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Paper Sunshine -- Part 3

LONNIE: Imagine spending 50 years in prison and never getting a single postcard from the outside world! Talk about lonely! Today we’ll visit with two people who are providing a way for Christians to fulfill Jesus’ mission to visit those who are in prison.

CONNIE: Hello everyone, this is Connie Jeffery! We are continuing our conversation with Don and Yvonne McClure with the Someone Cares Prison Ministry. What a great work they do! Today Lonnie will be talking to them about how the Lord led them to be in their unique outreach and how He has blessed them and millions of prisoners through it. As we share these stories, we want to encourage you to become involved in prison ministry. Please visit Someone Cares at, www.someonecares.org on the internet. Let’s listen in again as Lonnie speaks to Don and Yvonne McClure.

LONNIE: We’ve got Don and Yvonne back in the studio with us live! Welcome back, and we are always thrilled to share with others your unique ministry of Someone Cares, reaching out into the lives of particularly prisoners and their families. You have been in prison yourself Don, from L.A. to New York, and you’ve done hard time…Tell us a little more about your background.

DON: I guess I fascinate myself from time to time…I dropped out of school in the sixth grade…I grew up on the streets and learned street smarts…Then I got prison smart…Then I got smart, smart…Then I met Yvonne and I couldn’t tell Yvonne that this guy wearing the fine clothing driving the nice car…That I couldn’t even write! She gave me Steps to Christ, and I said I didn’t want any of that none-sense, but I read it and through that I learned the Bible. Now, I’m in the church. I’ve tried to be a youth leader, but that didn’t fit. I was on the church board and I didn’t fit. I was everywhere, but I didn’t fit in. Then I went to a businessman’s luncheon and the speaker was a prison volunteer and I said, thank you, Jesus! I called the chaplain at Soledad prison….I went down to the prison and I started a Friday night Bible study. Now Yvonne’s not going with me at all and I don’t know the Bible that well, but Jesus absolutely set me on fire. I had to do something for Him, so I learned the Bible as I taught it. I ended up becoming the chaplain at this prison, unpaid, for 11 years…Full-time unpaid chaplain.

LONNIE: You’re obviously making progress with these prisoners who can completely identify with you.

DON: Because I can stand in front of a guy’s cell and hear him say, you don’t know what it’s like! I say, I’ve been there and done that…You have done nothing that I haven’t already done. The big thing about anyone who has an addiction…When someone says they can help you, nobody wants to get stuck. Those of you who sit and watch TV, you may sit around and watch a soap opera, it’s an addiction. Because of Jesus and the VOP and our ministry, we’ve seen 1 million inmates complete the Discover Bible School Courses.

LONNIE: So let’s go to San Quentin here for a minute.

YVONNE: At San Quentin, the man that I was talking to in his cell told me that he had never received any mail and I said why? He told me that nobody writes to me. I said, not even a birthday card or Christmas card, and he said no! The memory came back to me from the first time that I had gone to summer camp and I thought that my parents and forgotten me…

DON: …Here is Yvonne, raised in the church, standing on the third tear of the toughest section in any prison, the only woman ever allowed in there. With dirt, rats and 500 of the worst inmates and she’s talking to one of them.

LONNIE; And you found that there are many inmates who don’t receive mail in there.

YVONNE; Yes, their families don’t want to write or visit them.

LONNIE: And this led to a vision that was born right there.

YVONNE: Right, I said I promise you that I’ll find somebody to write to you. When you make a promise in prison, you never break it…My problem was that I had to tell Don about it. That was a problem! I didn’t tell him until we were crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in heavy traffic, and I decided that was the best time to tell him, because he had to keep both hands on the steering wheel. I said Don, I kind of made a promise…I told him that I promised this guy a letter, and he said, no problem! When I get home I’ll call a couple of church members and that’s what happened. He contacted them and they wrote that inmate.

LONNIE: So this was the birth of Paper Sunshine?

DON: Yes, but it also ties into Voice of Prophecy. We went back to that section of the prison a couple of weeks later and the guy had received his letters from the people I had called. He had shared them with everybody on his run. Now…Lonnie, there are guys in prison who write themselves to hear their names called at mail-call. So double-trouble goes to the warden and says…

YVONNE: I said, we need a pen friend program, and he told me he wouldn’t have anything to do with that.

DON: But he finally told us, if you devise a program that is totally risk free than I will let you do it. This program we have come up with is so risk free that we have children writing to child-molesters, leading them to Christ. Because the person writing the inmate never gives out their address, they use our address.

LONNIE: So let’s just go over this…What if I’d like to write but I don’t want my street address or my name to be known? How do you preserve the identity and safety of the writer?

DON: You would contact us, telling us that you would like to become a pen friend. We then put your name into a pile. Next to that pile is a pile of inmates names…We then match you up with an inmate and we send you a packet of the do’s and don’ts and want not. Then you write the inmate a letter and send it to our address, we then re-mail it to the prison, the prisoner than writes his/her letter back to us and we then re-mail to the writer…We also read all the letters to make sure that there is no inappropriate stuff inside. Voice of Prophecy has a Bible School that is powerful, they need your support! By the way you might take the lessons for yourself.

LONNIE: A lot of the folks that write in are from inside the prison walls. Now, how does Someone Cares Prison Ministry survive? How do you pay the bills?

DON: When I became a Christian and went to prison ministries, I quite a very good job…I had gotten out of crime and into the real world. Yvonne asked me after I quit my job, well who’s going to pay the bills? I said, the Bible says I have the cattle of a thousand hills and if I ask Jesus to take care of me He will! We are a total faith ministry.

LONNIE: That is a wonderful thing that you are doing!

CONNIE: Wow! To think that this ministry has touched so many people!

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