Pastor Bakhytzhan Kashkumbaev was an elderly man when Kazakhstan arrested him in May 2013. The charges were strange, that he had harmed a church member's health and stirred up religious hatred. They sentenced him toward ten years and put him in a psychiatric ward, where inmates were routinely drugged. On the way in, he thought it might be the end of his mind. "This is probably the last time I will talk to you in my right mind," he said.
Then a question reached him, the kind God uses. "Where is your faith?"
Under the cover of the risen Lord Something lifted. "I felt like I was under the cover of the risen Lord," he said. The old man who expected to lose himself instead found Jesus nearer than the walls. He started talking to the men around him. To a prisoner wrecked by drug addiction he said simply, "Only Jesus can help you." Over nine months inside, nearly one hundred inmates gave their lives to Christ.
"In prison," he said, "the Holy Spirit opened one dimension of prayer to me." The place meant to break him became the most fruitful pulpit of his life.
They released him in early 2014. He walked out having planted the good news in the last place anyone would look for it. God is not locked out by any door that locks you in. He was already inside, waiting.