The vision for this play began over 12 years ago when the Lord called me to write about a story that deals with the struggles that offenders go through after they leave prison. As I began my research in 2007, through both interviews and autobiographies, I was amazed by the amount of offenders that were former victims. I started wondering if there was something that happened to a victim of a crime that led them to be a future offender.

I began by doing research on both offenders and victims, and the things they suffer with after a crime is committed. With victims, I found that many felt obligated to make sure that the offender was adequately punished so they would never hurt anyone else. They seemed to always talk about how they felt partially responsible for the crime. For instance, if someone broke into a father's house and hurt his daughter he would say, "I never bought an alarm system." If a son got killed going to college in New York City, they might respond with, "I should have not let them go to college there." Because of those feelings of guilt and responsibility, the victim felt obligated to make amends by making sure the offender doesn't hurt anyone else. With offenders, it appeared as if they liked to justify or ignore their crimes because they didn't want to feel like a "bad person."

These commonalities of guilt between victims and offenders led me to do research on the idea of grace and total forgiveness. In subsequent interviews, I found that people who forgave by giving their guilt to Jesus felt more at peace about the situation. An offender no longer felt "evil", while the victim trusted that God would take care of the things that were beyond the victim’s control. Through my study and research I also was told about what forgiveness was "not". For example, giving grace is not the same as trusting someone that has wronged you or even hanging out with them. It has more to do with trusting God as the ultimate judge and giving all the power to Him to make things just.

My primary conclusion after doing this research led me to truly feel that understanding grace towards each other is essential to understanding what Jesus did on the cross. Jesus calls us to "love our enemies and pray for those that persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). In order for us to love our enemies, we must learn how to give the sins they have committed against us to Christ. It has been said by an unknown author that when we provide undeserving grace to someone else, we are doing something only God can do. In other words, "total forgiveness" is something that makes us more like God and less like the world. When Jesus was upon this Earth, He was mocked, beaten, spit on, and finally nailed to a tree. And still, after all that, He provided us grace. It is important to give undeserving grace to others because it is essential to understanding how Jesus provided grace to us. For how can we accept His gift of eternal life if we cannot first accept His forgiveness?

The first productions were in 2009/2010 were met with both opposition and high praise so it has been a deep desire since that time to resurface this production once it was time. In light of all the anger and hatred that seems to persist and even grow in today’s environment, we felt pulled to present this message again now. The one major addition was to add sex trafficking in order to better understand how victims can become offenders. In our original production back in 2010, we found that some had trouble seeing David (who committed manslaughter) as a victim. After much prayer about this, we decided it was important to insert another character who also went to prison but was involved in sex trafficking. The victimization of people in this industry is heart wrenching, but what is talked about in this production is how people in this industry also can commit crimes and end up in prison. By having the story revolve around two offenders rather than one, our hope and prayer is that more audience members will be able to digest better that many offenders are former victims. And...as an extension of that...to accept God’s grace and allow ourselves to be forgiven by giving our grievances to God so others can be forgiven, which we believe is an important and necessary step in stopping the cycle of a victim becoming an offender.

Zach Francis , Author of Grace Beyond Humanity