3AM on Execution Day
I actually woke up at 2:37 this morning.
I had hoped it was later, but the darkness of the room said otherwise. I made a cup of coffee I didn't really need and came out to the studio. My mind was already awake. If I'm honest, I think it has been awake for weeks.
Tennessee. Death row. The men and women we serve inside prison walls. The countdown. Christa.
These thoughts haven't been jogging through my mind at an easy pace. They've been in a full sprint, racing toward a finish line that now has a time on it.
The first thought that hit me when I looked at the clock: before most of us sit down to lunch today, Christa Pike will be in eternity.
As Believers, we can live most days without much intention. We're busy. We have routines. We have schedules to keep. We have this, and we have that. (I'm preaching to myself here.) And so we autopilot through the day, and we miss Divine appointments with people who are hurting. People who need to hear about Hope. People who need Light shone into the darkness of their world. We walk right past them.
Carpe diem gets thrown around a lot in whimsical ways, but the phrase is true. Seize the day. If God has given us today, we have 24 hours. We have to take life a day at a time. An hour at a time. A minute at a time. A breath at a time. Because one of these moments, that breath is going to be our last.
Every breath is a gift from God. How we use it is our responsibility, and it's something we will be held accountable for.
“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”
Men and women on death row, and really anyone in prison no matter where they're held, are mostly forgotten until they make the news. Twenty-seven states still have the death penalty. Across all of them, there are 45 women on death row. Christa is the only one in Tennessee. Unless God intervenes, after the 10 a.m. Central window opens this morning, there will be 44.
What happened to Colleen Slemmer was evil, and her family has carried that loss for more than thirty years. Nothing in this post takes that lightly.
But I've spent the last few weeks praying for Christa's soul. From everything I've read in the media, and from what has been missing in her own recent writings, I have not seen her name Jesus. The coverage keeps returning to Buddhist practice.
So we've prayed. We've reached out to our prayer partners and asked them to pray with urgency. We've sent emails, posted prayer points on social media, and pleaded with God for her eyes to be opened. We are praying that she would see God as a loving Father who loved her enough to send Jesus to pay the price for her sin, so that she can have a relationship with Him. We are praying she would believe, call on the name of the Lord, and be saved.
“For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
That promise is still open to her this morning.
The tension I'm holding is simple. Life and death. Heaven or hell.
There's a second tension too, and I've wrestled with it all week. It's the hearts of people being revealed in the comments about Christa and her execution. Many of those comments come from profiles with a cross in the picture or a Christian quote overlay. Click through to their page and you'll find Bible verses posted right alongside the cruelty.
I've seen it before. When local media ran a story on our work on Mississippi's death row, people were ruthless. They cast stones and demanded to know why we cared more about the men inside than about their victims.
That's the reality of cultural Christianity. Complacent Christianity. And it makes me ask myself a hard question: when does the reality of sin and a Savior become life-altering to us?
Second Verses exists to use music to connect with the lost and walk alongside the found.
Music is common ground. For more than two years at Parchman, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, we've spent time on death row building relationships through music. Those relationships have opened the door to conversations about life, death, faith, and redemption that would never have happened otherwise.
I met Richard Jordan on our very first trip to Parchman in July 2024. Death row was being housed in Unit 29, J Unit, while Unit 17 was being renovated. It was a loud unit, and some days it was hard to hear each other over the noise of people and cooling units. Richard was working on a song for the Parchman talent show, and he wanted me to hear it. He went and got his keyboard, set it up, and sang me a song he wrote called "Jesus Was One of Us." He was going for a Gaither kind of feel, blending the music with spoken words dropped in at just the right moment to land a point. I'll never forget the depth of his voice.
Richard was part of our community on death row. He laughed. He joked around. He got serious when the moment called for it. Mississippi executed Richard last summer.
In one of our final sessions together, God did something in Richard's heart that I will carry for the rest of my life. I'll tell that story later this week.
Tennessee has one woman on death row. So does Mississippi.
She lives at Delta Correctional Facility, a women's prison where Second Verses has recently begun to serve. Every hour of Christa's countdown has made me think about her, and about how little time any of us actually has to get the gospel to the people God has put in front of us.
On Mississippi's death row, we have a Divine Mentor group of four men, led by a Believer who lives on the row with them. The group is built on Pastor Wayne Cordeiro's book The Divine Mentor.
Every day, each man spends time alone in the Word using the SOAP method: Scripture, Observation, Application, Prayer. He reads a passage, writes down what he sees in it, writes how it applies to his life, and then prays it back to God. Every Thursday at 3 p.m., they come together and share what God has shown them that week.
We can only be on the row a few times a year. God's Word is there every single day.
The same model is running in Unit 29 at Parchman, where the group has ten members and a waiting list. Next month we hope to launch our first Divine Mentor group at Delta Correctional.
There's a word we use for what we're working to raise up inside prison walls: musicianary.
A musicianary is a man or woman on the inside who has been strengthened, trained, and equipped to evangelize and speak life into a dark place. They don't have to play an instrument or sing. They need a heart for people, a heart for God, and a heart for relationship. Think of the field ministers who graduate from prison seminaries and go back out to serve their peers. Musicianaries work the same way, in teams of two or three, leading sessions and Divine Mentor groups on their own units.
And there is no darker place in a prison than death row.
A musicianary is there at 3 a.m., when no chaplain or volunteer can be. They're there the night before a date, and they're there the morning after.
This is where Second Verses is headed.
The vision is that every new facility that we enter will launch with three things in place: One Room. One Church. One Team. A chaplain or warden gives us a room and a weekly time slot. A local church within driving distance commits to walk alongside that facility with volunteers, prayer, and support. And a small team of Believers on the inside begins training to become musicianaries.
From there, the pathway is simple. A man or woman comes to a music workshop. Believers are identified and invited into a discipleship groups. Those who are growing and ready are trained, and then commissioned with their church family on the outside there to see it. Along the way, professional songwriters come inside to write alongside them, creating songs from the church on the inside for the church on the inside and the church on the outside.
The Christa Pikes. The Richard Jordans. The woman at Delta. The men on the row who haven't had a visitor in years. The thousands more who aren't on death row at all but are just as lost. There will never be enough of us on the outside to reach them all. But God has already placed Believers right beside them. Our job is to strengthen them, train them, and send them.
The reality is that every one of us is on death row.
We were born to die. That's as real and raw as it gets. We don't know our date. Christa knows hers. Richard knew his. Most of us don't. But unless the Lord returns first, every one of us is heading toward the day we take our last breath.
“And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.”
On that day, our eyes will close to the sights of this earth. What will they open to see?
For the one who has called on the name of the Lord, the answer is Jesus. Face to face. Every doubt gone, every sin paid for, and we’ll be home.
“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. ”
That gift is the same for a woman in a cell at Riverbend this morning as it is for you reading this over your coffee.
Here's what I'm asking.
Pray. Pray for Christa by name today, right up to the last moment. Pray for the woman at Delta, for the men in our Divine Mentor groups, and for the musicianaries God is raising up.
Partner. If your church wants to be the One Church for a facility, we want to talk with you. Send us an email.
Give. Every trip, every workbook, every song starts with people who believe this work matters. You can support our work here.
And if you don't know where your eyes will open, please don't wait for a date. Call on His name today.
It's 3 a.m. but the clock is still moving.
Seize the day.