I want you to remember this name:
Charles Chatman.
I’ll tell you why in a minute.
In all of my workshops and retreats (they are produced throughout the year in various locations, and all are based firmly in the messages of Conversations with God, seeking to show how to apply those messages to every day life), I am constantly telling people who are dealing with deep injuries, disappointments, and sadnesses from their past that the fastest way to heal them is to use them as jump-off points in the healing of others.
For instance, to a lady who had been sexually abused as a child I offered that she might begin presenting a class for women who have moved through the same experience. The experience, I suggested, could be redemptive for her — and wonderfully healing for those others who have not yet closed their own wounds and moved forward with their life. In this way, I suggested, she could turn a negative experience into a true gift, both to others as well as herself.
To a man who had lost his wife to cancer only one year after his marriage to the “woman of my dreams” I offered that he might begin giving talks or presenting classes on grief resolution and the bereavement process, perhaps focused particularly on widowers. Providing such a program just for men could go far, I told him, in healing his own grief.
Always in my retreats, when I encounter people who have suffered much and can’t make any sense out of it, I offer an invitation to turn what they have endured into an opportunity and a learning and a message of hope for others. In this way tragic events in some way can make sense, and tragedy can turn into healing
All of which brings us back to Charles Chatman.
About 27 years ago Mr. Chatman was sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. A black man, he was accused of raping a white woman who lived nearby. She had picked him out of a lineup in Dallas County, Texas. This is a county, you might want to know, with an unmatched number of wrongly convicted inmates — and he became one of them.
Over the years he appeared before parole board hoping for an early release — but each time, at his appearance, board members would try to get him to admit that he had done the crime. They asked him repeatedly about details, about his remorse. He showed none and he could tell them of none because, he insisted quietly, he never did anything wrong and knows nothing about the crime.
It should be mentioned here that Charles Chatman had a perfect alibi. He was at work at the time of the assault, and his employer so testified. Unfortunately for Mr.Chatman, he was working for his sister at the time, and her testimony was dismissed by the jury…a Texas jury in a Texas county not known for going slow in convicting a black man for raping a white woman.
(“It is time we stop kidding ourselves in believing that what happened in Dallas is somehow unique,” Jeff Blackburn, the founder of the Innocence Project of Texas, was quoted in a copyrighted report on this story from the Associated Press. “What happened in Dallas is common. This is Texas.”)
Now, thanks to DNA evidence analyzed for the first time with new scientific methods, it has been made clear that Mr. Chatman was telling the truth all along. He had nothing to do with the woman’s rape. The other day, they let him out of jail. And now, what is Charles Chatman going to do?
The AP report says “Chatman said he wants to work with the Innocence Project of Texas to support other people exonerated or wrongly convicted.” The AP report quotes Chatman as saying…
“I believe that there are hundreds, and I know of two or three personally that very well could be sitting in this seat if they had the support and they had the backing that I have. My No. 1 interest is trying to help people who have been in the situation I am in.”
Wow. That’s all I have to say to that.
Wow.
That’s straight out of Conversations with God…whether Mr. Chatman knows it or not. Actually, it’s straight out of any religious or spiritual tradition. And it’s wonderfully inspiring and uplifting to hear this kind and gentle man move past his own bitterness to a place where he chooses to use his terrible experience as a gift to others.
Wow.