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‘Genuine love’: Life sentences turned into lives serving the Lord for three former inmates who spoke at Yokefellow Ministries’ conference

All three went to prison as teenagers, serving life sentences, never thinking that they would leave, but through the work of the Yokefellows' prison ministry they testify to lives changed through placing their trust in God.

Doug Hollis shared how he had grown up in the church.

"My mom took us to church...we were church-going people," Hollis said.

"However I was a dumb kid. I didn't stay in the church," he added.

Speaking to members of the Yokefellows who were in Williamsport for a statewide convention, Hollis compared his life to the Biblical character Jonah, who tried to run from God rather than do what God had asked him to do.

"I was running, but God put me in a prison cell and set me down until I cried out to Him," he said.

In 1971 when John Freddie Nole entered Graterford Prison, located just northwest of Philadelphia, he described it as a "very dark place."

"They didn't have any programs and no school to speak of," he said. "Everything was very regimented."

"I was just running around basically doing what a kid did," he said.

Nole was 18 when he entered prison to serve a life sentence.

"Having a life sentence at that time hadn't really dawned on me until three or four years later down the line," he admitted.

Then the prison system started changing with more programs being offered to the inmates.

"I just decided that I needed to change. I needed to try at some point in time to better my life," he said.

The older inmates at the prison urged him to think differently about what a life sentence actually meant.

"They kept telling me that my life sentence wasn't going to be until the day that I died if I decided to do something to change my life. If I wanted to get better, I could," Nole said.

"Well, I got better. I got educated. I got involved in programs. I just saw myself as having a voice. But, the real substance in my life that gave me the discipline that I think is needed to get through the prison system is my faith in God," he shared.

Around 1980, about nine years after entering prison, Nole accepted Christ "wholeheartedly."

"But once I did I saw the grace of Him disciplining me. Giving me respect for other people. Actually getting to the point where it was 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you,'" Nole said."I gave my life to the Lord and it just changed."

The volunteers that came to the prison to do programs, he said, were a "speck of light."

"It wasn't a lot of light. It was a speck of light from them that I made big. I took advantage of everything that they offered. The caring factor, the humanities, sharing with us on a daily basis, their lives...that was the change for me," he said.

"When I say accepting Christ as my Lord and Savior and it turned my life around, it gave me respect for the guards. It allowed me to see that they just had a job to do," Nole said.

Nole realized that the change in his life could serve as an example to other inmates.

"I knew that most of the inmates that I was doing time with was in the same situation that I was in. They were disadvantaged. They were undereducated. They came out of poverty. They didn't really understand the choices that they had," he said.

"That put me on a better path because I was now showing people that I had grown up with, that I had come out of the same streets of what can happen with your life," he said. "Granted, not all of them took a better path because of Christ, but I let them know what Christ had done for me and that was and that was the important thing,"

Another lifer, Lewis Lee, credited prison with saving his life.

"I know for a fact that prison saved my life. Had I died before I went to prison in 1975, I know that I would have wound up in hell because I did not come from a Christian family. God was never mentioned in my home unless it was a cuss word. There was no Bible - the big Bible that used to sit on a coffee table - that was not in my home," he said.

"So how did I get saved in prison? I just came to the edge of myself and a friend told me about the Lord Jesus Christ. How he died for me and I knew that was what I needed," Lee said.

"The same grace that saved you out here in your walk is the same grace that the Lord extended to me and saved me when I was inside," he told those at the conference.

"I am the man that I am today because of the love of Jesus...and I'm just now a servant of the Lord, and just so excited to be out of prison after being in prison for 45 years. I'm serving Him and the Lord is blessing me and I am just ecstatic to be a child of the kingdom," Lee said.

When asked how the Yokefellow volunteers could better serve those in prison, Nole encouraged them to "just be yourself."

"What these guys really need to see is ordinary people making it," Nole said.

Having mentored prisoners who were released on parole and then ended up back in prison because it was hard to deal with life on the outside, Noll said that after 49 years in prison he too experienced some "bumps in the road."

"It never made me feel as though I needed to come back and start knocking on the jail of prison. The reason I can say that didn't happen is because the people who came in on a weekly basis to our Bible study...came in with real life stories. You understand how it was God's strength that was getting them through," he said.

"You understand the difficult times like bills and stuff not being paid. Not putting guns in your hand. Not taking the easy way out. Just getting to the grindstone, falling on your knees. Reading God's word and saying, 'thank you Lord for where I am and where you brought me because I know in faith you're going to take care of me," Nole shared.

"My advice to all who would want to go into prison to minister is to do it in the love of Jesus," Lewis said.

"That's what is going to minister to men on the inside – love, genuine love. That's it. Be Christ to them. We know that Jesus is love, so allow the Lord's love to shine and come through you," he added.