Written by Matthew Melvin
The Line in the Sand
It was August 2015. I was doing 72 miles per hour on I-495 West in Haverhill, Massachusetts. And honestly, for me, that was slow. There were plenty of days I had pushed past 130.
Then, in a single heartbeat, everything changed.
A Lexus SUV crested an embankment to the east and came barreling across the lanes directly into my path. There was no time to think. No time to react. In that fraction of a second, with metal and glass and consequence rushing toward me, I felt something I had never allowed myself to feel before.
I felt God.
Not as a concept. Not as a Sunday morning ritual. As a force, real, present, and unmistakable, drawing a line in the sand.
You choose. Right now. Your will or Mine.
I knew exactly what my will had looked like. The lying. The cheating. The stealing. The revolving door of the prison system. I knew the road I had been on, and I knew where it ended. What I didn’t know yet, what I was about to discover, was that control had always been an illusion.
God the Father is the only One who is truly in control. And in that moment of near-death clarity, I finally stopped fighting that truth.
The Road Less Traveled
Robert Frost wrote about two roads diverging in a wood. He chose the one less traveled and that, he said, made all the difference.
I chose Jesus. And I went all in.
That meant a complete 180. Not a slight course correction. Not a softer version of my old life with better habits bolted on. A full reversal. Because the road I had been traveling wasn’t just not working. It was destroying everything I claimed to love: my family, my freedom, my future.
I was ready for drastic. I was ready for life-altering. I was tired of the man I had been.
The Furnace
A year after that crash, I was in prison for an offense that dated back to 2009. I spent the majority of my 16-month sentence in solitary confinement.
Most people hear “solitary confinement” and picture suffering. And yes, it is hard in ways that are difficult to put into words. But what they don’t tell you is what can happen when a man is stripped of every distraction, every excuse, every noise he once used to drown out the voice of God.
For me, solitary became a seminary.
I went to every Bible study available to me. I sat and listened to volunteers from Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, and Scientology. Not because I agreed with all of it, but because I was hungry. Hungry for truth. Hungry for something real. Hungry to understand what I had been running from my entire life.
And I built disciplines. Every single morning, I made my bed. A small act of order in a world that felt entirely out of my control. I fasted. I prayed. I read my Bible. I exercised. Day after day after day.
Those disciplines didn’t just pass the time. They built the man I was becoming.
Learning to Love the Man in the Mirror
Somewhere in those walls, something extraordinary began to happen.
I started to love myself.
Not with arrogance. Not with the false bravado I had worn for years like armor. But with the quiet, settled
peace of a man who had been found and who finally believed he was worth finding.
I forgave myself. And I began to forgive others.
I started working Bill’s 12 Steps, a framework most people associate with AA, but one that applies to any addiction, any compulsion, any place in life where you have handed your power over to something that is slowly killing you. The Steps didn’t make me weak. They made me honest. And honesty, it turns out, is the foundation everything else is built on.
The Question I Ask Every Day
I am a proud Christian man. That is not a title I wear lightly, and it is not a label I use to market myself or make myself look better. It is the core of who I am.
Every single day, in every decision, every relationship, every business move, every conversation, I ask myself one question:
Is this serving God, or is it
serving me?
That question has cost me things. It has required me to say no when my flesh screamed yes. It has slowed me down when I wanted to move fast and cut corners. But it has also built something I never had before:
A life I am not ashamed of.
A family I haven’t abandoned.
A purpose that outlasts me.
The crash on I-495 didn’t just nearly take my life. It gave it back to me. And this time, I’m doing something with it.
When Matthew Melvin started working at a car dealership in South Burlington, Vermont, he never thought that one mistake would lead to a life-changing stint in prison. Feeling he wasn’t being paid his full commissions on car sales, he made an impulsive decision to get what he felt he was owed. He hatched a badly-thought out plot to steal a car, sell it as his own and keep the profits. However, a basic reference and background check quickly revealed that the vehicle’s title was not in his name, but still belonged to the dealership. He was arrested and sentenced to prison.
While Matthew has taken responsibility for his poor life choices, he believes he has been treated unfairly due to his sexual orientation, religious and political affiliations, and his adult diagnosis of autism. While he and his lawyer argued that his punishment would be best served in a mental health facility, Matt was unfortunately sentenced to 18 months in prison to be served in general population.
Terrified and alone, Matthew began his prison term with the best of intentions—to keep his head down and serve his time as uneventfully as possible. But being a gay, Christian, Trump supporter brought him unwanted and negative attention. He was bullied by cellmates, targeted by gangs and even raped in one facility. The months he was imprisoned felt like decades and there were times he doubted he would make it out alive.
Bullied Behind Bars chronicles Matthew Melvin’s life feeling like an outcast, enduring a lonely and friendless childhood, and being punished for a crime that began with the honorable goal of him just trying to make a living.