Camp: Florida

At the Florida CFO in 1955, Mittie Waters preaches on the phrase “help cometh.” She moves from a prison boy who underlined the words in his Bible to the caged bird man of Alcatraz, who kept his faith raising canaries. She also tells how prison director Walter Anderson ended a six-hour riot in which ten officials were held hostage. Anderson offered to take a hostage’s place, and all ten were freed unharmed.

Mittie Waters recounts nearly four years of paralysis and heart trouble that left her bedridden. Then a telegram quoting Mark 10:27, “with God all things are possible,” sent her by train toward a healing her doctor later confirmed. She carries that verse into an account she gives at the Florida CFO in 1955, about a life-sentence prisoner comforted by Psalm 138:8.