Finding the Grace to Change

Before Jeff Wallace was a chaplain at the Lane County Jail, he was an inmate. When he walks the halls these days, he’s heading to a class to teach the Bible and lead worship, but there was a time when he was the one behind metal bars that clanged shut. 

 “That used to be an awful sound,” he said, shaking his head during a recent tour of the jail. 

 For several decades, he cycled through the system and served time for various drug charges. He says he landed in jail at least 40 times, but God’s grace knows how to find its way into cells and he credits Jesus’ power with helping him break the cycle for good. 

 Wallace is a familiar figure at the Eugene Mission, where he serves as a mentor to men in the Life Change program. He said he loves to share his story with people who are struggling with many of the same addictions and problems he had because it demonstrates the power of God to do the impossible — overcome wounds and habits we could never heal on our own. 

His story is a testament of God’s extravagant love, limitless power and wisdom that knows exactly what we need, when we need it the most. 

Wallace was sent to juvenile detention for the first time when he was 9 years old. “I was a runaway; I just didn’t want to stay home,” he said. Some older boys introduced him to meth, and he didn’t stop because “who was going to tell me I couldn’t get high, or tell me what to do?” 

By age 32, he was in prison for the third time and had been such a heavy drug user that he had worn out a vein in his neck. His rebellion may have earned him a home at the state penitentiary, but it was there that he met Jesus.  

“My ‘cellie’ invited me to church; we had been cellies for a long time, but didn’t talk about God. I said yes just to shock this kid — ‘let’s go!’ So I went in there, and the preacher asked if anyone wanted to give their lives to the Lord, and I saw myself up there at the altar, and repeated this prayer to this guy.”

By the time he got out into the corridor after the service was over, he had already gone back on his prayer and told God he wasn’t going to follow him and he was going to smoke his cigarettes and do what he wanted. “But God didn’t hear that part out in the hall,” Wallace said. 

Three weeks later, he was smoking, and he thought, “this tastes nasty, and if it tastes nasty, why am I smoking?” He threw it in the ashtray and quit, right then. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he was experiencing the power of God to instantly heal an addiction that would have been impossible for him to overcome on his own. He began to feel what he describes as a “conquering feeling” of receiving power to do something that he knew he hadn’t been able to do in the past.

He began connecting the dots between his new behavior (like asking God for forgiveness when he cussed) and the deeper work God was beginning to do in his life. After he and his cellmate shook hands and apologized to each other after a fight, and after God asked him to say a prayer at the breakfast table one day (despite threats from a “pistol-packing, drug-slinging biker friend” of his) he knew he’d been officially “hired” by God. He’s been working for him ever since. 

He joined the Jubilee Prison Ministry in 1996 and has led countless Bible classes and Sunday services for inmates, in addition to his work with Celebrate Recovery and the Eugene Mission. 

“For us to show up every week with the Lord in pocket; he touches lives, and I connect them with Celebrate Recovery outside the doors. I get to see people’s lives changed as they come to CR, and the Eugene Mission Life Change program,” he said. “I just see the power of God changing people’s hearts in there.” 

Sometimes, it can be a rough ride. “You’re in there and you’re looking for fruit. You see things get screwed up and people come back to jail again and again. You think…’what the heck?’ The Lord taught me over the years that sometimes I’m planting seeds and sometimes I’m watering. It doesn’t matter which one I’m doing. Our lives are changed continuously, and our relationship with the Lord gets strengthened every time we have one of those meetings,” he said. 

Wallace tries to keep his focus on God these days and not on himself. He hit a rough patch during the pandemic when his thoughts turned inward and he struggled with isolation. 

“I had a really rough time; my life was not flowing the way it should. I got really frustrated,” he said. As things opened back up and he began ministering in the neighborhood, God was putting the pieces back together again. “That’s what Jesus is about: he says to ‘put your focus on me and I’ll take you where you need to go,’” Wallace said. 

We do a lot better when we’re together, in community, he said. Recovery communities and church families anchor us and connect us to God and to one another. 

“The Lord is an awesome dad, and he raises us up right,” Jeff said.