Timothy Harper, Spindletop Center Peer

“Prison was not the end of my story. It was the place where the war inside of me finally began to end.”

I was placed in foster care at birth.

“Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me.” — Psalm 27:10

As time went on, I stopped feeling like I belonged to people and started feeling like I belonged to institutions. First foster care, then juvenile homes, then prisons. People would later call me an institutional baby, and in many ways they were right. My life became shaped by systems before I ever had the chance to discover who I was outside of them.

There were 5 foster children in the home where I was raised and I was the only boy. My foster parents had children of their own, and even as a child I could feel the difference between us. Their children belonged there, I didn’t.

The punishment was different for us. The hunger was different for us. The love was different for us. There were days we barely ate while the money meant for our care disappeared into someone else’s life. We wore hand-me-down clothes and learned quickly that silence was safer than asking questions. As I grew older, the abuse became darker.

I was beaten often by my foster mother, sometimes for reasons I never understood. Other times, there seemed to be no reason at all. I remember sitting alone on the porch after the beatings, trying to figure out what was so wrong with me that this woman could hate me with such intensity.

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One day, after leaning against a brand-new car they had purchased, she called me upstairs. I already knew what was coming. I cried and refused to go up, but it didn’t matter. She threw a ping-pong paddle at me, and it struck the left side of my forehead. Blood poured down my face as my foster parents rushed me to the hospital.

On the drive there, she told me to lie. To tell the doctor you got hit with a baseball bat. The doctor did not believe the story but I told it anyway. When I returned home, she gave me ice cream. I remember the nurses saying something was wrong with me because I never cried while they stitched my head closed.

What they did not understand was that by then I had already learned how to disappear emotionally. But even in that darkness, there was still light.

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” — Psalm 34:18

One of the foster girls in the home became my quiet refuge. After every beating, she would sit beside me on the porch and hold my hand without saying a word. Sometimes, when I was hungry, she would sneak food out of the kitchen and bring it to me while keeping watch so I would not get caught. I miss her deeply.

She passed away shortly before I was released from prison. To this day, I believe God used her as an angel in my life. Looking back now, I understand that God often sends comfort quietly. Not always through miracles that shake the earth, but sometimes through the simple kindness of someone sitting beside you in your pain.

As a child, I did not have the language to explain what I felt, but I always sensed a presence around me. Something unseen that was protecting me. Even when I was alone and when nobody else seemed to care. She was placed into a separate foster home and I believe she suffered too.

Every summer we were allowed to visit each other, and even though we were children, I think she knew something was wrong in the home where I lived. She never said it directly, but I could feel it. Then one year, the visits simply stopped. No explanation. No goodbye. Just silence.

The next time I saw my sister, I was seventeen years old standing in a community college after surviving juvenile homes, detention centers, group homes, and years of running away. By then, life had already hardened me. But seeing her again felt familiar and safe. She was still my blood.

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He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”  Psalm 147:3

The closest thing to home I had left. Growing up, I learned early how to survive. I also learned how to fight. At first, I believed I was at war with the people who hurt me. The foster mother who hated me. The boys who beat on me because they knew I could not fight back without punishment.

The men who stole pieces of my childhood before I even understood what was being taken from me. But over time, I realized the war had spread much deeper than that. I was at war with rage.

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world...” — Ephesians 6:12

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I was at war with abandonment. With the part of me that stopped believing I deserved love, peace, or safety. I remember being sent to a juvenile home in Pennsylvania deep in the woods. We would wake up before sunrise and chop maple trees before breakfast. I complained constantly because anger was the only language I knew.

One morning, one of the older boys finally snapped. He kicked me in the back, sending me onto the floor while the others laughed. I tasted blood in my mouth. And in that moment, something inside me shifted. The rage I had been carrying for years began transforming into something colder. 

More focused. More dangerous.

Eventually I stopped crying and stopped asking for help. I had stopped believing that anyone was coming to save me. By the time I reached my teenage years, I had already been running away for a long time.

There was one family who took me in and treated me like I belonged. A woman I still call my mother opened her home to me when I had nowhere else to go. In her house, I was not treated like an outsider. I was called brother. I was trusted and I was loved.

For the first time in my life, I experienced something that resembled family. I wanted to become a Marine because I believed discipline and structure could save me from myself. I trained hard and I passed the test. But I was rejected because of asthma. I was furious.

It felt like another door closing in a life already filled with locked doors. My mother encouraged me to go to college instead, and I enrolled in criminal justice. The irony of that still stays with me. Not long after, I left New York. I left without telling anyone.

And somewhere along the way, all the anger, violence, and survival instincts I had spent years building finally consumed me. I became involved with criminal organizations. Violence became normal. I trained myself not just to defend myself, but to hurt people strategically.

Eventually that path led me to prison facing a murder charge. I was sentenced to life with parole. The judge believed I would die there. The prosecutor believed I would die there.

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Truthfully, so did I.

And yet prison was not the beginning of my story. It was the awakening. Because somewhere behind prison walls, after decades of anger, violence, hatred, abandonment, and emotional warfare, I finally reached the end of myself.

I realized I could no longer drive the life I was living. So I surrendered. Not because I suddenly became strong.But because I finally understood I could not save myself.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” — Matthew 11:28

I gave God the keys. Not halfway. Not conditionally. I did it  completely. And when I finally surrendered everything to Him, something began changing inside of me.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” — 2 Corinthians 5:17

The war that had lived inside me since childhood slowly began to quiet. Not instantly or perfectly, but genuinely. I began to understand that God had been present the entire time. In the foster sister who held my hand. In the woman who called me son.

In the moments I survived when I should have been destroyed. In the prison cell where I finally broke. And in the grace that carried me through 37 years and 4 months before my release. I was never supposed to come home according to the system. God had something else to say about that.

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“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” — Jeremiah 29:11

This story is not about glorifying pain. It is about revealing what God can do with a life that should have been lost. Because prison was not the end of my story. It was the place where the war inside of me finally began to end. Today, my purpose is bigger than simply telling my story.

I want to advocate for mental health awareness, reentry support, and peer support for people coming home from prison carrying years of trauma, isolation, addiction, violence, abandonment, and emotional wounds that were never treated.

Too many people leave prison physically released but mentally still incarcerated. Too many people suffer in silence as they were taught survival instead of healing. I know what it means to live at war with yourself. And I also know what it means to finally begin healing.

That is why I believe reentry is not just about housing or employment. It is about restoration. It is about helping people rediscover their humanity. It is about giving people support before they fall back into the same darkness that once consumed them.

God did not bring me through thirty-seven years in prison just for me to survive. He brought me through it so I could reach back for others. Because sometimes the most powerful peer support comes from someone who truly understands the battle.

And if my story can help even one person choose healing over destruction, hope over despair, or faith over surrendering to darkness, then every page of this journey has purpose.

“Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” — Galatians 6:2