Jose Marcano volunteers as a mentor to prisoners through Crossroads Prison Ministries in the Dominican Republic. He recently sent us his testimony of how his life has been impacted through reviewing prisoners’ Bible lessons and writing them letters. The letter below was translated from its original Spanish.
God has been good and his mercy has no end. A little while ago I started working as a mentor for Crossroads. God through His grace and love has been ministering to me in every prisoner lesson that I review, in particular through the letters that I write to students.
While I am writing to them, I feel God’s grace in my life. . .Many times I feel in my heart the living voice of God speaking to me, as I am writing to the student.
In one particular instance, I remember when I was reading and correcting a lesson of a student who gave me joy in the Lord for the faith by which he responded to the essay questions. God confronted me and made me question myself about my attitude before the storms of life and how that student (a prisoner deprived of his freedom) spoke to me of his great faith in God. It was through His grace that God ministered to me and left me in tears.
I began to sing the song of Marcos Witt: “Si puedes Creer” (“If you can believe”) and I was singing it while crying through writing the letter to my student. In summary, I finished writing the words of that song to the student and encouraged him to sing to the Lord all the time and even more when in affliction. The most surprising thing is that God himself was ministering to my life; He found me distressed and troubled from the worries of daily life, from the anxieties of this world. God took all these storms and trials and filled me with His peace so that I can rest in the Lord and so that my faith would grow.
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