My wife and I had just dropped off a couple to a meth rehab facility. We’ve been working with them for some time now and have prayed the trust developed over the years may someday lead to them coming to us when they were ready to seek help for the struggles they face. They have been homeless for nearly seven years.

We’re driving back home and the phone rings… it’s a colleague who helps my wife with the really tough cases in getting identification for those living on the streets and have lost all forms of ID. It’s a HUGE problem for homeless folks to get ID. Kim’s been working with “long hair Scotty” (his street name) for the past several months and has hit one roadblock after another and is not much farther along than when she started.

So after awhile Kim mentions that Scotty had been in prison back east somewhere… then there’s silence on this end of the phone for a while… followed by Kim saying “Hopefully… he’s been in prison here” and then she thanks our friend for the help and hangs up.

I sit there for a few minutes trying to understand the conversation and am unable to come up with anything that would justify her making that kind of statement… “Hopefully… he’s been in prison here”?  What a strange thing to say.

So, being unable to figure it out for myself, I break down and ask Kim what that was all about. Turns out that long hair Scotty is pretty much at a dead end in being able to get identification. Even with all the resources at our disposal he is literally STUCK. He can’t get ID. PERIOD. Unless… maybe… YES! “Hopefully… he’s been in prison here.”  In Arizona that is. If he has served prison time here (not “jail” time… but prison) we’ll be able to work with the Department of Corrections and get paperwork that will open the door for the rest of the process to bust open.

So I am thinking about Romans 8:28 and wondering if, in some weird way, long hair Scotty serving time in an Arizona prison can be part of “God causing everything to working together for the good of those that love him”. I don’t have the answer. We don’t even know for sure if he’s done time in Arizona.

But at this point we’re hoping he has!