Reclaim Inside

The Pull Up Podcast | Season 1, Episode 7 — reclaim inside

This episode sounds different from the others.

No deputy warden at the table. No program framework being explained. No reentry timeline or parole date anchoring the conversation. Just four men serving life sentences — JD, Ben, Juáne ("Smurf"), and Gary ("Circus Bear") — sitting together inside Jefferson City Correctional Center, doing something rare:

Telling the truth about where God found them.

Episode 7 of The Pull Up Podcast launches Reclaim Inside, a new series hosted by Bo Cornelius that passes the mic to men inside and lets them talk — about faith, friendship, transformation, and what brotherhood actually looks like when you've been in the same building for two decades. This is the first conversation. It runs deep.

God Shows Up in the Strangest Places — a Tower in Topeka, a Hole in Ad-Seg

The episode opens with a simple question: when did you first feel seen by God?

Every answer is different. None of them are tidy.

Ben was 80 or 90 feet in the air on a radio tower in Topeka, Kansas, working a job that required him to unclip from the structure and swing out on an arm to hang an antenna. Something made him pause. He heard — or felt — a question: What happens if you clip onto that and it breaks?

He answered out loud. Said he'd fall. Said he'd go to heaven, he hoped.

Hope. The word stopped him cold. His whole life, he'd treated God like fire insurance — believe in him, don't go to hell, figure out the rest yourself. But standing on that tower, realizing his only answer to the question of eternity was I hope, he understood he didn't actually know the God he claimed to believe in.

He didn't hang the antenna that day. His boss drove three and a half hours on a motorcycle to finish the job, never said a word about it, and went back on vacation. And Ben started going to church on his own, for the first time, at 19 years old.

Gary's moment was different — quieter. He and Smurf had been running every hustle the prison economy offered for years: cards, clothes, pictures, jewelry, you name it. Then, in an ordinary season — not a crisis, not a rock bottom — both of them arrived at the same conclusion almost simultaneously. They were either all the way in or all the way out. God put it on Gary's heart to be out. He told Smurf. Smurf said he'd been thinking the same thing.

They quit. And Gary says, from that point on, it's mostly been a God-of-the-hills season. Which, coming from a man serving life without parole, is not a small thing to say.

Believing About God and Believing In God Are Not the Same Thing

Ben names the distinction that runs through every testimony in the episode.

He grew up in church. His mom was a Christian. He believed God existed the way most people believe in gravity — it's just there, you don't think about it much, it doesn't ask anything of you. That's not faith. That's data.

Real belief, Ben says, means believing who God says he is — and trusting that he'll do what he says he'll do. That's a different category entirely. That's a relationship. And relationships require engagement, not just acknowledgment.

JD puts it practically: John Maxwell says don't ask what Jesus would do — do what Jesus did. Stop asking the question and start practicing the answer.

Juáne is the one who finds it most gradually. Not a single moment, not a dramatic conversion. Just two years of reading the Bible for himself — not filtered through what a preacher said or what he was taught as a kid — and watching a relationship build over time. And then Gather25 happened. A global church event, live-streamed inside a max-security prison. JD organized it after feeling an unmistakable nudge he kept trying to hand off to someone else. It came together in days. And for men who had spent years watching everything in prison move slowly, it felt like proof.

Gary in the Hole: "I'm Still Here."

The episode's heaviest moment comes from Gary.

He ends up in administrative segregation after doing laundry for 45 guys — the kind of thing that makes sense in exactly no context outside of prison. Ad-seg at Jefferson City is not a cell block. It's 24 hours a day, three showers a week, no phone calls, cuffed any time you leave your door. You smell it before you see it. Your stomach drops when you walk in.

Gary describes sitting in there and feeling — not hearing, but feeling — a presence say: I'm still here. If you're looking, I'm still here.

That was 2012. The full weight of what that moment meant didn't land until years later. But the seed was there.

He doesn't dress it up. He also doesn't minimize what that environment does to a person. These men know ad-seg. They know what it means to have the reset button pushed — to have everything you've built get stripped away at any moment, by anyone, for almost any reason. The miracle isn't that God shows up in beautiful places. The miracle is that he shows up in that hallway, in that smell, in that isolation.

When You're Serving Life and You Fight to Seem Miserable

Ben shares the thing that might take the most courage to say out loud.

For years, he was afraid to have an okay day. Not because things weren't sometimes okay. Because he knew his family was fighting on the outside for him — appeals, lawyers, advocacy — and he was terrified that if they knew he was doing all right, they'd stop.

So he managed the narrative. Kept the darkness in front. Left out the good. Made sure every phone call, every letter, confirmed how bad things were.

