He Taught Forgiveness in Prison. Then He Learned He Had to Surrender Control.
Chuck Jansen’s work with prisoners, families and wounded Catholics has convinced him that forgiveness is not a feeling or an escape from justice. It is a choice that begins with facing pain, surrender
A Prisoner Who Found His Purpose
Chuck Jansen remembers meeting a man in prison who did not seem to belong there — at least not in the way Jansen expected.
The man, Orman, had been incarcerated for about 35 years. Yet when Jansen met him through Brothers in Blue Reentry, where Jansen’s Forgiveness 101 course had been adopted, he encountered someone strikingly joyful.
“The minute I met him, I could tell he was different,” Jansen said. “There was something about him, and he was so happy and he was so joyful.”
Jansen asked him how long he had been in prison.
“About 35 years,” Orman replied.
“You’re happier than half my golf friends,” Jansen told him. “What’s your secret?”
Orman’s answer stayed with him.
“God, use me for good.”
Over time, Jansen learned that Orman believed his years in prison could still serve a purpose. Many of the men entering the prison knew little about Jesus or how to live differently, he said. Orman believed he could help them.
“You have done an amazing job of finding purpose in a rather difficult situation,” Jansen remembered telling him.
But that sense of purpose came after profound trauma.
Orman told Jansen that when he was 12 years old, he encountered the body of a Black man hanging from a tree beneath a racist sign.
“I didn’t know it then, but I was traumatized,” Orman told him. “Do you understand now why I hated white people for many, many years?”
Yet decades later, Orman said he had learned to overcome that trauma.
“I now see that God is working through me,” he said, “and I’m just here to help other men find Jesus Christ.”
Jansen was stunned.
“You humble me,” he told him. “It’s astounding.”
For Jansen, Orman became an example of what forgiveness could look like when it was no longer an abstract religious idea.
“He’s like a hero to me,” Jansen said.
“God Speaks to Us in Our Joy, but He Shouts to Us in Our Pain”
Jansen later taught Forgiveness 101 inside a cramped prison cell.
The space measured roughly 10 feet by 11 feet. Ten men crowded inside.
Orman joined them, watching Jansen teach so he could eventually help lead the program himself.
Jansen divided the men into pairs and gave them four quotations. Their assignment was simple: discuss which quotation resonated most.
Three minutes later, the room was loud with conversation.
One prisoner raised his hand.
“Can I go first?”
He stood without being asked. His face was covered in tattoos.
“God speaks to us in our joy, but he shouts to us in our pain,” the man said.
Then he began telling his story.
“Eight years ago, I hit bottom.”
As the prisoner spoke, Jansen looked across the cell at Orman.
“This is what we have to do,” he thought. “We have to get them teaching the class.”
For Jansen, the moment reinforced a conviction that has shaped his ministry: the answer is often already present in the room.
His task is not simply to lecture people about forgiveness. It is to help wounded people recognize what God may already be doing in their lives.
The Problem Behind “Yeah, But”
Jansen believes unforgiveness remains widespread, even among practicing Christians.
During one Bible study visit, he asked six women who had been meeting weekly for four years to answer a question.
How many people were in their lives whom they had not forgiven?
Two said none.
Two said between one and four.
Two said four or more.
“Why do we allow a lack of forgiveness to be prevalent in our lives?” Jansen asked.
For men in particular, he believes one major obstacle is justice.
He illustrates the tension with a drawing: “forgiveness” written in cursive, separated from the word “justice.”
When people are invited to forgive, Jansen said, the response frequently begins the same way.
“Yeah, but.”
“You haven’t talked to your dad for six years,” he said as an example. “I invite you to make peace with your dad.”
The response comes quickly.
“Yeah, but you know what he said to me? You know what he said to me on my birthday six years ago?”
Jansen said justice itself is necessary.
“Justice is important. Justice is crucial,” he said. “If you don’t have justice in a society, how’s it going to get along?”
The problem comes when a demand for justice becomes the reason a person refuses forgiveness.
“It’s not right. They don’t deserve to be forgiven. It’s not fair,” Jansen said. “We’re grabbing hold of justice.”
Forgiveness, he said, requires something different.
“To forgive is a choice. It’s a heroic choice,” Jansen said. “And it’s a decision that leads to a habit that leads to a virtue.”
People who learn to forgive, he said, often become noticeably more peaceful.
Those who refuse can remain trapped in resentment and anger.
Hurt People Hurt People
Jansen did not originally set out to build a forgiveness ministry.
The work began after Father Tom, his spiritual adviser of 15 years and a priest he has known for three decades, challenged him with an assignment.
“We have a parish of 3,000 people,” the priest told him, “and half of the people have somebody not talking to somebody else in their family.”
