On Friday September 28, David Garlock who is a former student of Eastern came to speak at the Windows on the World event. His speech centered around his life story framed through the University’s motto of “Faith, Reason, and Justice.” He began with how this motto interacted with his life before he came to know Christ and then showed how Jesus changed those three attributes within Garlock’s perspective.
Garlock described himself and his relationship to faith without Christ as being a “faithful faithless churchgoer.” He attended church his entire life but he never knew Jesus. His reason, he explained, was that he got lost in all the alcohol and drugs he consumed to deal with the trauma and abuse he suffered on a daily basis as a child. Garlock described his feeling of isolation and not seeing any way out of the situation as leading him to decide to enact his own act of justice: killing he and his brother’s abuser. At the age of twenty, Garlock found himself booked into prison on a murder charge.
However, prison helped reshape his views of faith, reason and justice in ways that Garlock could not have imagined. He was given new faith, as it was in prison that he met his Savior. It was through this fledgling faith that he found the ability to handle whatever sentence mankind’s version of justice handed him, even when it meant spending twenty-five years in prison. He restored his sense of reason by earning his GED, taking advantage of any and all opportunities to take classes and generally worked on improving himself during his time in prison.
It was this work ethic and self improvement that allowed Garlock to win the Good Citizen scholarship upon applying to attend Eastern University. Garlock concluded his speech with a look at how his current life is an example of God’s justice. God’s justice, he claimed, is the business of redemption and restoration. Where man would have kept Garlock behind bars for a full sentence, God allowed Garlock early parole in 2013.
It is through this mindset that Garlock is able to perform his current job of working with sex-offenders looking to set their lives aright. Garlock’s job is to offer them the same redemption and restoration that he found in Jesus by helping these people build new lives and become better people.
“We have to change the narrative…and the way we label people” Garlock said. He discussed not looking at those spending time in prison by what they’ve done but by who they are. “What I did doesn’t define who I am,” Garlock said and it is this kind of thinking that Garlock would have all those who hear his story possess.