“I think I have been here before, “ Connie Wagner said to her friend Scottie Barnes as they pulled into the wooded area surrounding Camp Mundo Vista near Asheboro, North Carolina.  Then Connie spotted the large rock outside the activities building.  “I had sat on that rock for a photo with 17 other inmates 22 years earlier.  Jesus had just brought me full circle.”

Connie had grown up in church and, as a teenager, made a profession of faith in Jesus Christ.  But it was, as she puts it, “head knowledge, not heart knowledge.”  After a failed marriage as a young adult, Connie wallowed in self-pity, blaming others for her unhappiness.  She experimented with marijuana and rapidly graduated to barbiturates and finally heroin.  In four short years, her life became unmanageable, and she was arrested for possession of drugs.

Awaiting trial, Connie went into detox treatment.  “But I wasn’t ready to totally give up drugs; I was complying only to get my family off my back,” she says.  Not feeling confident that she could resist drugs after release from jail, she asked a counselor for help.  He suggested a spiritual halfway house called Maranatha House in Jacksonville.  “I repented of my sin, but I knew that sin had taken me further than I had intended to go, made me stay longer than I had intended to stay, and pay more than I had intended to pay.” Her court cases were consolidated, and she ended up with five years to serve, to be followed by five years of probation.  “Here I stood, the mother of an eight-year old son, never having spent one day in jail, let alone prison.  I was bankrupt in soul, demoralized and terrified.  I was assigned to a cellblock that held 40 women, none of whom I would have chosen as my neighbor, but my choices in life had chosen them for me.”  Connie was devastated when she was denied parole at her first hearing.  “It was only after I’d fully surrendered to God’s will that I became content in my situation.  My rediscovered relationship with God became my pillar to hold me up through the painful repercussions of my sins.”  That rediscovered relationship was nurtured by Christian volunteers who ministered in the prison.

Finally paroled, Connie determined never to return.  “I’d paid my debt to society and had no intention of ever setting foot in a prison again.”  That resolve began to change when Scottie Barnes persuaded Connie to share her testimony at a women’s dinner at Hickory Grove Baptist Church in Charlotte.  With further coaxing, Connie agreed to join Scottie at a program ministering to North Carolina women prisoners at a retreat – unaware that it was the same camp she had attended while service time at the N.C. Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh.