J. R. Woodgates

It was two-and-a-half years between the one time I was interviewed by the FBI in late 2002 about my Internet activities at work and when I received notification from my lawyer that I would face a single charge for possession of child pornography.  It was another year after that before I actually stood before a federal judge in Washington, DC and pled guilty to that charge.

Unbeknownst to anyone but a few prayer partners, clergy and family, I had spent those three-and-a-half years going through a rigorous process of church discipline, clinical examination and personal restoration. By the time I stood before the judge, I was a different man from the one who had been engaging in such disordered behavior in 2002. Nevertheless, he convicted me of my crime.

In the fall of 2006, just as I began a nine-month stay in a federal low security correctional institution in North Carolina, I divulged my situation in the parish magazine of my large suburban Episcopal church.*  I was overwhelmed by the loving response it elicited.  Six months later, I followed up that article with an epistle from prison.

Read both articles now to gain a better understanding of my full story…and the discoveries that inspired me to write Daily Light on the Prisoner’s Path:

Woodgates Articles

* In 2009, having left The Episcopal Church, it became a founding parish of the Anglican Church in North America.