He told Jansen to study forgiveness for a year.
Jansen was not enthusiastic.
“Father, the rectory is in need of painting and there’s a lot of dry rot,” he replied. “I’ll paint the rectory. I’ll be done in three weeks. Please don’t make me study forgiveness.”
But he did.
A year later, Jansen returned with three conclusions.
First, he said, people who forgive tend to be happier, more content and closer to Christ.
Second, he could not find an existing program that walked people through the common elements he repeatedly saw in successful forgiveness.
His third conclusion became foundational.
“It all has to do with pain and suffering,” Jansen said. “Hurt people hurt people.”
Before a person can move toward forgiveness, he said, the wound itself has to be confronted.
His framework is simple: acknowledge, own and process.
“It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,” Jansen said of suffering. “Everybody experiences suffering and pain.”
The danger comes when a person refuses to deal with it.
“You have to acknowledge, own and process the hurt, or the hurt owns you,” he said.
He has seen that pattern repeatedly in prison.
Jansen recalled speaking with a man incarcerated for child sexual abuse who eventually revealed that he himself had been sexually abused as a child.
“He didn’t process it, so he acted out his emotions,” Jansen said.
That does not excuse what the man later did. But it reinforced Jansen’s conviction that untreated wounds can shape future behavior.
“A lot of us men have to ask, what wounds do we have, especially with our dads?” he said.
Some men may need counseling. Others may begin with a trusted friend, spouse or mentor.
But secrecy, Jansen said, allows a wound to maintain its power.
“If you have a secret that you haven’t told anybody, that secret is controlling you.”
From Management to Surrender
Jansen spent the first seven years of his ministry trying to create what he called the perfect forgiveness class.
His background had trained him to manage.
He had spent 12 years teaching high school religion and coaching varsity soccer. He later ran a real estate office for three decades.
His instinct was to study harder, prepare more and control the outcome.
“I’ve got to come up with the perfect class,” he remembered thinking.
Eventually, he said, the Holy Spirit began breaking that instinct.
“The Holy Spirit slowly but surely — I say hit me in the head with a 2-by-4,” Jansen said. “Sometimes I don’t listen carefully.”
He began praying a short prayer.
“Empty me of me. Fill me with you. God, use me.”
The lesson that followed was uncomfortable.
“Shut up, Chuck. Just take notes.”
Jansen stopped trying to manufacture a flawless method and started paying attention to what wounded people were teaching him.
“If you steal from one, it’s called plagiarism,” he joked. “If you steal from 12, it’s called research.”
Over hundreds of encounters, he began seeing the same process.
First, acknowledge, own and process the pain.
Second, make the decision to forgive.
Third, surrender what remains to God.
Jansen summarizes that final step with another image.
“Where I put a period, God put a comma.”
A drunk driver killed my daughter. Period.
My father was an alcoholic and beat me. Period.
A business partner cheated me. Period.
Jansen said those wounds are real. But people can become so attached to their conclusions that they leave no room for God to continue the story.
“God is inviting us to have a comma,” he said.
That requires surrender.
“Get out of management and get into sales,” Jansen said. “Dear God, how can you use me for good?”
Why Men Struggle to Let Go
Jansen believes surrender can be especially difficult for men because men often want to fix problems.
“Don’t you think men want to fix things?” he asked. “A lot of times when we talk to our wives, they just want to be understood. But men, we want to fix things all the time.”
Forgiveness confronts that instinct because the past cannot always be repaired.
Some injustices cannot be undone.
Some relationships cannot be restored to what they were.
Some wounds remain painful even after a court case is finished or an offender is punished.
That is where surrender begins.
“‘Vengeance is mine,’ says the Lord,” Jansen said. “The Lord’s going to take care of it.”
He often reminds Catholics that forgiveness is embedded in one of Christianity’s most familiar prayers.
“The Our Father is not a multiple choice,” Jansen said.
Christians pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
But Jansen said people often live as though the prayer means something closer to: Forgive us as we forgive most people — everyone except the one person who hurt us most.
“I Want What Allison Has”
For years, Jansen’s study of forgiveness was largely analytical.
Then he met the family of Mike Darby.
Darby, a well-known Kansas City business owner, was walking his dogs early one morning in 2017 when he was shot and killed.
A few months later, Jansen was teaching a one-night forgiveness class.
He stood at the back of the room welcoming people when Darby’s daughter, Allison, arrived with her mother.
“My God, I’ve out-punted my coverage,” Jansen remembered thinking.
Then he prayed.
“Empty me of me. Fill me with you. I don’t know what you’re going to say tonight, Jesus, but please work your magic through me.”
Something from the class connected with Allison.
They became friends.
