These past two months I’ve written about those making progress at Forge, the Christian shelter I lived at in Joplin, Missouri. But not everyone perseveres. I played disc golf on a sunny day last October with one Forge resident who told me how he had become a devotee of YouTube Satanist channels. For a time, he combined demonic rituals, drug use, and increasingly elaborate drawings of skulls and skeletons. He told me how every demon has a name, personality, and practices that I’ll skip by here. He said his wife, pagan but not a Satanist, “looked in my phone, saw all the Satanic stuff, and kicked me out.”
I’ll refer to my disc golf partner only as J. His wife, J said, “saw evil is real, started reading the Bible, and is now a Christian.” With her urging J moved into The Forge last June. We sat next to each other in a “Living Free” Bible study and J declared, “I’m reconciled to my wife. I’m a child of God now.” Maybe. This year he dropped out of the program, and the administrator I talked with did not know J’s whereabouts.
Another resident last fall — call him T — was 56 and still angry about being abandoned by his dad, whom he had talked with only once. T graduated from Forge in 2021 but “five months later I went off the rails again.” (Criminal records from 2022 — “Driving While Intoxicated-Aggravated” — substantiate that.) T said “alcohol has stolen forty years of my life. I wanted to be alcohol-free so I started using meth…. Now I’m scared of dying from drugs. I want to lead a clean life. I want to get married before I die.” But this year he apparently “went off the rails” once more.
On the other hand, the two oldest people in the program last fall were sticking with it when I checked last month. Nathan Strickland, 62, is a big man who was a center on his high school basketball team. Married at age 21, he has sons in their thirties and a 14-year-old daughter. He is writing letters to them in an attempt to rebuild relationships. He said he’s been in six Christian programs but needed one with lots of structure and regular urinalysis.
Russell Wright, 64, told me the “strong childhood memory” of his father telling him, “You never do anything right.” Wright said he’s proven that forecast in the realm of marriage: five weddings, five divorces. He did prison time after breaking into a neighborhood liquor store and stealing 59 bottles. At age 50 he was still “drinking and horsing around,” and went to the Kansas state penitentiary after pleading guilty to “lewd touching.” Wright could not remember how many DUI arrests he’s had — “my life has been a mess” — but he expressed determination to change, and recently moved into his own place to start the final phase of the Forge program.
Travis Palmer, 47, who said his life has been “a frigging mess,” has also made progress. He was eager to talk about “living in the Maine woods off the grid” and the way drug cartel outlaws sitting outside his motel room were ready to shoot — but also how his sister’s prayer group asked God to intervene. Palmer, on methadone for fifteen years, talks about a heavenly vision of Jesus alternating in his brain with views of demons. But he said his perfect “independence day” was July 4, 2023, when he watched Top Gun, ate at a Cracker Barrel, saw fireworks, and realized “Satan can’t do sh– to me.”
Palmer is in Forge’s Transition Phase, the fourth and last phase that residents in good standing can enter after ten months in the first three phases. He has moved into an apartment, works full-time, goes to church, and is scheduled to graduate from Forge next month.
Most felons who enter Forge drop out before graduation, but those who persevere change their lives. I’ll identify one graduate only as D because the ugly words on a prison record I found back up what he told me happened 25 years ago: “Statutory Sodomy — First Degree. Offense Day: July 8, 1999.” D went to prison for ten years because of that crime, but chapter seven of Luke’s gospel tells of “a woman of the city, who was a sinner,” using her tears, hair, and ointment to clean Jesus’s feet.
Christ said, “her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.” D movingly spoke of how he loves God.