Bible Society’s lunch featured a story of a wonderful transformation. Prison Chaplain Wally Pospelyj, and AJ, whose story of radical change began when a mate gave him a Bible while he was facing a murder trial.
Wally’s story
This journey started back in February 1987. I graduated from the police academy in Goulburn and for the next eight years, worked my way around Western Sydney. During those eight years, I saw the best in some people. Also, hopeless times as well. It was at Merrylands where I met my wife. She came out of the academy six weeks after my class, and as we got to know each other, she introduced me to Christian faith. I got to know her and her family.
There was one distinctive difference between her family and the family I was raised in.
As I got to know them, I saw that the one difference was the Bible. Every time I went over their house, there was a Bible open on the dining room table. It had an impact on the way that they were raised – their lives. Very different to my family.
It had influence in my wife’s family, not really considered in mine.
When I was out at Mount Druitt, I worked with the youth liaison officer, and we would go into the police citizens youth club and we run what they call crime prevention workshops, trying to reconcile the relationship between the police and the local hoodlums and trying to reduce crime that way. At the same time, I was involved in the youth ministry at the local Anglican church that I was going to, and it was around that time that God put two things in my mind. One was the concept of reconciliation, and the other was the concept of eternal versus temporary.
As I’m wrestling with these thoughts over a period of time, thinking through my work and involvement in youth ministry at church compared to what I was doing in [policing]. I thought the work I do in the [policing] has a minimal change in the lives of these kids on the streets, and that can be completely reversed in a bad shift from someone else that they meet. Yet the work I was doing on the youth group on Friday nights, it had an eternal perspective. That ultimately led to me resigning from the police force, which I did on Christmas eve in 94 and then 95 started at Moore College. After graduating, for five years I was in church, and the last 25 years I’ve been in jail. The last 25 years.
Since being introduced to Jesus and Christianity 40 years ago through my wife’s family, there’s one constant thing that I’ve seen that has always been there at the centre of permanent, life-transforming change, and that’s been the Bible. I’m eternally grateful for the Bible Society and the grant that they offer us each year as services chaplains. The money that they give allows us to provide Bibles for any inmate that requested it in English or any foreign language. It’s immeasurable what that has done. One thing I’ve seen in my life and in many others is that is the only thing that brings lasting change. And ultimately reconciliation between me and the God who created us.
In 2004, I was out at Parrmatta Jail. A young man was coming thorough. he was very young, just a tad oiver eighteen. He’d been out of the juvenile centre for just eight days before he committed another crime and was in Parramatta. Now this kid was young, he was angry, extremely violent at times, strong, but he was a lad without hope and no chance of a bright future. I didn’t get to meet him then. But 16 years later I got to meet him in 2020 when he started up in my jail. At that age he was 30 times he was 36 and the difference between his first Paramatta experience and when I met him was unbelievable. This is that guy. Impacted my life
A.J.’s story
Yes, this guy impacted my life, enormously.
Yes, 16 years ago, 17 years ago I started my journey of incarceration. I thought I’d die in jail. But back then I was a man who believed there was no hope for my life. I should say a boy. I was sitting in prison facing my second murder trial in 2010, broken, angry, lost, and convicted and convinced that my future was over and that I was nothing society.
But just before two years before my murder trial, a man gave me a Bible on the way out of Parramatta jail on Christmas Eve. He gave me this Bible. (A. J. gestures with a small blue Bible in his hand) I held onto it because he was my mate and two years later I decided to take that Bible with me on that murder trial, this little small Bible. I started reading in this second murder trial. I came across a passage, a turning point in my life where in the index it has love, freedom, I saw the word freedom, but I also would say that I only could read at the year six level.
I didn’t know what a chapter was, I didn’t know what a verse was. I had the page number. All I saw was truth and freedom. I had a conviction in my heart. Many years later I found out that truth was actually Christ and I had taken everything out of context,
But the God who created me, that knows me and knew what he was doing and I wasn’t too bright but in that Bible, this Bible I began to read and that Bible taught me how to read, taught me how to write, taught me how to reflect and not react, how to respond. Over a fourteen year period it taught me how to be gentle, how to sacrifice, how to endure suffering and taught me that there is meaning in the suffering. And through God’s word, I discovered the presence of the Holy Spirit walking with me in the darkest place of my life.
I was a man who believed there was no future. I was a man on the verge of losing his soul. No redemption, no purpose, but in this beautiful Bible. I found Jesus. I found living an eternal hope.
People say that I’m an I am an enigma, i am an anomaly, some sort of freak. As Wally has said to me over the last six years, I don’t believe in me.
Jesus changes anyone, at any time, in any moment. The story of Saul to paul reflects that. But somewhere there’s someone in a desperate need of truth and purpose and love, fighting addiction, hopelessness, just in a very bad place and they believe that there’s no chance of life.
But today I stand before you because the word of God was given to me, the hope that was given to me, in my hands of today. (Holding his Bible)
I want to thank the Bible Society. Whether this Bible came from them, I don’t know, but I know the Bible was through all New South Wales prisons and you can ask for a Bible at any time and you will get them. Thank you. And those Bibles don’t go to waste because I’m a living example that was ‘no chance’ and when the hope was given Jesus Christ turned my ‘no chance’ in to a ‘second chance.’ He reached into my prison cell and into my soul and changed the course of my life. I’m so thankful that you bring this (gestures with his Bible) into my life as well.
Image: Wally with A.J. holding his prison Bible. Image Chredit Christian Alliance FB