The church decided to invite the inmates who had worked hard on the renovation project and offer them a dinner of appreciation and encouragement. Wearing their neatly pressed blue uniforms and freshly shaved, the inmates entered the fellowship hall prepared by the congregation, looking a bit shy and awkward. As they stepped through the doorway, we rose to our feet and greeted them with applause. Then we pinned on their chests small lilac boutonnieres—buds just beginning to bloom.

After the carefully prepared dinner and dessert, everyone joined in the Holy Communion to which the pastor invited them.

“This bread is the body of Christ, given for you… This cup is the blood of Christ, shed for you… We now go out into the world as the small body of Christ.”

All of us were gently soaked in the warm love of Christ.

After Communion, Harvey Durham, representing the congregation, stood and offered generous words of appreciation and comfort. The inmates responded before the church with sincere gratitude, as though new courage and resolve were rising within them.

Finally, I stood and unwrapped a painting I had brought. “This picture is my humble attempt to paint the cross I saw in a dream early on Good Friday morning. Please sign your names here. We thank you for your labor, and we pray that wherever you go, God’s guidance will be with you.”

My heart longed for them to be invited into a new world in God. One by one, with solemn expressions, they came forward and signed their names on the painting of the cross—encircled by a crown of thorns and bearing the covenant of the rainbow. Ten inmates, one guard, and my own signature made twelve in all. Though it was only a brief moment, I hoped that moment would become a sign—like a permanent tattoo—of their desire to receive Christ.

I donated the painting to the church, and the church council decided to hang it on the inner wall of the sanctuary entrance. Even now, the painting hangs on the wall of the First United Methodist Church in Coxsackie, New York.

Though we may not have violated human laws enough to wear blue uniforms, before God’s eyes there is surely little difference between fifty steps and a hundred. “There is none righteous, not even one…” Countless times a day I break God’s law, and each time I must turn back with tears of repentance. Am I not, in truth, wearing a spiritual blue uniform?

As I read the letter again, I could faintly hear the hammering, the buzz of the saws, and the whistling of those days. How are those inmates in blue uniforms—those who signed the wooden cross that evening—living now? Do the others remember that they once wrote their names on that cross? O Lord! Even if they have forgotten, help them realize that their names hang upon Your holy altar!

— Yoon Wan‑Hee, June 1993

Note: About ten years later, in a letter Mr. Harvey Durham sent us, he wrote that one of the ten men had returned with his fiancée to the church and showed her his own signature on the cross painting hanging at the entrance.