More Than the Tattooed Mormon by Carraway Al

Author:Carraway Al
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cedar Fort Publishing
Published: 2018-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11 …

CHANGE

Change is always available. Help is always there. Comfort and healing are always there, because CHRIST IS ALWAYS THERE. And He will never look at you like a waste of time.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO I traveled a few hours from where I lived to speak to one of the smallest groups I’ve spoken to yet. It was a Saturday morning, and all the girls had just woken up and finished eating breakfast around the fire. I was there to end their Young Women retreat, so when I finished, they would pack up and leave to go home. After I spoke, the bishop stood up to give some closing remarks, and he asked us all a question: “What is the most important principle of the gospel?”

“Prayer.” “Sacrament.” “Reading scriptures.” The girls yelled out tons of great answers, ones that would have been my answer had I responded vocally, but he kept shaking his head no.

“The most important principle of this gospel,” he said, “is that people can change.”

I have been able to speak at Utah State Prison five times now (three on the men’s side, twice on the women’s), and I have been forever changed by it. I have been to some really incredible and beautiful places and met hundreds of great people a day. I have heard tons of different stories, backgrounds, challenges, and successes. All have had some sort of impact on me, and still the prison has been my absolute favorite places I have ever been. I’ll share a little bit of what I wrote in my personal journal after my first time speaking to the men’s side in March of 2013:

“I can’t express what I felt…. The Spirit I felt was beyond what I had felt before—it was incredibly powerful. I didn’t want to leave and lose how I felt. I was surprised by their example. They all came single-file into the gym, all wearing their matching white inmate uniforms, every single one of them holding a Book of Mormon and a journal on their own will. Their humble eyes staring at me was completely captivating…. After I spoke, I was able to stay as they separated into groups, and my eyes filled with tears as I heard their goals and desires—their passion to get out just so they can baptize their son or be sealed to their family, to simply sit in a church building. To hear inmate investigators quote D&C more beautifully than I had ever heard before from any member … I was truly among incredible, incredible people and was so humbled to meet them. When it was time to leave, a lot of them thanked me and shook my hand. You know how sometimes you can look at someone and you just know they’re truly a great person, you can just feel it? I saw that and I felt that with every single eye I looked into. It moved me to literal tears. It moved me to change, to become better, because of their example and greatness that I saw in them.

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