and they were going to eventually come back to Pennsylvania. They're from the Scranton area.

I said, "This is really nice." And we parted our ways. We had a prayer.

They said, "We'll be praying for you in your ministry." I told them that I was feeding people in Cheyenne. I just invested $495 in a grill. $440, I'm sorry. And I started feeding people in the park. And they said, "We'll be praying for you." Well, three and a half weeks after they took off, I get a text. "We've decided to give you the RV for a dollar."

Now, I didn't believe it. I was doubting. And we arranged a time, and I flew into Trenton, New Jersey. It was three hours away from where he lived, and I didn't know how I was going to get to his house. And he just showed up and picked me up. We went and transferred to Title, and we found a provision that I didn't have to pay a dollar. And he's just sitting there going, "I didn't even get my dollar for the RV."

And then we had dinner, and we talked.

And I was a little bitey because I just took a job with a guy in Wyoming, and I promised to be there on Monday morning. It was Thursday afternoon. I wanted to get on the road. Now, I flew in with a backpack. I had a towel, no soap. I had a credit card. I had a computer. I didn't bring a plug for the computer. I didn't know what I was doing. I was excited.

So I flew in there. I picked it up. And before I left, he was at the back of the RV. He was telling me a few things, and he said, "Now you can go and make some tents." And I heard that. And I have a hearing problem. I walked away from it thinking, "Eh." But as I think most people, I'm driving. It's a 30-hour ride back to Cheyenne. Somewhere's about 10 hours into it, I start thinking about what he was saying. And I called him, and I'm like, "What did you mean?" He says, "I was saying, go do ministry."

Okay. So for the next 15 hours, I sat like I did in prison. For all those years, planning, plotting, scheming. That's just my words for it. You know, there's probably more positive ways to say it. But I sat there and drew up halfway house, because when I was in prison, I was convinced that I was going to start a soup kitchen, a homeless shelter, and a construction company. And I came out of prison, and I started a soup kitchen, a halfway house, and a construction company.

So on that ride from wherever I was going to Cheyenne, I started the dream of the Tent Makers Travels. Now, go back a couple of years before on that Kingdom Fellowship weekend with all the young guys, and we were dreaming about a bus ride across America showing up at Kingdom Fellowship weekend. And they were all like, "Yay! We'll do it!" Well, I came back five years later, and they're like, "Oh, don't butt up."

So, you know, God has a way of weaving things together. Matt and his family, I keep them included in what I'm doing across the United States. They gave me an RV last year. I went to 26 different churches along the way and fed people all over the United States.

And it's the first time in my life I'm worrying about finances. And I hear him saying, "I got your back." Hearing him say that and actually living worry-free is really difficult. Well, I did that, and I found that we did fine.

All the bills were paid, and there was a little extra.

But I left Harkin House beat up from the experience because I was a thug trying to work with Anabaptists. So I was pushing a board, and I said, "I'll never have another Anabaptist board," because I thought they did wrong. They didn't do wrong. My spirit was wrong.