SALT LAKE CITY — Fifteen years ago, Robert Feland had some reservations when he was asked to teach inside the Utah State Prison.
"I'd spent my life purposefully avoiding prison. Now they wanted me to go there voluntarily?" Feland told his audience Friday, Sept. 24, at the Westminster Institute of Religion.
Feland said he worried about whether he could carry enough of the Spirit with him to relay the positive and inspiring messages God would have him share.
"Isn't the expectation that you teach by the Spirit?" he asked. "I wonder if there's the Spirit in prison?"
Less then two weeks later, he found himself weeping and surprised to find the Spirit in abundance inside the walls filled with men who had committed serious crimes.
"I think their spiritual receptors are so damaged the Lord literally has to firehose them to get through," Feland said. "The point being, no matter how bad off, how far or how removed somebody is. The Lord still loves you and wants you back."
Feland said he reiterates that message every chance he gets.
He tells the hopeless and the discouraged that they still have a chance for redemption if they'll rely on Jesus Christ and his atoning sacrifice.
"The Lord cares about the prisoner," he said. "We all come up short of God's glory and perfection. If we didn't we wouldn't be on the earth."
Feland said the tough part is convincing a prison inmate that he is of worth and therefore needs to take responsibility for himself and his actions so he can repent.
"Change is important, but you can't change without recognizing responibility," he said. "The gospel makes us change who we are."
The joy that comes is a long time coming, he said, but it's attainable.
"Be receptive to him. The atoning sacrifice is personal and individual."
Feland pointed to the example set by Ernie Velasquez, a man serving a prison term for the murder of three people, a man who tried to shoot his way out of a courtroom and who more than once tried to commit suicide while incarcerated.
During the last attempt, he heard evil spirits laughing and realized he needed to seek Christ.
He then happened to watch a six-hour showing of "Jesus of Nazareth" and for the first time in his sad and tumultuous life, cried.
He began to write music and lyrics that talked about Christ's love, ending up as one of the kingpins on a CD — "Freedom Within" — produced in 2000.
(Feland said that never happens, but because Elder David B. Haight heard Velasquez' music and declared the inmate music needed to be heard, a recording group was set up in the prison chapel within 30 days.)
"His love made me brand new," Velasquez sings on the album, backed up by inmates whom he taught to sing the chorus with him.
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