I read that Gram Seed lay dying in Middlesbrough hospital. Three years of living on the streets had taken its toll. He had hypothermia, pneumonia and septicaemia. The doctors sought permission from his mother to switch off his life-support machine. He says, ‘I spent nearly all my life in jail. I was a skinhead, I was a football hooligan, I was in the rave scene, I was charged with murder. But I was searching for love all my life and I couldn’t find it.

My mother gave up on me when I was twenty-one. She said I was the son of Satan. She said I was evil like my father who I’d never seen. He used to rape and beat my mum up and he went to prison. She said, “You’re more evil than your dad and I don’t want nought to do with you – you’re dead as far as I’m concerned.”

I grew up with my nanna and my granddad. My nanna was drinking and taking drugs all the time. I didn’t have hope. I didn’t know what it was but I was always trying to fill this hole inside me with things – drugs and alcohol and sex and violence.

It was a vicious cycle of prison and outside and prison and outside. I ended up in a coma and it looked as if my life was over.

Then these lads who had been trying to tell me about Jesus on the streets turned up in the intensive care room and prayed for me.

They said, “In the name of your son, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, give this man new life”. And I woke up and started breathing myself. That evening I opened my eyes for the first time in six days. They came back later and told me of God’s love for me and that Jesus came and died for people like me. I felt a freedom that I had never known before.

I went along to this Alpha course at the church. I had four front teeth missing and I was a right rebel. I hated myself and I remember saying, “Jesus – if you are real, come into my life. These people tell me that you can change me and give me hope and set me free.” I had my hands out and I fell back and started crying. From that day on I was totally transformed.

I said to Jesus that day, “You’ve given me hope. Help me to give other people hope.” From then on I had a desire to tell people about Jesus.

Three years later I started a ministry in our church called Emmanuel Prison Ministries. I was asked to go into the prison that I was released from in 1995. I spent ten years of my life in jail trying to get out and now every day I’m trying to get in. I run Alpha back-to-back now in seven prisons in the North East.

I talk to all the kids on the estates to tell them there is a better way of life. Stealing and taking drugs is not the way to go. I wanted them to know Jesus the way I had got to know him.’

Source: Bible in One Year – Alpha, Day 136 of 365