Our Team Shares the Same Values for Growth

Collin Price, SJ, a Jesuit scholastic, joined our team in September 2023. He has been getting to know the participants on the retreats and supports them in their journey of healing and transformation. He has shared a reflection on his experience at JRJI. JRJI has taught me, in my short time here, about finding God in hidden places. Prisons, and the people locked inside them, are hidden away from the rest of society. Most of the places we visit are a half-day’s drive away, but when we take the time to travel that distance, we arrive at a place where God resides. Matthew 25 tells us to put ourselves in contact with poor, suffering, outcast people because God is present in the relationships we build with people who are suffering, especially those whose pain is hidden away. We are not the Christ-bearers, bringing God’s message to sinners in need of saving. We are all loved sinners in need of God’s healing mercy, and we find it when we encounter the light of Christ in another person, whether they are wearing black or wearing blue. Our gift is to look underneath the bushel baskets of concrete and barbed wire, face tattoos and life sentences, to find the light within the people we encounter and make it a little less hidden.