That kind of manipulation comes from love and desperation tangled together. But it's also a trap. You can't build real relationship on a curated version of your suffering. And it keeps you performing a story instead of living a life.

The faith journey, for Ben, included learning to let go of that control. Trusting that God wasn't going to withhold something good just because Ben stopped insisting how miserable he was. He quotes Romans 8 and Psalm 84 — his way of articulating that if God allows something in his life, it's for a purpose. And if something good is meant for him, it'll come.

He also says plainly: there were times he thought about not finishing his sentence the way the institution expected him to. Multiple times, over 20 years. He doesn't need to say more for the men in the room to understand exactly what he means.

What kept him was recognizing the pattern — that in those specific moments, Smurf would just show up at his door. Not planned. Not texted. Just there. Bowl in hand, standing in the doorway, out of nowhere.

Gary had the same experience, in reverse. He'd have those thoughts, and Smurf would just pop up. Three, four days of not talking, and then: door opens, Smurf's standing there.

Neither of them can fully explain it. They don't try to.

Who Was Your Philip? Who Brought You to the Table?

The episode anchors itself to the biblical story of Philip and Nathanael — Philip finding his friend and saying, simply, come and see. No argument. No theology lecture. Just: I found something. You need to see this.

Every man at the table has a Philip.

Gary's brother Kyle — the kind of man who stops in the rain to help a stranger change a tire, who brought a homeless priest home for dinner and fed him steaks, who just shows up for people without needing to be asked.

JD's Nathanaels were the guys already in the prayer group in the wing, coming around to invite him every night at 7:30. He didn't want to be there. They kept coming. He eventually stopped resisting.

Ben's was his mother — deeply imperfect, dealing with her own brokenness and addiction, but never stopping. Never letting him forget. And now, 30-plus years later, she's settled into who she is in Christ. The seed she planted in the middle of her own mess eventually grew.

Smurf's Philip was a pastor who found out what neighborhood he was in — and started showing up there. In a suit. In the middle of the night. When you're running a drug operation, the last thing you want is a pastor standing on the corner making everyone nervous. Smurf started leaving just to get the pastor out of harm's way. And the habit of leaving — of getting out of those spaces at night — started shifting his trajectory before he fully understood why.

That's what one seed can do, nourished over time.

Friendship Inside Prison Isn't Transactional Anymore — and That's the Whole Point

Before faith, Gary says, he looked at people like pieces. Smurf accomplishes this task so Ben can do this task so JD can do that task and I get the result I want. Pure transaction. That's not unusual — that's survival math. But it's also isolation dressed up as connection.

Now, JD shows up at Gary's cell at 7:15 PM when Gary is getting a few minutes of basketball in, and they go clean an ad-seg unit together. Smurf catches Gary handle a hard phone call with his family without snapping, and tells him about it. Gary's daughter stops cursing when she calls Smurf — not because anyone told her to, but because she watches how he is and adjusts without being asked.

That's the difference. Before, it was what can I get from this relationship. Now it's what are the same priorities, the same concerns, the genuine thing — noticing when someone's up, noticing when they're down, holding each other accountable without making it a transaction.

And they're funny about it. The Circus Bear origin story (medicine balls, increasingly absurd push-up challenges) and the bit about Smurf always leaving someone's cell with snacks breaks up what is otherwise a remarkably heavy hour of conversation. These men have been doing life together, literally, for years. The ease between them is earned.

Who's Your Nathanael?

The episode ends the way it began — with a question.

Philip went and got Nathanael. He didn't force feed anything. He just said: come and see. I found something. You need to be here for this.

Each man names who he's going to get.

JD: his kids and grandkids, starting with his four-year-old granddaughter who already told him, unprompted, that Jesus made her perfectly, just like this, in my mommy for me. He's still thinking about that one.

Ben: his daughter — gone from his life since she was seven, back now for almost a decade — and his cellmate, who doesn't read the Bible but listens to Christian rap and asks good questions.

Gary: the people God keeps placing in front of him, whether he seeks them out or not. His defense mechanism is to say he doesn't like people. His actions say something different.

Smurf: everybody. He doesn't force it. He just lets people watch how he moves, how he handles things, what he prioritizes. And when someone asks why — that's the door.

You don't have to have the theology figured out to be someone's Philip. You just have to go get them.

What's Next for Reclaim Inside

Reclaim Inside is a new ongoing podcast launching on Pando, hosted by these four men, exploring biblical stories through the lens of life inside Jefferson City Correctional Center. It's produced in addition to the Pull Up Podcast. Look for it early next year.

If you're inside a facility with stories of faith, leadership, or transformation worth telling, 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. New episodes explore faith in prison, leadership behind bars, and what transformation looks like when God has room to work. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.