THE POWER OF LOVE

Sometimes I am frightened But I'm ready to learn 'bout the power of love. JENNIFER RUSH, "THE POWER OF LOVE

Love covers a multitude of sins. PETER, 1 PETER 4:8, NLT

"Will you go see him?"

Christine came up to me after church, fidgeting nervously.

Him was her ex-husband, Dan Schoenfeld — #227495 in the Macomb County Jail.

"Of course," I said, not really sure what I was getting myself into. I was still a rookie when it came to experiencing the love of God in my own wounded heart. Did I have what it takes to love another profoundly broken brother — like Dan?

A few days later I sat down across from an angry, scary, tattooed, muscled, 225-pound inmate whose glare shouted, You're wasting my time, you sissy Bible thumper. I've got no use for your religion or your god. His hands and feet were chained, but it didn't matter. My heart was in my throat, and my gut was churning. This wasn't going to go well.

There was good reason for all the hate I was feeling in the room. As a child, Dan was consistently and brutally beaten by his alcoholic father. Dan's dad also beat his mom, and Dan constantly got in between her and his father, thinking that if he wasn't there to defend her, she was going to die. At the age of eight, Dan started shoplifting and then breaking into homes and stealing whatever he could get his hands on. He loved the thrill of getting away with petty crimes but also secretly hoped that he would get caught. Maybe then his dad would start paying attention to him in some kind of positive way.

Later Dan began partying, drinking, and drugging — and after a failed first marriage where his wife cheated on him with his best friend, he started shooting heroin to try to numb the pain. His depression, anger, and emptiness increased until one day he tried to kill himself with that same mind-numbing heroin — but he woke up eight hours after tying off his arm and injecting the poison, his body literally blue. He didn't care about anyone or anything because in his mind, no one, including God, cared about him.

At the end of his second failed marriage, this time to Christine, Dan's violence escalated. He silently broke into a neighbor's home, threatened a woman with a broken broomstick handle that he used to simulate a gun, and raped her. And then he ran. He lived a couple of more tortured years in Florida, angry and paranoid, always looking over his shoulder, until the system finally caught up with him and brought him back to Michigan to face the rape charge.

Sitting across from him at a bolted-down prison table, I opened the Bible — to John's gospel, I think — and began to speak a little of the good news of Jesus. Dan didn't say a word. He just stared at me. He wasn't having any of it. After about ten minutes, I knew the visit was a failure.

Closing the Bible, I began to silently ask God, What now, Father? What do you want me to do? And then it happened. As I looked down at the prison-gray tabletop, my heart began to break for the broken human being sitting across from me. As tears came to my eyes, ran down my nose, and hit the gray surface, I began to love this brother who obviously hated me. Almost without thinking, I walked around the table, threw my arms around Dan's neck, whispered in his ear that I loved him, kissed him on the cheek, and asked him if I could come back.

"Yeah," he said. "Come back if you want." He told me later that in the moment he wasn't sure why he responded the way he did.

As I walked out of the jail, I mentally beat the heck out of myself. Why did you kiss him? And fine, tell him that you love him in the name of God or Jesus or the church or whatever, but did you need to whisper it IN HIS EAR? I had acted like a fool in front of a rock-hard felon who obviously needed something I didn't have to give.

Little did I know that when Dan went back to his cube that day, his knees buckled like a prize fighter who had taken one too many blows to the head. His heart and spirit were rocked by the raw power of the love of God. He said to himself, "What just happened to me? No one has ever hugged me like that. No man has ever kissed me and told me he loves me. And no one has ever cried over me. Not over someone like me. Please, God, if there is a God, I've got to have more of what just happened in that room." And so began Dan's journey to the arms of the Father.

Eight years later, at the Lakeland Correctional Facility in Coldwater, Michigan, almost a decade into a fourteen- to forty-two-year prison sentence for rape, Dan Schoenfeld — a man so wounded and broken that he hated the world and would just as soon beat you as he would speak with you — bowed his heart to the love of God and put his trust in Jesus.

What melted the steel in his soul? What began to heal the wound? What overcame the abuse and the rage-filled defense and the pain? The power of the love of a God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ. Just as one of Jesus' main followers Peter once said — this love "covers a multitude of sins" (1 Peter 4:8, nlt). Peter should know. He was the guy who denied he even knew Jesus, right when Jesus needed him most. And a few weeks later, Jesus powerfully loved Peter back to life — because that's what the love of Jesus always does.

I didn't plan to weep over Dan. The love of God compelled me to beyond reason. I was barely in the beginning stages of realizing God's love for me personally, and yet that same love was already pumping through my slowly healing heart into the heart and life of another of God's wounded sons.

That same love followed Dan through all eighteen years in the Michigan correctional system. It began to break him at Jackson — one of the most dangerous prisons in the Midwest — where in solitary confinement Dan looked in the mirror and with tears running down his face cried out in brokenness, "My God, this is all my own doing. What have I become?" It kept him safe in the institutional hell of men fighting men with death-dealing weapons made out of everything and anything. It protected him from gang involvement and even from violently acting out when he was threatened, accosted, or violated. In almost two decades in the system, Dan didn't catch one major ticket. Not even one. That's a miracle. That's the power of the love of God.

I watched the love of the Father heal the rage and hate and damage of Dan's lost childhood. He clung to that love when he was sent back into the system five times after first being eligible for parole. The Father's love kept us walking together all eighteen years of his sentence, through letters, visits, and phone calls — and even my little girls sending pictures they had drawn of Christmas trees, puppy dogs, and birthday cakes to, yeah, a violent sex offender. That love led him to Jesus in 1999 and finally released him from prison almost ten years later.

I will never, ever forget the day Dan first shared his story with Hope Community Church of Detroit, the group of Jesus' followers I am privileged to shepherd and the church that became his church because they wrote him, sent him money, and loved him when he had almost no one else. Dan closed out his talk that day with these words: "To my Hope family, I want to say that I understand if you don't want to be close to me. I understand if you don't trust me because I am a felon and I was a violent man and did some horrible things to human beings just like you. But I want you to know that if you do approach me these days, not only will I not hurt you, but I will more than likely throw my arms around your neck and kiss you on the cheek and whisper in your ear that I love you. Because of the power of the love of God, I am not the same man that I used to be. I am a new man. I am a new creation in Christ Jesus."

Just a few moments later, Dan stood at the front of the church with some other brothers and sisters, serving the Eucharist — the body and blood of Jesus — to all who were willing to get out of their seats and take a walk down the aisle to receive it. One of those who came that day was Dan's exwife Christine, a woman he had cheated on and abused. Two others walked right beside her — Dan and Christine's grown son and daughter, whom Dan had hurt and abandoned so many years ago. I watched as this wounded, shattered family took the body and blood of a loving Christ from the calloused hands of the husband and father who had damaged them so deeply. And I watched as God began to heal relationships so broken and human beings so emotionally and spiritually injured that any sane person would have said there was no way they'd ever be whole.

But for the power of love. A love that had begun to miraculously heal me. A love that would continue to heal Dan and is still healing his family.

Listen, we're about to embark on a hard road, you and I. A road through our emptiness and shame and wounded- ness. As you wrestle with your pain along the way — and even struggle with the difficulty of believing God loves you — remember Dan's story. Because no matter where you've been, what you've done, or what you've been through, you're heading toward a love that Jesus and his followers said was the power behind the covering and healing of all the sin and all the mess in all the world. A love that is powerful enough to heal ... you.