Ambassadors in Chains
The Pull Up Podcast | Season 1, Episode 10 — ambassadors in chains
Daniel Barmak is two and a half years into a 48-year sentence. His parole date puts him at approximately 60 years old — if laws don't change, if everything goes according to the system's plan.
He's 25 now.
There are two obvious responses to that number. Press your bunk and disappear. Or decide that the next 35 years aren't a waiting room.
Episode 10 of The Pull Up Podcast travels to Charlottesville, Virginia — the first episode outside Missouri — to sit down with Chaplain Van, Daniel, and Justin at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail. What unfolds is a conversation about grief, addiction, faith, identity, and what it looks like to be what Van calls, precisely and without irony, an ambassador in chains.
The Chaplain Who Understands Because He's Been There
Chaplain Van Arsdale was 19 when he went to prison in Illinois. Nine years, starting from a drug deal gone wrong — he didn't pull the trigger, but he drove the car, and that was enough.
What changed him wasn't a program. It was people. Chaplains and volunteers who showed up. Men inside who poured into him when he had no reason to expect anyone to. By the time he got out, he'd found his calling — and spent the next 15 years building toward the role he holds now at the regional jail.
He's one chaplain for 300 to 500 residents. The math doesn't work on paper. So he operates differently. He doesn't wait in a chapel for scheduled appointments. He goes to cell doors. He takes calls in the middle of the night when someone loses a family member. He finds the person in the facility and he prays with them right there.
Bo spent six years in prison and saw his chaplain twice. Never at a cell door. If you wanted 15 minutes, you signed up for a slot on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday from 1 to 3:30. That's what most people mean by chaplaincy inside.
Van's version is boots-on-the-ground ministry. And it's exactly the model he's teaching Daniel and Justin to replicate — not as staff, but as residents. Their cells in HU3 have become the outposts. The places people know they can come for a real conversation, a prayer, or just someone to listen without judgment.
That's not a program. That's a calling.
Justin: 16 Months In, Already Leading
Justin Crimmie is 16 months into a five-year sentence on two distribution charges. He says something clicked — with Van, with the faith community inside, with his own sense of who he wants to be.
He holds Bible study on Friday and Saturday evenings at 7 o'clock. Up to 15 guys show up. He takes what Van gives him to study and passes it on. When someone swears in his cell, they don't get lectured — there's an accountability system, light but consistent, that has shifted the behavior around him without him having to say much about it.
He has two daughters he hasn't seen or spoken to in years. One of them, he raised from birth to five years old before the drugs pulled him under again. He's honest about what he let go of.
Bo doesn't let it stay abstract. He asks what leadership looks like for a father who isn't present. He doesn't let Justin off the hook — but he doesn't shame him either. He points to his own daughter, who was 11 when he came home from prison after six years. She didn't need a provider. She'd been provided for. What she needed was someone who could show up in brokenness, perfectly imperfect, and represent love without requiring anything in return.
That's the leadership ask. Not restoration on Justin's timeline. Not the version of fatherhood that makes him feel good. The version his daughters actually need.
Daniel: A Lost Mother, a Spiraling Decade, and a Night That Can't Be Undone
Daniel's mother died when he was nine. He never processed it — not in any real, healthy way. Not for 15 years.
He coped with drugs. The drugs became a lifestyle. They consumed relationships, consumed his ability to show up, consumed the years he should have been building something. Then his grandfather died, and he spiraled down a hole of depression and narcotics. On the night of the incident, he was so far from himself that he lost track of reality entirely.
A police officer intervened. Daniel lashed out. The officer died.
Daniel doesn't minimize it. He doesn't dress it up. He says he's grateful for the people who have shown up around him since — Van, pastors, the brothers in the pod, the Pull Up Podcast reaching him through Pando. He can see the Holy Spirit working in his housing unit. He says it's a beautiful thing, and the way he says it makes clear he's not performing for the camera.
He's 25. He has a 48-year sentence. And he has a support system — his father, his mother, his stepmom who is like a mom to him, his sisters, some friends — who are sticking with him through the whole process.
Bo tells him what he's seen from men 30 years down the road: the ones who did the work in the hardest environments are shaped to do work that most people can't. Their present actions become so profound that the people around them stop talking about what they did and start talking about what they're doing.
