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Jail ministry helps women reenter community successfully

Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal - 10/20/2018

Oct. 20--Just before dawn on Sept. 4, 17-year-old Logan Mattox was driving the Natchez Trace, heading to his grandmother's house when he fell asleep at the wheel.

Half a mile from his exit, Mattox's truck hit a tree, killing him instantly. He had just finished high school and was planning to enlist in the U.S. Air Force.

At the time of the accident, Mattox's mother -- 36-year-old Tina McCarley -- was in the Lee County Correctional Facility after a three-year-long downward spiral that began with alcohol abuse and morphed into methamphetamine addiction.

"Meth consumed me," she said. "It took over my mind. I lost my marriage and lost my kids. It took away everything I loved," McCarley said.

Finally clean, sober and on a journey toward redemption, McCarley had written letters to each of her three sons from jail.

In the 10-page letter to middle son Logan, McCarley told him all the things she wanted him to know but couldn't tell him in person.

"I poured my heart out," she said. "I told him how sorry I was, how proud I was of him, and about the change deep in my heart. He read it just a few days before he died. I talked to him on the phone and he said, 'Momma, that's what I've been waiting to hear.' When we buried him, that letter was in the casket with him."

McCarley said she would never have written the letter in the first place if not for the mentoring of Missy Lunceford and Anne Reed of "Day One," whose ministry, among other things, encourages incarcerated women to write "love letters" to family members.

McCarley said Day One and its ministry gave her hope and helped turn her life around.

"When you've ruined everything, they let you know someone cares past your mistakes," she said. "They gave me hope that God could restore me. They help women so much."

Day One meets weekly on the Campus of Calvary Baptist Church in Tupelo and is open to women recently released from incarceration. The volunteers provide spiritual guidance and practical support -- everything from a fresh change of clothes to help getting into a treatment program -- to women who often have nowhere to turn and no one to support them.

Sixty-year-old Tupelo resident Missy Lunceford began Day One four years ago, along with Diane Wiese and Marsha Flinn, as a way to help incarcerated women make a successful re-entry into the community -- providing spiritual guidance and a practical plan to break the cycle of recidivism.

"If they don't have a plan it's a revolving door -- the same cycle over and over," Lunceford said. "We tell them, 'When that fresh air hits your face you'd better have a plan.'"

Lunceford is a career coach at Tupelo High School who has worked in jail ministry for many years. She said the women she encounters often feel unloved and hungry for affirmation.

"These women are just my heart," she said. "When I come to the jail on Sundays, I'll take their hands in mine, look them in the eye and call them by name. I'll tell them, 'You are beautiful. You were created as a beautiful daughter of God and you are a woman of worth.' We'll both have tears in our eyes when I say, 'You are not bound by your past.'"

Anne Reed of Tupelo is a fellow Day One volunteer. Like Lunceford, she works with women both before and after their release. She said while most of the women they encounter are in trouble because of drugs, there is often an underlying cause for the situations many of these women find themselves in.

"I'd say 98 percent of them are here because of drugs," she said. "These women have no sense of worth, and they are always looking to a man to value them," she said. "And it's usually a man who treats them very poorly. That's often what gets them sucked into the whole lifestyle to begin with."

Lunceford and Reed and their co-workers at Day One all share the same goal: to see women restored to their communities with a new hope and a new plan. Stories like Tina McCarley's keep them coming back, one day at a time.

McCarley is out of jail now, reunited with her estranged husband. While she grieves her son's loss, she said she is focused on the future and grateful for how far she's come.

"I made a promise to my son not to go back," she said. "I'm getting back together with my husband and I'm putting my 10-year-old son on the bus every day. It's never too late. You can turn around. God can restore all things."

davidpan1963@gmail.com.

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(c)2018 the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal (Tupelo, Miss.)

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