Editor’s note – Donald Szukala wrote this from inside his own reentry, seven months removed from twenty-nine months in federal prison. BCW is running it because Micah 6:8 is too often quoted as a slogan and too rarely applied to a man standing at the edge of a job application or a church door. His argument isn’t academic: he’s asking what justice, mercy, and humility look like once the state’s sentence has ended but the community’s answer is still pending.
Seven Months Out
I walked out of federal prison seven months ago, after serving twenty-nine months. Since that day I have applied for work everywhere I can think of, and not one employer has hired me. If my mother had not taken me in, I would have nowhere to live. And I tell you plainly: if my church had not surrounded me with people and with purpose, I would have been left alone with the same empty days and old contacts that pull men back inside.
I am not writing about reentry as a policy problem. I am living it.
The Numbers Behind the Question
The numbers describe my life back to me. The Bureau of Justice Statistics tracked state prisoners released in 2012 across 34 states: 62 percent were rearrested within three years and 71 percent within five. Rearrest is not reconviction, and honest writers should say so. Even so, the pattern is hard to dismiss. A related federal study found employment among those released from federal prison hovered between 35 and 38 percent over four years, with the average wait for a first job over six months. Seven months out, I am still waiting on my first yes.
People are told to pay their debt to society, and then society closes the doors they would need to walk through to pay it. Housing, work, and community make a changed life possible.
Editor’s note – These numbers are not abstractions to Szukala; they describe his own week. The data make his case for him: housing, work, and community aren’t extras bolted onto justice. They’re what finishing a sentence actually requires.
What Micah Was Actually Saying
Micah 6:8 is often quoted on its own, as a tidy summary of the good life: “to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” But the surrounding verses weigh more. Chapter 6 opens as a courtroom scene: God brings a case against His people (v. 1-2), and Israel asks what offering could satisfy Him – burnt offerings, thousands of rams, even the firstborn (v. 6-7). The answer: He has already told them. He wants not a more religious spectacle but a community that does justice, loves covenant faithfulness, and lives humbly before Him.
The three commands belong together. Mishpat, justice, sets right what has been made wrong. Hesed, often translated “mercy” or “steadfast love,” is loyal, covenant-keeping kindness. And humility keeps us honest that every one of us stands before the same Judge. Remove any one of them and justice goes wrong. Justice without mercy turns into vengeance. Mercy without justice turns into sentimentality. Both without humility turn into self-righteousness.
Two Ways of Thinking About Wrongdoing
Debates about criminal justice usually split into two camps. The retributive view asks, What does this person deserve? Crime is a violation of law, and justice means proportionate punishment. The restorative view asks, Who was harmed, what do they need, and how can what was broken be repaired? It centers victims, accountability, and the offender’s return to the community.
Christians sometimes assume they must pick a side. Scripture doesn’t let us. Retribution is real and Biblical. Romans 13:4 says the governing authority “does not bear the sword in vain,” and the Mosaic law prescribed consequences. Even the famous “eye for an eye” of Exodus 21:23-25 limited vengeance: the penalty had to fit the harm and go no further. Neither Testament treats wrongdoing as trivial. The cross itself is the most serious statement ever made that sin must be answered for.
But the Biblical vision of justice never stops at punishment. The law required restitution, making the victim whole (Exodus 22:1-15). It set up cities of refuge to protect people from unjust vengeance (Numbers 35). It built in a Jubilee, a regular resetting of economic life so no one stayed permanently locked out (Leviticus 25). When Zacchaeus met Jesus, his repentance showed up in restitution: he pledged to repay anyone he had cheated four times over (Luke 19:8). Ezekiel 33:15 describes repentance the same way, as returning what was taken and living differently.
In short, Scripture holds accountability and restoration together. David was forgiven in 2 Samuel 12, yet the consequences of his sin did not vanish. The thief on the cross received paradise (Luke 23:43) without being spared the cross. Grace does not cancel justice. It is what makes restoration possible after justice has been taken seriously.
Editor’s note – Szukala’s reading of Micah 6:8 refuses the false choice between toughness and softness. Zacchaeus’s fourfold restitution and the thief’s unearned paradise appear in the same Gospel because grace was never meant to erase the cost of wrongdoing, only to make a changed life possible afterward.
Where the Church Comes In
If the sentence is the state’s or the Fed’s responsibility, restoration is largely the church’s. I know this because I am the one being restored.
Jesus put it directly: visiting someone in prison is the same as visiting Him (Matthew 25:36). Hebrews 13:3 repeats the thought: “Remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison.” Isaiah 61:1, which Jesus read aloud in Nazareth, promises “freedom for the captives” and “release from darkness for the prisoners.”
Notice that these are commands for the local congregation, not for a government agency. The church can offer what no program can fully supply: a place to belong. A returning citizen needs a job, an apartment, and a driver’s license, but also needs people who know his name and expect good things from him. In my case that has been literal. My church gave me a food bank to serve at, a Bible study to grow in, and men who check on me. My recovery program, The Most Excellent Way, keeps me anchored week after week. Without them, the statistics quoted above would have had me by now.
In practice this can be as ordinary as a congregation that hires returning citizens, a small group that mentors someone through their first months out, or a landlord in the pews willing to look past a record.
The New Testament is full of redeemed people with ugly pasts. Paul had persecuted the church and approved of killing believers. Onesimus, a runaway slave, returned to Philemon “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother” (Philemon 16). The gospel does not assume that people stay what they were.
Editor’s note – This is the part policy can’t reach. A program can issue a license; only a congregation can give a man a reason to show up and people who expect good things from him. Szukala’s testimony is a quiet rebuke to any church that praises grace on Sunday and locks its doors the rest of the week.
Some Honest Tensions
This does not mean every proposal labeled “reform” is wise. Victims deserve real attention, not an afterthought, and restorative practices work best when they begin with victims’ needs and consent. Public safety is a legitimate good. Christians of good conscience disagree about sentencing, risk, and which policies serve the common good.
What we cannot do is treat a person’s worst act as their final identity. A society that permanently closes the door on millions of its people, and then acts surprised when many of them struggle, has obviously not met the standard of Micah 6:8. Neither has a church that praises the grace it received and then hesitates to extend it.
Walking It Out
To act justly means insisting on both accountability and a path forward. To love mercy means showing up with the kind of loyal, practical kindness God has shown us. To walk humbly means remembering that we all stand before a Judge who has been merciful to us.
I paid what the Feds required of me. Whether I become what God intends for me now depends in large part on whether the church keeps its doors open. The sentence ends at the prison gate, but the question of justice does not.
A Word from the Editor
Micah’s courtroom scene ends with God telling His people exactly what He requires, and it is not more sacrifice but a changed way of living together. A church that only talks about grace has not yet practiced it. If God has shown us mercy we did not earn, the least we owe another sinner is an open door.
Salvation – Eternal Life in Less Than 150 Words
Distributed by – BCWorldview.org
Editor Comment: Thank you for turning your own hard season into a clear call for the church to practice the mercy it preaches.