Daniel is two and a half years in. The conversation isn't hypothetical for him. It's Tuesday.
Courage Isn't Fearlessness. In Prison, Fearlessness Is Stupid.
One of the episode's sharpest moments comes from Daniel, channeling something a lieutenant told him before sentencing.
You can't change what you did. But if you let that one mistake define what you do for the rest of your life, that's your own fault.
He's been sitting with that. And he connects it to something from the GLA leadership content — Patrick Lencioni on courage. Courage isn't the absence of fear. Courage is going against the grain when you can see clearly that the grain is going the wrong direction. It's choosing the harder path because the easy path leads back to the place that got you here.
Bo agrees and pushes it further: fearlessness in prison is dangerous. You need to be aware of your surroundings. You need to seek information you don't have. You need humility to ask questions instead of covering ignorance with bluster. Bluster is a survival mechanism. It's also a trap. The men who replace insight with a strong opinion aren't leading — they're protecting themselves from having to grow.
Real courage in a housing unit looks like Justin's Bible study. Like Daniel staying in community when his case didn't go the way he hoped. Like not walking away from faith when the verdict came in.
Because that's the test Van names directly: jailhouse religion collapses when the sentence lands. Genuine transformation keeps going. The men who press harder into community after disappointment — those are the ones whose faith is real.
The Problem With Christians Only Talking to Christians
Bo doesn't let the chapel off the hook.
In a lot of facilities, the chapel is where Christians go to do time. It's safe, warm, consistent. You show up twice and everyone knows who you are. You can be the arrogant you, the one with all the answers, and nobody pushes back because it's a self-selected room.
That's not leadership. That's a silo.
The opportunity — the actual opportunity, the one that requires courage — is the room full of people who haven't heard it yet. Who need someone to sit down at a cell door and just be present. Who need to see that a man can face 48 years without falling apart, because that makes it conceivable that they could face 14 months without falling apart.
Your differences in prison, Bo says, are your biggest asset. Not your similarities. The man of a different faith, the guy from a different neighborhood, the person with a story you don't recognize — that's where you learn something. That's where leadership actually gets tested.
Van calls his approach the ministry of presence. He doesn't come in with a 20-pound Bible and a script. He sits down, asks who you are, shares some of his story, and lets the relationship develop from there. Three to 500 residents. One chaplain. The only way it works is if Daniel and Justin are running outposts in HU3 — and they are.
Stop Living a Plan. Start Living an Identity.
The episode builds to something Bo has been circling all season, said plainly here for the first time.
You start really succeeding when you stop living a plan and start living an identity.
Plans break. Plans require specific circumstances. Plans depend on variables you don't control. But identity — who you are, what you're about, how you show up — that travels with you into a maximum-security prison, into a regional jail, into 35 more years of a sentence that nobody wanted.
Daniel lands it in biblical language: God is sovereign. He can't always see the plan. But he's learning that it's not his job to see the plan. It's his job to show up as who God made him to be, in the place where God has him right now.
Van puts the phrase on it: ambassadors in chains.
Not prisoners waiting to be released. Not residents serving time. Ambassadors. People with a mission, a message, and a constituency — deployed into the hardest places on earth precisely because those places need what they carry.
Bo's identity, he says, is no longer in the money he makes, the car he drives, the clothes he wears, the status he can claim. His identity is in how he serves. If he were facing 30 years, he says with confidence, he would do it by serving.
He sees that same identity forming in Daniel. And he commits to it: if Daniel starts a GLA wherever he ends up, Bo will come. He'll help. He'll stay in contact.
That's not a closing line. That's a promise.
What's Next for the pull up
The Pull Up has now traveled outside Missouri for the first time — to a jail in Virginia, with more visits planned in Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Florida. The GLA's second location outside Algoa started here in Charlottesville, through a connection that began at the Global Leadership Summit right after Bo was released.
If you're inside a facility and leading where you are, or if you know someone who is, reach out through Our Daily Bread Ministries or have your chaplain or activities coordinator contact the team directly.
The Pull Up Podcast is produced by Second Mountain Leadership in partnership with Our Daily Bread Ministries, with production by Golden Eagle Creative. Season 1 continues to document what servant leadership in prisons and jails looks like when it's real — across states, sentences, and starting points. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.