“God Put Me There So They Could Teach Me”

John Beard walked into his first prison class certain he was there to teach a room full of men how to be good Christians. Nine years and roughly a thousand visits later, he'll tell you flatly that God put him there so they could teach him. John and Laura Beard on a decade with JUMPSTART SC, a thousand prison visits, and a miracle they're still weeping over 

John Beard is a retired cardiologist who spent most of his practice in Columbia. Laura Beard is a retired nurse and risk manager. Next month they'll celebrate 38 years of marriage. They have two adult daughters and one grandson they describe, without hedging, as phenomenal. 

They also have four standing appointments a week on the other side of a prison fence. 

John started in prison ministry back in 1992. Laura joined him in Columbia, teaching classes at a minimum-security facility through Prison Fellowship. Then, in 2017, John met a JUMPSTART SC leader for coffee, and nearly a decade later, he's still going. 

Ask him what surprised him most about that journey, and he doesn't start with the men. He starts with himself. 

"I got into prison ministry because I'm so good, and I can teach these guys how to be good Christians, and I can teach them the Bible because I know the Bible," he says. "And I learned really quick that, one, they know the Bible as well as I do. And two, God put me there so they could teach me how to be a good Christian." 

A week that looks like this 

On Tuesdays, John drives to Tyger River. Wednesdays, Perry. Wednesday evenings, Livesay, from 5 to 7. Then Sundays, Livesay again, 1 to 3, because Livesay has work release, and the weekend is about the only window when you can get men together for an hour or two. 

Forty-six weeks a year, counting leadership training. Four programs. Nine years. Somewhere north of a thousand visits. 

He'll admit to the tired days. "There are times when I've said, I'm not sure I'm going to do this today. I'm pretty tired. This has been a long day." He pauses. "I have never once walked out saying, man, I wish I hadn't come here today. Not once. Every single time, it is uplifting." 

"There's nothing like it in this world" 

When John first came to JUMPSTART SC, there was no Restoration Village. Residents were mostly living in trailers. There was the big house, and beyond that, he says, it was a bit of a nightmare just getting people where they needed to be. 

"What is happening here now, there's nothing like it in this world, and certainly not in America," he says. "We're in many other states now, but only in South Carolina is there a Restoration Village. With every possibility of taking people from that situation to restoration in society, in a workable way. I'm just constantly awed by what the Lord is doing." 

Laura comes up on Thursday nights for dinner with the residents. That's where the growth stops being a number for her. 

"You hear their stories, how they'd struggled with addiction, or with the things that got them into a bad place, and how God has completely given them a new life," she says. "People who had been brought low through their own choices, and God has redeemed them. The smiles on their faces now. Joy that comes from God being inside you." 

Squares and circles 

In the Purpose Driven Life workbook the JUMPSTART SC classes use, there's an exercise where participants map out their story. You draw a circle around the abuse or neglect you suffered. You draw a square around the abuse or neglect you caused. 

"The inmates' books are full of squares and circles," John says. "The volunteers' books are not." 

That contrast is, for him, the whole picture. "You make your choices. That's true, but your choices are often affected by the circumstances you grew up in. And to the extent that we can help those in those circumstances, we must." 

Laura puts the same conviction a different way: "How arrogant would it be to sit here and think, God gave me this great life, and your life is whatever you got, because you're not a good person? All of us need God. If you’ve never heard of God’s love for you, and if you've never seen God in someone else, it's very hard to believe He actually loves you." 

How it clicked 

For John, the turn came at 25. At 16 he'd told his mother she was foolish to believe in a God she couldn't put her hands on. He was smart, hardworking, and honest. Religion was a crutch for the weak. He'd make his own destiny. 

"And God let me believe that for nine years." 

He did well in college, near the top of his class. Got married. Became a platoon leader, then a company commander. And then the bottom fell out. His marriage was coming apart, which he says was his fault. His command was coming apart under a dishonest executive officer who ordered him to cheat. Then his father, a man he admits he nearly worshiped, died six thousand miles away. 

"I got down on my knees for the first time in many, many years and acknowledged that God was in control and I needed help." From that day, he says, he had a compassion he'd never had before, and a life centered on people who needed help rather than on himself, "who actually needed a lot of help." 

For Laura as she recalls really seeing God’s hand, it wasn't a single moment so much as a 15-and-a-half-month one. A woman in their Bible study was disintegrating in front of them under the weight of abuse at home. The Beards offered her and her daughters two weeks. The day after she came to live with them, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and two weeks became a year and a half filled with daily challenges. 

