August 12, 1998

No. 80812

25th Anniversary

The Conversion of Charles W. Colson

Today is a very special day in my life.

Twenty-five years ago I was mired in the Watergate scandal.

Almost every day I'd pick up the newspaper and see my name

in headlines on the front page. There were times when I

thought I was public enemy number 1. My world was

collapsing.

Twenty-five years ago this very day I visited a good friend

who seemed so at peace that I was determined to find out

what had happened in his life. Tom Phillips, then the

president of Raytheon, read to me from a wonderful little

book by C. S. Lewis titled Mere Christianity. Tom read from

the chapter on pride, and told me about Jesus Christ. I'd

been to church many times in my life, and I'd been at

religious services at the White House, but until that night I

had never heard the gospel.

Tom wanted to pray with me that night but I was too proud

to do so. I told him I'd read his book. I tucked Mere

Christianity under my arm and headed for the car. But I was

unable to drive out of the driveway that night because this

so-called White House hatchet man, ex-marine captain, was

crying too hard to get the keys into the ignition of the car.

I sat there for a long time that night deeply convicted of my

own sin. Desperate to know God, calling out to him, asking

Him to come into my life.

Nothing has been the same since that night. Nothing can ever

be the same again because the living God lives in me. People

can argue all they wish about whether Christianity is true or

not.  I know--because I know my Savior.

Along the way I've learned some lessons. The most important

one, as I reflect back, is that I used to think the most

important things in life were money and power, prestige and

position. But the more I achieved by the world's standards

the emptier I was inside.

It was in prison with everything gone that I realized the

great lesson of life--the one that Alexander Soltzenitzen

wrote about from the gulag, when he said, "Bless you prison,

bless you, for being in my life, for there, lying on the rotting

prison floor, I came to realize that the object of life is not

prosperity, as we are made to believe, but the maturing of

the human soul." We seek security in this world, we can never

find it. When we lose our lives for Christ's sake we find the

only security there is and the only meaning and purpose.

When I got up this morning I prayed a prayer that I've

prayed every morning for the past 25 years - but I prayed it

with special feeling this morning because it was the quarter

century mark. And that prayer is one of thanking God that he

reached down in the depths of Watergate, picked up what

was then public enemy number 1, turned his life around and

now uses him for his glory and his purposes.

People often ask me why I do what I do. This isn't easy

work. I've been in 600 prisons including some of the worst

hell holes in the world. My life has been threatened. It's

demanding, it's pressure all the time. But I've never looked

back. I do it not because it's a job, not because it's a

ministry, not because there's some glamour in it - there's

none.

I do it out of gratitude to God for what He did in my life in

that driveway 25 years ago. And it's that same gratitude

that should drive every single one of us as Christians.

Think about what Jesus did. I do all the time. I would have

been overwhelmed by the stench of my own sin were I not

certain for a fact that Jesus Christ, the son of God, died on

that cross for my sins. And I'm forgiven.

"From BreakPoint, August 12, 1998,

Copyright 1998, reprinted with permission of
Prison Fellowship

 P.O. Box 17500

 Washington, DC, 20041-0500."
 
 http://www.breakpoint.org