I was starting a business to assist authors who were publishing their own books—advising them and helping them turn out a finished product. My brother-in-law, Gary, long-time Alaska resident who is also active in prison ministry, called to tell me he was referring a former employee in his business to me. She had a prison ministry of her own and had come in contact with an inmate who had written a book, a 365-day devotional for prisoners. Her ministry’s vision was to get this book published and place it in prisons for free. She already had people who wanted to fund the project and she would continue to get more. My brother-in-law was a little skeptical about all this succeeding but he had learned to go with the ideas of this woman (Lois was her name) when she believed they were ultimately the Lord’s ideas, and that He would therefore bring them about, no worries. 

“Lois is quite a character,” Gary explained during our phone chat. “You’ll see. She is in her mid-70’s and going strong. She has had a rough and wild life. When she started working for me, her plans were to steal my business. She copied my files and was going to contact my customers and bring them over to a business she and her husband were beginning. She was an alcoholic, had a hot temper and quite a mouth on her. I interrupted her plans and started talking to her about the Lord. I gave her a Bible. A bit after that she came to know Him. Let me tell you, He has changed her completely!”

So it was that about 16 years ago, I received my first phone call from Lois. She was a character! She had a spirited vivaciousness for her Jesus that came through loud and clear. She called me “Honey” non-stop and after a few questions about how we would work together, she told me the testimony of the author of the book she wanted to publish. He was doing a life sentence for murder, but after Jesus had come into his life he used his jail time as a ministry opportunity for spreading the gospel. He was just fine with spending the rest of his life within prison walls. I could tell Lois was like a spiritual mom to him. In fact, she told the prisoners to call her granny. Every phone call, she asked me to pray for some request she had. She inquired and remembered all about my life. I was always reminded how much Jesus loved me after talking to her. It was easy to see Christ in her.

The book got published, and to this day has reprinted thousands of copies. It has been placed in dozens of prisons in both English and Spanish translations. There is always enough money to pay for printing and shipping the books. Although I had never met Lois in person, we would talk about that happening someday. She asked me to go with her to Israel as she had gotten into taking tour groups there. She would tell me bits and pieces of her life story. Even when she had hard things happen with her loved ones, or she was sick, her voice remained strong and her faith in God was unwavering.

Finally, while I was visiting Florida last September, I got to meet her. She had just turned 90. Her body was definitely slowing down and Covid-19 had stopped her prison travels, but her personality still resonated with her love for Jesus. We settled down in her living room while she told me her story. As she spoke, I began to understand who she was and who she had become. I could clearly see how God particularly and individually creates us, saves us, redeems us, and then uses us for His purposes.

The fitting birthplace for Lois was a logging camp in Oklahoma. Her father was a logger.  A brother born before her died at birth, and her mother was told not to have any more children. But then Lois was born. Just as the unlikely circumstances of her birth, so the rest of her life has followed. She is not one to be stopped or ignored. When she was ten, her family moved to northern California. To say that she was flirtatious or boy-crazy is probably an understatement. She had a boyfriend all her high school years and married one as soon as she graduated. They had two daughters together; but six years of settling down didn’t exactly agree with Lois, so she divorced him and ran off with his best friend. They married, but two weeks later while he was away at work, she left and didn’t come back.

Lois moved in with her parents; but her desire was to see the world, so she soon took her children and moved to Reno, Nevada, where she found work in a casino. It was the perfect place for Lois to make friends and to accommodate her desire for booze. After working all night, it was not uncommon for her and her friends to begin bar-hopping in the early morning and continue right through the afternoon. Lois loved to dance and Reno bars provided the best atmosphere to drink, dance, and find men. One particular morning about eleven, she and her friends entered a bar. Lois had her shoes in one hand and loudly announced to the entire place, “Here we are, fellas!” 

Her entrance attracted the attention of a recently discharged military man. They soon ended up in his car, parked by the river. He asked her to marry him and she quickly agreed. They had a church wedding because he insisted on it. They stayed married for a decade and had three daughters. Their every-day life consisted of alcohol abuse, fighting, and physical abuse which they each leveled against the other. 

But husband number three was a gambler, and he eventually gambled away everything they had. Working in a casino wasn’t a good job for him, and the marriage grew quite shaky. Lois, too, continued working in the casino and as her marriage deteriorated, she took interest in a co-worker. Short conversations on breaks and romantic glances across the casino tables as they worked together, finally led to them meeting in a bar one night after work. There they discovered they both loved to dance. Someone at the bar who worked with them, reported what they were doing to Lois’ husband, who soon came to the bar to see for himself. He started no trouble, just greeted them and left. At her new friend’s suggestion, they followed him home where they announced to him their intentions of marrying.

