Early on, Pamela said, “These masks are so stupid.” She moved her stool closer, facing away from the camera, and pulled down her mask. As a good libertarian Baptist, she had every intention of breaking the Draconian no-physical-contact rule. I took my mask off my nose—which otherwise fogged up my glasses—and, on occasion, lifted it off my mouth or pulled it down around my neck. Our first kiss was with masks on. The second through fifth—the last one occurring while standing and hugging, just as we were leaving the visitation—were with bare lips and showed happy, even sensual affection. It did the marriage good to have such an encounter.

There is a theology of physical presence that the modern church, enamored of digital communication and “virtual” everything, has largely forgotten. The incarnation itself teaches us that God did not remain at a distance when He visited His people. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). He came near. He touched lepers. He washed feet. He broke bread with sinners. The Draconian regulations that placed tape marks on the floor between a husband and his wife were not merely bad public health policy—though they were that. They were a contradiction of the fundamental human and biblical principle that love requires proximity. The church that fails to visit prisoners in person, preferring instead to send money or post encouraging messages on social media, has made the same error the health ministry made: it has confused distance with safety and forgotten that presence is irreplaceable.

The Gendarmes Look Away

In reality, there was no risk of punishment for violating the rules, as sternly stated before visitation. The pacos entered the room two or three times to speak with a reo and his visitor, but no sanctions or reprisals were imposed. Comandante Carla Toledo passed by our table, and I warmly introduced her to my wife, saying how happy I was to help her daughter with her English homework and how I had enjoyed talking and joking about language nuances with her and the other officers the previous day. She concurred and exchanged a few niceties with Pamela. I wanted a good relationship with the gendarmes, especially the officers, with much mutual respect.

For a while, the gendarmes would be watching right at the doorway near Pamela and me, but we were bold—sitting closer, holding hands, inspecting each other’s skin, surgery scars, hair, and flab, lifting masks, and even kissing. The gendarmes did not mind or scold us. In fact, they even walked out of view to give people more privacy. I was not surprised. Even the guards understood that nine months of enforced separation cannot be bridged by sitting on opposite sides of a plastic table, making small talk through useless and ineffective Covid-19 masks.

One-legged Jorge and his girlfriend were even more daring, as I and others saw, making out in the corridor or the staircase across from the entrance where no cameras were present. Marcelo, the mozo, and Isabel were about as bold as Pamela and I at our respective tables. One mozo saw the affection and got up to ask the paco if he could practice some with his mother, just as others were doing with theirs, and he got the go-ahead.

Back in 118 afterward, Rubén and Miami were delighted to hear the good news about displays of affection during visitation. Sergio listened to the report and said that each one would have to be responsible if they got infected with Covid-19. Nonetheless, Pamela and I were not the least bit worried, looking at all the hype as a mere government control technique. I had had Covid-19 badly, along with pneumonia, and almost died. But I believed I had since built up immunity, and the new strains seemed less dire than the prevailing reporting suggested. Pamela remarked, “We can’t stop the entire planet on account of this illness.” I agreed.

The Sustaining Power of Visitation

Rubén and Miami sent their regards to Pamela. They had become beneficiaries of her grocery-shopping services. Rubén finally got the correct change and paid me for the beef Pamela had bought and part of the Uber fare, leaving the chicken and the rest of the Uber costs to Miami, whom I never charged. Of course, Miami washed my clothes and even pulled a hip pocket liner off in order to sew it behind a tear in one of my pant legs. My clothes were wearing out. Miami could end up being a good friend, and, like me, he was eager to give and do good works for others. I had no problem giving to a man like that, recalling the words of Christ in Acts 20:35, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

The visit did more than I can easily articulate. For two hours—less the forty minutes stolen by bureaucratic incompetence—I was not an inmate. I was a husband. I saw my wife’s eyes, touched her hand, heard her voice without the tinny distortion of a cellphone signal, and remembered that I was a person who was loved by a person. That may sound elementary to the reader who goes home each evening to a spouse, a meal, a conversation, and a bed shared with the one who chose him. But for the man who has been stripped of all these ordinary graces, their restoration—even for two hours under surveillance at a plastic table—is an event of almost sacramental significance.

This is why the church’s failure to visit prisoners is not merely an oversight. It is, as I have argued throughout this book, a failure of obedience. When the author of Hebrews writes, “Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them” (Hebrews 13:3), the word “remember” does not mean to think warm thoughts from a comfortable distance. It means to act—to go, to appear, to sit down, to bring one’s body into the presence of the one who is suffering. The prisoner who receives no visitors lives from Saturday to Saturday with nothing at the end of the week but an empty room and an empty chair. The psychological and spiritual damage of such abandonment is incalculable. I was blessed beyond what I deserved.

Pamela came faithfully every week she was permitted. And my dear friend Valentín Navarrete visited me more than two hundred thirty times, and brought sacks of food and supplies more than two hundred fifty times, during my incarceration—mainly after I arrived at the Casablanca jailhouse. That number deserves to be paused over. Two hundred thirty visits across five years, five months—roughly one visit every week, plus additional supply runs, plus the cost of his time, his transport, his energy, and the emotional weight of seeing his friend behind bars again and again. That was not religious theater. It was Christian fidelity. It embodied Hebrews 13:3 better than many eloquent sermons ever could.

In prison, you learn quickly that some who called themselves friends were merely acquaintances with warm language. The one who comes, returns, and keeps coming is the one who has remembered your chains. Not having that contact with faithful people really harms a prisoner. Once again, hope is one of the cruelest instruments in a prison. Solomon understood: “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12). Prison is the laboratory where that proverb is tested weekly.

Visitation and the sano

Miami and I had often discussed how obvious it was to identify an innocent man in jail, whom the machucados call sanos—meaning healthy, mentally. Instead of utilizing others, a sano thought about others and how he might help them. Even if they had no money, they could still offer a smile, a kind word, or be of service in some way. Normal people enjoy helping others or being kind; criminals often do not, the latter tending to be more self-absorbed. Sanos are always like a fish out of water in a hellish Chilean prison environment. This fact was evinced by their language, their courtesy and manners, their lack of interest in ripping others off, their sincere practice of their faith, their maintenance of something to hope for—such as holding out hope that one day they will be free and all restored—and their clear support from people outside who knew they had gotten a raw deal.

The gendarmes and other reos who knew Miami and me could see that we were sanos. The evidence was not subtle. It appeared in the quality of our visitors, the consistency of our encomienda, the way we treated other men, and—most tellingly—the fact that people on the outside had not abandoned us. A man whose friends keep coming is a man whose character has been tested and found credible. The prisoner whose wife endures the bus ride, the search, the line, and the plastic table every week is a man whose marriage has been refined by fire rather than consumed by it.

This observation carries a practical implication for the church. When Christians visit a prisoner, they do not merely comfort one man. They testify to every inmate who watches. When unbelieving prisoners see a Christian actually remembered by his people, they witness an embodied theology of love. They discover that the church is not merely a dispenser of slogans. The machucados who observed Pamela’s faithfulness, Valentín’s constancy, and the steady stream of supporters who sent food, money, books, and letters were seeing something they could not easily explain within their own moral framework. They were seeing the body of Christ functioning as it was designed to function—bearing one another’s burdens and so fulfilling the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2).

The Visitor’s Sacrifice as Ministry