Voices of Hope – William R.

“Growing up, I had a lot of great opportunities, and I worked hard to become a master auto technician. Unfortunately, I was more wild than I was smart. I had the mentality that I wasn’t going to get caught. But because of my own stupidity and selfishness, I ended up serving a 27 month prison sentence. Prison is a whole different world. There is so much anxiety, so much pressure in there, and going to prison gave me a whole different mindset. I had a breakthrough. One day, while using a ruler to make lines on the page for a letter I was writing, one of the other inmates said, ‘I bet you can’t make a straight line on your own.’ I thought to myself, ‘What does he know?’ So I set out to try. However, no matter how many lines I drew or how hard I tried, I still couldn’t make the line straight. And that’s when I heard the Spirit say to me, ‘You can’t draw a single straight line by yourself. What makes you think you can do all this by yourself?’ That’s when it struck me – I thought I could do it all by myself and get a different result than I had in the past, but the truth is I couldn’t. So I chose to make a change.