Cheryl has since passed away. Her older daughter, sixteen and in full rebellion when she moved in, is thirty now and calls Laura every couple of days. They call her their surrogate daughter. 

"I will never replace her mother," Laura says. "But I am the mother God put in her life when her mother went home to be with the Lord." 

Retirement, reconsidered 

Between them, the Beards also co-led a marriage rebuilding ministry for years, and Laura now co-leads a discipleship program aimed at root causes: pride, fear of man, a head knowledge of God without any actual trust in Him. She mentors a single mother through a local housing ministry, prays for her daily, meets her monthly. She helps stock a church freezer so families in crisis can take home a meal and stop worrying about dinner for one night. John builds coffins for his church and spent years at a summer camp where kids rebuild homes for people who can't afford the repairs. 

They love their Viking cruises. They just don't confuse them with the point. 

"I don't think God ever designed us not to be working for him," Laura says. "Our purpose in retirement is to do the things God would have us do that we couldn't do when we were working full time. We don't have to limit our ministry to one night a week anymore." 

Taylor 

Several years ago, their daughter Taylor was having trouble getting pregnant. A fertility workup found a cyst on an ovary. When they removed it, it was cancer. 

Ovarian cancer comes in two forms, and John, a physician hearing this about his own child, knew exactly what the odds looked like. Taylor had the rarer type: slow-growing, hormone-sensitive, poorly responsive to chemotherapy, and almost never seen in premenopausal women. 

Off her medications to recover from surgery, she got pregnant. "We now have a two-and-a-half-year-old grandson from that," John says. But the pregnancy and delivery flooded her system with estrogen, and the tumors came back: one behind the spleen, and, when they opened her up, tiny ones that hadn't shown on any scan. 

What followed was surgery, chemotherapy, a full hysterectomy, anti-hormonal therapy, a second anti-hormonal therapy, and MD Anderson. 

And for months, in every prison John walked into, he asked the men to pray for Taylor. Week after week. Tyger River. Perry. Livesay. In JUMPSTART SC services and in services that had nothing to do with JUMPSTART SC, men were praying for a woman they had never met. 

At her visit about three weeks ago: no evidence of disease. Nothing on the CT scan. Tumor markers at zero. 

"When I went into Tiger River and into Perry and told them, the cheers were enormous," John says. "Men standing, praising the Lord, shouting." He calls them the prayer warrior army. "God couldn't pass it up. He could not fail to hear so many people trusting him for that miracle." He and Laura are, in his words, still weeping with joy. 

Laura is careful to say the miracle wasn't only the scan. 

"Her house was overflowing with gift baskets. She got over a thousand cards. She'd say, I don't even know who these people are. They knew someone who asked for prayer, so they sent her a card." Friends of friends. A church prayer group here, a church prayer group there, no direct connection to her at all. "Even had it not turned out this way, to have seen how God used that band of prayer warriors to encompass all of us, not just them but all of us, was amazing." 

John quotes William Cowper, as he tends to: Behind a frowning providence he hides a smiling face. And: Bitter be the bud, sweet will be the flower. 

"We hate ovarian cancer," he says. "But we love what the Lord did through ovarian cancer: in our lives, in her life, in the lives of others. In the lives of people on the other side of the fence." 

What they'd tell you 

John's pitch is characteristically blunt: “Come on, folks. You can't imagine the blessing of serving the people on the other side of that fence.” He notes, dryly, that he boxed for four years at West Point and got beaten up all four, and that he's never once needed any of it inside. "There are guys on the inside who will defend me better than I could ever defend myself." 

Laura's invitation is simpler. Come to a Thursday night dinner. Sit down with the residents. Listen when they get up and describe how it was an inside volunteer, someone who drove out on a Tuesday, someone tired after a long day, who first told them about Christ. 

"That witness was the catalyst for the change in their life," she says. "Every time I come and listen to their stories, it leaves me in awe of how God, through JUMPSTART SC, truly changed their lives." 

Watch the Full Interview here:

Since 2008, this faith-based prison ministry has walked alongside incarcerated men and women across South Carolina, offering Christ-centered discipleship on the inside and real support after release: housing, employment, mentoring, and a community that doesn't give up on them.

Lives are not changing by accident. They happen because volunteers step through the gate to mentor a man on the inside, walk with a graduate after release, share a meal, teach a workshop, or offer a ride to church or work. Jesus named these men and women specifically in Matthew 25:36, and this is your invitation to go to them. There's a place for how you're called to serve.

Submit an application to serve inside prison or as a mentor at Restoration Village: jumpstartsc.org/volunteer