On Tuesday of this Holy Week I was honored to break bread at a table filled with Christian disciples.
While none were fishermen or tax collectors, like the original followers of Jesus they are all humble men who work and pray hard and praise God for their many blessings.
They are also convicted felons who have spent years in prison, including a former Aurora gang member whose violence landed him on the pages of this newspaper back in the late 1990s, and a man originally from Chicago who served 50 of his 65 years behind bars.
“Like Lazarus, we have been born again, brought back to new life,” declared 72-year-old Ed Chance, who spent 17 years in prison for burglary and aggravated battery and is now a church deacon who owns a thriving handyman business.
This gathering of once-lost souls was held not in recognition of Easter, however, but to mark another event celebrating renewal – the 95th anniversary of Wayside Cross Ministries of Aurora.
The notable milestone will be publicly recognized May 16 at Calvary Church on the border of Aurora and Naperville with a dinner that will focus on the Master’s Touch Ministry at Wayside Cross that has offered second chances to thousands of men through a Scripture-based rehabilitation program.
Wayside’s vision of providing spiritual and material help to the poor and destitute has slowly expanded over the decades to includes missions for the imprisoned, the homeless, single mothers, inner city youth and those addicted to drugs or alcohol.
Wayside now operates a center in Elgin, and its outreach not only extends into state prisons, this time-honored organization has a clothing and housewares warehouse, resale shops and a car detail business.
But at Wayside’s core remains the Master’s Touch Ministry, which began in 1928 when Billy Sunday began a series of evangelistic meetings in Aurora that led to a downtown rescue mission for the growing number of transient men coming to the area looking for jobs, shelter and hope.
The Tuesday gathering gave me the chance to sit down with nine Master’s Touch graduates – from 1997 to 2021 – and to hear their remarkable stories of transformation that speak volumes to what this organization has accomplished in nearly a century of work.
At one time in their tumultuous lives, all nine would have been considered hopeless – throwaways, the dregs of society who did nothing but take from others and leave destruction in their path.
Not surprising, most came from traumatic childhoods marked by poverty, alcoholism and physical, verbal or sexual abuse, with some experiencing all of the above. They grew up angry, bitter, depressed and in some cases suicidal. And they turned to crime, as well as drugs and alcohol, using the prison system like a revolving door.
All nine will be the first to admit how lost they were. They will also be the first to praise Wayside Cross for putting them back on the right path.
Ed Chance, who “got pulled back into prison” five times, recalled applying to 58 places as he searched for somewhere to go after his release from the Illinois Department of Corrections in 2010.
Only one location responded to his plea for help.
“I needed structure. This was the perfect place,” he said of Wayside. “Just a lot of stuff had the hand of God written all over it.”
Likewise, Michael Douglas, who said he grew up in the Chicago projects with an angry alcoholic father, and was in prison for 15 years for criminal sexual assault, said Wayside was the only place that would accept him.
Today, as head of the mission’s Hope on Wheels car detail business, Douglas is considered one of the center’s hardest workers, pulling in more “thank-you notes from satisfied customers,” points out Wayside Cross Executive Director James Lukose, than ever before.
Demetrius Hughes, now a plumber and church deacon, was once a gang member, crack addict and burglar, which led to a couple stints in prison. And it was only through a rare encounter with the warden at Big Muddy River Correctional Center that he eventually was able to make that one critical phone call which opened the doors of Wayside.
Clyde Branch, who spent 50 years behind bars because “I was an addict, a liar and a thief,” now points proudly to his face on the cover of a thick Wayside brochure – his testimonial will also be featured at the May banquet – and smiles broadly while informing me the only other time his picture has been taken was for those prison mugshots.
“Now I get up every day and am motivated to do more and more,” said Wayside’s maintenance supervisor, “because God has work for me to do.”
Craig Schuler, who keeps busy with his successful painting business, recalls how even a good family could not keep him from Aurora’s streets in the late 1990s. Shot at least three times himself during that violent era, he spent years in and out of prison.
But it was the pull of alcohol that scared him most, said Schuler, who admits that at one time he “thought I was better than the men” he’d see going in and out of Wayside over the years. That all changed the day he entered its doors “with shakes so bad” he could barely function.
David Bialachowski also beat his battle with the bottle, but not before multiple DUIs and a family assault landed him on a mattress next to a toilet in a crowded Cook County Jail. There, “two huge, intimidating” men one evening invited him to a Bible study that eventually led him to Aurora’s mission.
The path for Michael Cortez, who was in AP classes and a skilled chess player as a kid but used his brain to “become a career criminal,” went through Cook County Jail, and later a Bible study in Glen Ellyn, where “I came alive. The seeds were planted,” he said.
Fourteen months later, he came to Wayside, where he is now a resident coordinator, working alongside Warehouse and Transportation Manager Harold Wright, who is also head of umpires for the mission’s Urban Youth Baseball League.
Wright, who traveled across the country and around the world while in the Army, eventually ended up in prison for three years because of “out-of-control” drug use. After his release a bus brought him to Wayside, but unhappy with the structured program, he left the mission only to realize “I could not find my way out of Aurora.”
And so he returned, becoming one of the mission’s most beloved faces and biggest cheerleaders.
Kevin Johnson, who spent over six years in prison for burglary and now works at a local grocery store and as a housekeeping volunteer, describes his journey to Wayside this way: “No matter how often I’d wander off the wrong path, something always pulled me back on the road where I needed to be.”
Like the others, Johnson insists he’s not the man he used to be. After hearing their stories, it’s hard to imagine the destructive emotions that once controlled their lives. Despite hard pasts that at one time, as Chance put it, “left us dead inside,” most of these men look years younger than their ages, with clear, vibrant eyes that seem to reveal much about their souls.
Some shed a few tears as they reflected back on their journeys. But when you’ve been give a second chance at life, they ask, what’s not to smile about?
“I did not know what I was searching for,” said Johnson. “We are happy to be here.”
dcrosby@tribpub.com
