Now I Walk on Death Row by Dale S. Recinella

I received this book free from Bethany House in exchange for my honest opinion. I am not being influeced to write a positive or negative review.

The first half of the book was about the authors’ upbringing, how his sister became institutionalized,  how this affected His faith for some time, his beginning career as an attorney, a nutshell version of marriages and children. He was a very successful Wall Street finance lawyer, who was married to his job and the money. Through a series of Bible studies, his life changed & he starts earnestly seeking God and His will for his life. He met his current wife through this Bible study group.  They begin questioning what else they can do for God.  He begins to work part time and starts devoting his time to street ministry and volunteer work. He goes on a study-pilgrimage to Italy, where the group spends time begging in the streets of Rome, visiting holy and historic sites there and Assisi, & go to a monastery , spending 3 days in silence, praying and reading Scripture.  When he returns to the US, as both were raised Catholic, they feel they can best serve God under the auspices of the Catholic Church. They are met with jaw-dropping remarks like, ‘You are suffering from excessive zeal…. Leave the work of the religious to the priests and nuns.’ They end up getting connected with The School of Lay Evangelism, & volunteer through Good News Ministries. After some time, he and his wife are trained in working with AIDS patients and their caregivers through Big Bend Cares. He becomes a spiritual advisor for a prison inmate, and eventually becomes a chaplain for death row.

I am challenged by his faith, prayer life, (including their prayer life as a couple) and their quest to leave the life of luxury behind, become stripped of possessions, in order to focus on serving the ‘least of these’. He is real and open about his struggles, including that his identity was in his work as an attorney and his affluency. From the title of the book, I expected the death row experiences to begin earlier in the book, but actually begin around Chapter 13. There is a small glimpse into the death penalty system and the politics behind this, too. A couple of occasions I felt sick to my stomach with sadness reading about the reality of the legal system and the fact that innocent people do go to prison and that an execution would not be stopped  even if a confession was made by the one who committed the crime.  My heart was softened at reading about experiences of inmates’ faith, openness to being prayed for/with, and it challenged me to look at some of my personal stereotypes and judgments about those in ‘the system’ . It challenged me to start praying for professions such as attorneys, staff who work at correctional institutions, along with their families. More about his experiences as witness to executions and especially his time spent with the inmate, & their families, in the days/hours leading up to execution, would be a fascinating read, if he ever wants to write a sequel!  The book is challenging, making one think about what it really means to be a follower of God and ‘take up your cross to follow Him’. A haunting quote, “who of us wants to face the worst possible consequences of our smallest mistake?’ There is no room for arrogance or self-righteousness in the face of that question! “It is only by the grace of God that we ourselves do not face the worst possible consequences of our smallest mistake, let alone our worst”