What if God is Waiting in the Shadows?

Matthew* sits in a medium-security prison, where concrete walls and razor wire drain hope from the incarcerated. Though only 38, his eyes show signs of a century of living. Tattoos snake around his arms, each a chapter of a life he’d rather forget: gangs, betrayal, a robbery gone wrong, a life of bad choices. Fifteen years into a 25-year sentence, Matthew had become a ghost, unseen by the world beyond the razor wire. His family stopped visiting a decade ago. The guards call him “Inmate 472,” stripping away his name. In the hierarchy of the prison yard, he is a nobody; no gang to claim him and no power to impose influence on others.

 

One day, in the cinderblock chapel with chipped paint and plastic chairs, Matthew sat in the back, arms crossed, skeptical. Other inmates lifted their hands in worship and shouted, “Amen!” Matthew scoffed under his breath at all this religious mumbo jumbo, but he stayed, returning week after week, though still unconvinced. Yet each week he showed up, volunteers and prison church leaders welcomed him, listened, and always remembered his name. One evening, Matthew broke. Tears ran down his leathered face as he whispered, “I’ve done things no God could forgive.”

 

Matthew was handed a Bible opened to Matthew 25:36, “I was in prison, and you came to visit me.” Matthew read it, then read it again. For the first time in years, he felt seen, not as a number or a mistake, but as a man Jesus offered dignity to.

 

That night, Matthew didn’t sleep. He lay on his bunk, clutching the Bible, wrestling with the idea that the God of the universe might care about a forgotten convict. Over months, the words of Scripture chipped away at his despair. Matthew began to pray, initially hesitant but then with a raw hunger. He joined a small group of inmates studying the Gospel of John. He started writing letters to his estranged daughter, hoping she might read them one day. In the margins of that prison, where society had discarded him, Matthew found a God who had been searching for him all along.

 

Why God Cares for the Margins

 

The story of Matthew points to a profound theological truth: God’s heart diligently seeks after those the world pushes to the edges. Matthew 25:31-46, the parable of the sheep and the goats, is not an ethical checklist but a revelation of divine identity. Jesus doesn’t just sympathize with the hungry, the sick, the stranger, or the prisoner; He is with them. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (v. 40). This is no metaphor. Christ’s presence in the marginalized is a mystery woven into the fabric of His incarnation. When God became human, He didn’t choose the palace or the temple; He chose a stable, a carpenter’s life, and a cross. The margins are His home.

 

Theologically, this flows from God’s character as both just and compassionate. Sin fractures the world, creating hierarchies that exalt the powerful and crush the weak. Prisons, in their starkest reality, are monuments to this brokenness, places where human failure and societal neglect converge. Yet God’s justice is not punitive but restorative. He seeks to redeem what is broken, to lift up those the world casts down. The prophet Isaiah foreshadows this in Isaiah 61:1, where the Messiah is anointed “to proclaim good news to the poor” and “to set the oppressed free.” Jesus claims this mission in Luke 4:18, binding His purpose to the outcast.

 

Why the prisoner, specifically? Because the incarcerated embody the paradox of human dignity and human failure. They are image-bearers of God, yet branded by society as unworthy. In Matthew 25:36, Jesus identifies with them not because they are innocent, but because they are His. The cross itself was a prisoner’s death, and Christ’s solidarity with the condemned reveals God’s refusal to abandon anyone, no matter their guilt. To visit the prisoner is to encounter Christ Himself, to participate in God’s mission of reconciliation.

 

This truth challenges us. The margins where society’s outcasts hang out are not peripheral to God’s kingdom; they are its heart. Ministry to the marginalized is not charity; it is worship, an act of obedience to a God who dwells among the least. Matthew’s story reminds us that God is already at work in the shadows of human despair, waiting for us to join Him.