Over the next four years, Jansen accompanied her through the painful process of forgiveness.
“You have to hold the hand of the wounded as you lead them to the freedom of forgiveness,” he said.
The phrase eventually became guidance he gave to other forgiveness facilitators.
“If you don’t hold their hand, people will not move off of that first step,” Jansen said. “How do I deal with my suffering and my pain? Somebody shot my dad. My poor kids won’t experience grandpa.”
Then came a moment Jansen still remembers.
He and his wife were sitting in church praying before Mass when a woman turned toward him.
“You don’t know me, but I’m Allison’s mother,” she said.
She thanked him for helping her daughter.
Then she said something else.
“I want what Allison has.”
Mercy for the Person You Do Not Want to Forgive
Working in prison forced Jansen to confront the limits of his own mercy.
When he first became a mentor, someone asked whether there was anyone he would struggle to work with.
Jansen prayed about it.
“I’m going to have a rough time working with somebody who had sex with a child,” he answered. “That’s a tough sin.”
The woman overseeing the program replied, “Chuck, you’re not the Lone Ranger.”
Jansen quickly discovered that even prisoners often isolate people convicted of abusing children.
But Christianity’s teaching on mercy forced him to examine his own judgment.
“Mercy teaches us that all sins are forgiven,” he said. “If you come to Christ and you’re sorry for your sins and you’re repentant, you can be forgiven.”
He does not pretend the questions are easy.
“I don’t have all the answers,” Jansen said. “This is a tough journey.”
His role, he concluded, is not to erase justice or pretend evil is harmless.
It is to encounter the person in front of him without appointing himself that person’s final judge.
“My job is to understand them, hold their hand and introduce them to Christ,” he said.
Justice Cannot Heal Every Wound
Near the end of the conversation, Jansen recalled another encounter.
He had spoken at an all-day men’s retreat when one participant approached him afterward.
The previous day, the man said, he had spent four and a half hours in court.
His granddaughter had been sexually abused.
The perpetrator had finally been caught, prosecuted and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
The man returned home that night expecting something to feel different.
“The pain is still there,” he told Jansen.
He had spent years seeking justice, only to discover that justice had not healed the wound.
“I tried to get satisfaction through justice,” the man said. “You can’t. The pain won’t go away. It’s only through forgiveness that it’ll go away.”
He was not yet able to forgive the man who abused his granddaughter.
But Jansen’s presentation had given him something.
“At least I have a map now, Chuck, of where to go,” he said.
He planned to begin praying and moving in that direction.
For Jansen, that is what the ministry is meant to provide — not instant emotional resolution, but a path.
“Empty Me of Me. Fill Me With You.”
Jansen said one of the men who deeply shaped him is John O’Leary, whose childhood story of surviving burns over his entire body became the subject of the film “Soul on Fire.”
Jansen met O’Leary years ago through a real estate convention, before O’Leary became widely known as a speaker.
“John O’Leary lives Jesus Christ,” Jansen said. “He’s closer to Christ than most people ever realize.”
O’Leary also helped give Jansen the prayer that has become central to his ministry.
“Use me for good.”
Jansen has now spent years repeating it.
The prayer reflects the broader transformation he sees in his own life: away from controlling outcomes and toward trusting the Holy Spirit.
“Don’t be married to an outcome,” Jansen said. “Don’t think that Dominic is all the world or Chuck is all the world, that I’m going to do this. I’m going to just kind of be the vehicle in which the Holy Spirit uses to bring something about.”
That does not mean doing nothing.
“When you pray, move your feet,” he said.
Jansen continues taking forgiveness programs into prisons, churches and retirement communities. His Forgiveness Institute now includes facilitators around the country, along with online courses and resources through yebut.org.
But he insists the ministry does not ultimately belong to him.
When people praise its growth, his response is simple.
“Isn’t God wonderful?”
Getting Out of Our Own Prisons
Jansen believes some people live behind prison walls without ever entering a correctional facility.
They remain imprisoned by resentment.
“Half the people in America have no trouble forgiving and they’re free,” he said. “The people who hang on to resentment and anger and justice and ‘it’s not right,’ they’re living in their own prison.”
The freedom he describes does not require denying evil, abandoning justice or pretending wounds no longer hurt.
It begins with acknowledging the wound.
Owning it.
Processing it.
Choosing forgiveness.
And surrendering what cannot be controlled.
Jansen said he hopes men will begin by asking God to create peace within them.
“Help me forgive everybody in my life,” he said. “Let me be an instrument of peace where I’ll hold the hand of the wounded.”
And then return to the prayer he has learned to repeat when control, anger or judgment begins taking over again.
“Empty me of me. Fill me with you. Use me for good.”