Doing Time

Sometimes you lose everything you love, but find something more important. Greg Fletcher discovered that in prison.

I enjoyed a good life: a beautiful wife, two wonderful children, and a great teaching career. Then they were gone. I found myself in prison. I’m a recovering addict, but not to drugs or alcohol. My bondage is sexual addiction. I wasn’t a predator, nor did I engage in behaviour that wasn’t consensual. But my enslavement cost me the things I held closest.

Those who knew me saw an imposing, extroverted confident man, a talented musician but my life had become a performance— a lie designed to hide the real me. No-one knew that for my entire life I’d fought off feelings of dislike of who I was.

I tried to both please others and do what I had to to fulfil my own needs. I developed wrong mechanisms to cope.

I was sexually abused as a child by an older male and again as an adult while drugged. I was also seduced into a relationship with a married woman in my late teens. However, mostly my life was quite normal and only later did the significance of those incidents surface. I attended church, and while I knew all the “right stuff,” I wasn’t living it. Eventually I found myself in jail, but I’d always been imprisoned by despair and brokenness.

One night, alone in my cell, I challenged God: Where are you? Come to me, Lord, if You’re really there , I said. And He did. I didn’t see a vision but I felt His presence. I felt Him in my cell through the peace of the Holy Spirit that encompassed me.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” He said.

When I accepted Jesus, my life changed. I asked Him to baptise me in His Holy Spirit. A few days later, an inmate invited me to Alpha, a course run in the prison. The group received me and modelled Christian love. I looked forward to the Alpha meetings each Monday night.

Through the Holy Spirit, I was led to passages in the Bible and also to supportive people where I received answers to many questions. On one occasion in particular, my 11-year-old daughter and I had been having a discussion.

“Daddy, I pray for you nearly every day, but when I listen afterwards, God doesn’t speak to me,” she said.

I’d begun a letter, attempting an explanation when, one Monday evening, I was feeling very tired after working late in the kitchen and decided to skip Alpha. But I was overwhelmed by a conviction that I needed to be there. So I went even though I was late. The video had just started. It was entitled “How does God guide us?” Wow! God was nourishing my spirit and supplying my needs, which right then included equipping me to help my little girl.

As soon as it concluded, I returned to my cell and finished an eight-page letter to her.

I’ve had powerful spiritual experiences after being “born again.” God has also given me insight into my life as a Christian man, father and husband. His grace helped me determine where my life should go and changed it forever. Despite the prison environment, I feel freer than I ever have.

I feel God has much more in store for me. Now I want to lead others to my loving heavenly Father, to light up their path and show them a life worth living.

I met Him when everything that seemed to matter to me was gone. I had no more excuses, nothing else to hang onto or hide behind. He knew He had my full attention and, in gaining it, the Lord helped me reprogram in a way that will encourage me to continue to seek His will for my life.

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