By BJ HERNDON
Current Co-Publisher
RICHMOND, Ky. -- “The Lord wants you to get into the prisons. When you walk in, you will encounter the miraculous hand of the Lord.”

This was a prophetic word delivered to David Howell eight years ago at a ministry conference in Florida.

Now, eight years later, Howell, 53, of Richmond reflects on his journey into the prison ministry that has provided so many personal rewards for him and for the people he has touched.

The local masonry contractor said that his during very first visit to the Madison County Detention Center five years ago, he felt the presence of the Lord after passing through the fourth door into the jail area. He knew then this was where he was supposed to be.

“The perspective and direction I have is to NOT prepare,” Howell said. “Don’t prepare anything. Don’t bring words, a sermon, a testimony. God told me that as I come into that place, He will show me what He wants me to do. It’s a place of total vulnerability.

“I come like a leaf in the wind and let God move in any way HE wants with those men.”

Madison County’s Detention Center holds a mixture of major and minor offenders – some bound over by the state because larger prisons are overcrowded and others whose stay is very temporary.

When Howell arrives, he is taken to a small room where a maximum of 20 men are brought. He is unsure how the participants are selected.

“One theme that I see continually is that these men’s lives are like a twisted ball of yarn – twisted, frayed, shredded,” he said. “I don’t come to straighten out the snarls. My job is to teach them to hear God’s voice because then HE can speak to them and that whole ball of yarn will begin to come untangled.

“My sheep hear my voice and they follow me,” Howell said, quoting John 10:4. “I teach those men to hear God’s voice. If they have never touched the manifest presence of God before, at least for that hour they know what it is like to be in God’s presence.

“All I do is show up and God meets me there,” he said. “He shows up over and over and over again. There are many stories I could tell where I just begin sharing and God just breaks off a part of His heart to share it with these men.

“I feel like a hammer and chisel sometimes, just breaking down and chipping away the wrong concepts of what God is really like,” Howell continued.

“One night a man asked me if I was a healer,” Howell recalled. “He said that while I was talking, a mole fell off his hand and his backache went away.”

When Howell came out of his former world of hippies, drugs, parties, sex and festivals, he said, it was because one of his best friends was shot in the head over drugs.

“It isn’t easy to separate from an old lifestyle,” explained Howell, who applies this to those in jail. He believes there needs to be a formal separation of the old lifestyle and a new lifestyle.

“I would love to see a house established that would be a discipleship house – kind of a halfway house – for these men coming out of jail into a new lifestyle,” Howell said, adding that if it is God’s will, He will make it happen.

(January 2005)