So Lois had her third divorce, followed shortly by a fourth husband. They had gone to San Francisco to get married and returned to Reno only to find out that they no longer had jobs there. They decided to try to get work at a Lake Tahoe casino. At this new job, they discovered that Lois’ former husband was also now employed there. All three were working in plain sight of each other. “Oh, dear me,” Lois says as she tells the story. The ex-husband, Bob, would follow her around, accusing her and “pestering” her. Soon, she got a divorce from the new husband, Skip, and remarried Bob. This pattern repeated itself a couple more times until finally, when Lois was just 37, she married Skip for the third and final time. Their marriage would survive the longest and they would have one daughter together. 

In 1969, Skip announced that he was moving to Alaska. “Not without me,” Lois said, and they packed up their belongings in an RV home and headed to Alaska. Once there, they started an RV and trailer park business. Just the same kind of successful business my brother-in-law, Gary, had. Lois got a job with Gary to learn the business, and to win a few of his customers over to her and Skip’s park. 

But Gary was an oddity to Lois. “I thought he was nuttier than a fruitcake,” she says. He treated her like a family member and started talking about Jesus to her. He spent a lot of time and money doing prison ministry, which seemed like a waste to Lois. He would have conversations about the gospel with her and then walk outside to business buildings across the road. She would watch out the window, and it looked to her like he was talking to himself while he was walking. Later she would learn that he had actually been praying for her. He gave her a Bible which she took home without so much as a glance inside, and threw it on the top, unused bunk of her daughter’s bed.

Life continued for Lois in the same way. Alcohol. Always alcohol. Fighting. Physical abuse. Receiving it. Giving it. Even giving it to her children. Her oldest daughter was killed in an automobile accident, leaving behind two small children. Lois adopted them and raised them with her youngest daughter. Another daughter took her own life, as did one of her granddaughters. Drug addiction has played an active role in her children’s lives. Only two of her six daughters are still living.

Eventually, Skip had enough and filed for divorce. Lois describes, “I had always been a fighter. I did things my way. That’s one reason I was married and divorced so many times, because I could never find a man that would obey me. Divorce from Skip was bad. So much paperwork was thrown at me. I was left with very little. He took me to the cleaners.”

This seemed to Lois to be rock bottom. She was about to turn 48 when she decided it was time to take her own life. Enough was enough. Sitting inside her tiny RV, she decided to drive her pick-up truck over a cliff which would land her in the ocean. She found herself walking outside into the cool July evening for that final drive. But when she got to the truck, the doors wouldn’t open. They seemed to be locked but they wouldn’t unlock either. Defeated, she went back inside and for the first time, reached for the Bible that Gary had given her.

She began reading, and the more she read, the more convicted she became. Convicted of her sin, her unrighteousness. 

“None is righteous, no, not one;

No one understands;

No one seeks for God.

All have turned aside; together they have become worthless...” 

–Romans 3:10-12

That was exactly how she felt. Worthless. She read on. About the righteousness of Jesus. About having His righteousness by believing in Him. About receiving the gift of justification by His grace. On to chapter 4 and verse 5:“To the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness…God’s love has been poured into our hearts (5:5)…but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (5:8).” She read through chapter 7, and even though she didn’t understand a lot of what she was reading and couldn’t even keep it all in context, she began to repent of her sins, one at a time. She knew she needed to surrender to Him, completely.

The next day was Sunday, and she got into her truck (which she had no trouble getting into) and headed to a church she had heard advertised on the radio. She knew the pastor and his wife as well. The service had already started so she went in a back door. The pastor’s wife greeted her there. She said her husband had told her to wait for Lois. Puzzled about how he knew she was coming, Lois took a seat in the back. The passage the pastor was preaching on was none other than Romans 3. “It was like everything he said that morning was to me,” Lois says. He gave the invitation. It seemed like it was lasting forever. Surely it would end soon. But no—she heard the pastor say something about “unfinished business,” and that is when, Lois says, “The Lord had me run down the aisle.”

That was 42 years ago, and Lois’ life has changed drastically. There is no more drinking. Her vocabulary has changed. It has been many years since she punched anyone or knocked them to the ground. She is a new creature, and old things have passed away (2 Corinthians 5:17). Now, sharing the joy of knowing Jesus is mainly what her life and conversations are about.

Gary got her started in Bill Glass Prison Ministries. She thought prison was a great place for her to minister because she feels like that’s where she belonged for a good share of her life. God has and still is using her there. Even at 90 years of age. Now she has her own prison ministry—along with her long-time roommate in her Florida home—Cathy. Read Living Letters April 20th blog to find out more about that.