Tom Zimmer – PhotoBubba – tomzimmer.wordpress.com

I thought I would share a story that many of you know at least some of the details of. This is the story about how God led me to send my “Moments with a Biker Chaplain” books into nearly 100 prison and jail facilities.

This is kind of a long story, so grab your coffee or preferred beverage and enjoy the read.

Around 2015, after I had written “Moments”, and had sold or given away around 1000 copies to members of the greater Austin and surrounding biker community, my general distribution of the Moments books has started to slow down. I still carried copies in my car trunk to give away, but I thought it had a good run. 

Most of you know I am a member of CMA (Christian Motorcyclists Association), and the New Life Riders CMA chapter in Austin. Well, one evening we had a visitor; Phillip Hicks who was also a CMA member, but he and his wife were moving to Austin. Phillip was a member of the Holy Ghost Riders CMA chapter. Debbie and I met Phillip and discovered he was a professional Clown, and that he went into prison facilities to share the Good News of Jesus. Phillip has kind of a rough background, like many CMA members that Jesus has Saved, and you can read about that in your spare time on his web page;

 https://www.jesusbehindbars.com .

We enjoyed getting to know Phillip and his wife, but within a year they had to move on to California. Not long after that Phillip shared with me a copy of the Chaplains directory for the entire US Prison system. Within that document were the names and contact information for all of the around 200 chaplains serving. 

I was praying one morning, and God gave me the desire to reach out to all the chaplains and offer to send copies of Moments to each chaplain for the prison library. I was about to get started, and my wife, Debbie, suggested that I should probably get permission from the head chaplain before jumping in. I thought about that for a minute, and agreed. So, II wrote the Chaplain Commander, telling him the story about Moments, and did receive approval to contact the chaplains.

Over the next few weeks, I wrote emails to every chaplain I had an email address for, around 200 chaplains in total. I started to receive responses from them, and came to understand an interesting detail about the rules the chaplains operate under. It seems they are not allowed to ask for things from people offering to send them stuff. I didn’t want to break any rules, or get them in trouble, but the size of these prison facilities range from perhaps a dozen, to several thousand. I somehow needed to figure out how many of my books to send to each facility without asking them how many I should send. 

It turns out that the chaplains directory also listed the sizes of each prison facility, so I thought and prayed, and came up with a formula. For small facilities I would send a dozen books, for medium facilities i would send 50 books, and for large facilities I would send 200 books. I ultimately received permission to send books into almost 100 prison facilities. That is a lot of books.

I of course am only one person, so I didn’t want to buy my books wholesale and re-package them and ship them out to the prisons because it would be too much work. I also a programmer, and I think that means I’m lazy. So, I adjusted the price of my books on Amazon down as low as they would let me set their prices, which turned out to be around $6 a book. Then I simply bought them from Amazon and had them delivered to each prison chaplain to put into the library. 

This was wonderful, and I didn’t even need to worry about shipping and handling because Amazon took care of that for me. Without extra charge I might add. There was still, one little tiny niggle of a problem that remains though, buying dozens or hundreds of books from Amazon still cost quite a lot of money. But, I figured I would just pay for the shipments as I could afford it, and it would all get done eventually. Well, God had another plan.

In my role as Chaplain of UCOA (United Clubs of Austin), I was privileged to give an encouraging “Moment” and the closing prayer at each monthly meeting. As all the book emailing with chaplains was happening, on one evening when I was giving the chaplains moment, I was so excited I shared what God was doing in helping me get copies of Moments into prisons. Well, everyone present was also excited to hear what I was doing, and someone suggested they should “pass the hat” to help pay for buying and shipping books. I was astounded, but very pleased of course, and when the hat was tallied, I received over 500 dollars to use for sending books into prisons. That was a big boost in paying for the cost, and over the next few months, a total of over 600 Moments books were purchased and shipped to prison facilities around the US.

Almost 2000 copies of Moment have been distributed since it was first published. Thank you Lord!

Today, having retired from my role as Chaplain of UCOA, I still attend events as I am able, and I still carry copies of Moments in my trunk to give to people I encounter.