A New Heart

Finally cornered in June 1972, Mary Kay sat in a jail cell, wondering what had become of her Christian childhood upbringing. She started attending the weekly church services held at the jail. She asked one of the volunteers why she and the others got up at 5 A.M. to minister to jail inmates. “Jesus loved all of us enough to go all the way to Calvary, “ the lady answered. “So we can love you enough to come here and tell you about it.”

But Mary Kay was convinced that she couldn’t become a Christian; her heart was too hard. Then she picked up a Bible and read, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26–27).

The words held out a hope that she had never known. Mary Kay prayed her first prayer since childhood: “O.K., God, I’ve made a mess of it. If You mean what You say here in Ezekiel, please change my heart.”

And her life changed. A new inner peace replaced her bitterness; she stopped fighting with other inmates and asked their forgiveness. Though looking at a potential 180 years in prison, she pleaded guilty to the charges. Yet, miraculously, she was sentenced to only 21 years in Alabama.

Mary Kay used her time at Alabama’s Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women to attend classes. She graduated from junior college with a near-perfect average and was granted a scholarship to Auburn. Four years later, she completed that, with honors, and began graduate studies. She was unexpectedly paroled in 1978.

A Vision for Prisoners’ Children

Now she received a new challenge. Ex-prisoner Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship, wanted her to become PF’s first Alabama state director—and the first woman to serve in a PF state leadership position. She joined the staff in April of 1982.

One of her first jobs was to come up with a Christmas project. Her volunteers asked which prisons they would visit and what gifts would they take. “I said, ‘Everyone does that. Let’s do something different.’ ”

Mary Kay remembered the six Christmases she had spent behind bars. “Some Christian groups would come to the prison and bring little trial-size tubes of toothpaste, bars of soap, and bottles of shampoo. I noticed that women who never went to chapel always went to those programs.

“I thought they were just greedy. I saw them bring the items back to their cells and trade with each other. [But] then they would divide the items into piles, and I realized that each pile was for one of their children. That’s what they gave their children as Christmas gifts because it was all they had. And I thought, Just because she’s a thief or a drug addict, or possibly even a murderer, doesn’t mean she doesn’t love her children.”

Then, during the prison’s family visiting time the week before Christmas, Mary Kay noticed as the children opened their little presents and flung their arms lovingly around their mothers.

“Oh, Momma, thank you, thank you!” they squealed.

“You see,” Mary Kay explains, “children don’t care about things if they know they are first of all loved.”

That Christmas of ’82, Mary Kay went back to Tutwiler, where she had spent six years, and gathered names and addresses of the inmates’ children. Then she and a handful of volunteers, with the permission of the managers, put up Christmas trees at two shopping malls, in Montgomery and Birmingham.

“We made paper angels—red for girls and green for boys—and on each angel we wrote the name and age of a child. We put them on the tree—an Angel Tree! That’s how we got the name.

“I submitted an article to the newspapers about how children are victims of crime. They are not responsible for what their adult parents do, and yet they suffer. So we advertised for the public ‘to come by and purchase a Christmas gift for an angel.’ I hoped that we could get Christmas for two or three hundred children. I had no idea what God would do with that project.”

Within six days they ran out of names and had to go back to the prison to get more. At the end of that first Angel Tree in 1982, 556 children had received up to four gifts each.

She saw another result, too—a reuniting of family ties as children received gifts from a mom or dad they had not heard from in a while.

What’s more, the post-Christmas attendance at Prison Fellowship’s in-prison Bible studies doubled and even tripled—bolstered by inmates whose children were Angel Tree gift recipients. “Anyone who would get my child a gift is something special,” said one of the newcomers, voicing the sentiments of many. “So I decided to come and listen to this Bible study.”

The program branched to 12 states the following year and was soon restructured as a church-based program. More than 525,000 children were reached at Christmas 2003, bringing the cumulative total to more than six million children served by Angel Tree since Mary Kay Beard first thought about those little tubes of toothpaste.

When told those numbers, Mary Kay Beard smiles. “I am both awed and humbled to have been any part of something so enormously effective. I consider it one of the highest privileges of my life. And Jesus Christ is still in the business of changing lives, I know."

Mary Kay Beard releases new book: Rogue Angel. Lean more.
Visit Mary Kay Beard's website at: http://www.marykaybeard.com/