“We believe that the men at Walk were born to reflect the glory of God in the world.”

Most of the men at Walk have been dealing with deep trauma that started in early childhood. Their life stories are often devastating tales of trauma upon trauma upon trauma that are incredibly difficult to listen to and almost impossible to live through. As a charity we arrive late in those stories, after much harm has been done, with a seemingly overwhelming task ahead.

People ask us how we are able to work in those circumstances, so we tell them how all the stories actually began. The stories of every man at Walk did not start with the first traumatic incident, it started with a man who was made in the image of God. This man, no matter what he’s been through, was born to bear the glory of God and reflect the glory of God in the world.

Walk is grounded on that foundational value and our work is to remind men of the redemptive hope they were designed and born with. Life, pain, hurt and trauma can hide that hope, but it can never be taken away from them.

We tell the men about that hope all the time, but we also tell them that faith is something you embrace, something you take hold of. It’s not a thing to look at from a distance, it’s something you get involved with. God has given us this grace, this incredible gift of salvation, and it’s there, but we’ve got to pick it up and unpack it, unwrap it and explore how we make it our own.

This message is a lifetime’s work for the men who we meet at the prison gates, but it’s a lifetime’s work for me too. My story is very different to the men we serve at Walk, but we face the same challenge as we have to unpack the same promise of the gospel and figure out what that means for our lives.

We are always honest about the difficulty men face at Walk and death through overdose has been a tragic, unfortunate part of some journeys here. I miss those men, we all miss those men. I wish they were still in my life and still with us at Walk, but I remind myself they are with Jesus now and I rejoice at the memories of them taking hold of that hope for themselves – even if it was only for a short time.

Walk has been running for more than ten years and we need younger people with a redemptive vision to pick this work up and carry it forward. I am so pleased to say that we have been blessed with a great team and the energy of new people is both exciting and inspiring.

We are still breaking ground and moving ahead in new directions, but Walk remains built on a foundation of eternal hope. It is this hope that is available to every man who ever comes through our front door, now and forever.