Carving a New Creation

If one event can ever shape a person’s life, that event for Carlos Antiono Velesquez was his mother’s death when he was just 12 years old.  Instead of supporting his son at this critical time, Carlos’ father turned to alcohol for refuge from his own grief and soon Carlos was also drinking heavily and falling in with the wrong crowd.    

Eventually his path of addiction to alcohol and drugs would lead him to work for the drug lord Pablo Escobar, who recruited him for a job in the laboratory processing pure white cocaine.  In this role Carlos had his fill of money, drugs, alcohol and women, but as he accounts in his now published testimony, despite these worldly comforts, he continued to feel an emptiness inside.

His criminal and excessive lifestyle eventually caught up with him and he was sent to prison, which became the second life-altering event for Carlos.  He was sent to Bellavista maximum security prison in Medellin, a notoriously bloody and dangerous place.  Though extremely fearful of Bellavista’s terrifying reputation, Carlos discovered many Christians there, thanks to the work of PF Colombia.

One day, he passed a group of prisoners singing in a circle and one of the men turned and said to him, “Carlos, Jesus loves you.”  “Those words penetrated deep and I found myself returning to the group,” Carlos recalls.  Through the example of his fellow inmates and the support of Prison Fellowship Colombia, Carlos gave his life to Jesus.  But when he told his young wife of his new found faith during her next visit, she doubted his sincerity.  He felt the Lord telling him that it would be his life, not his words, that would convince her.

That night, Carlos dreamed that he carved a beautiful clock with an eagle perched on top of it from what had been an ugly block of wood.  The next day he found a block of wood on the prison patio and he began to carve that very image using a blade made from the instep of a shoe and a handle from a plastic cup.  When it was finished, he was offered $20 for it, money he planned to give his wife, who was pregnant with their third child.  But before he could sell it, someone took the art and said he’d pay for it later, but never did.  Discouraged but determined, Carlos set to work again.  But again, his artwork was stolen, leaving him with no money to give to his needy wife. 

“Why is God letting this happen?” he cried out to his fellow inmate, who encouraged him to pray about it.  That night he sensed a message from the Lord, telling him that like these blocks of wood, God was also creating a masterpiece in him and each setback and blow he suffered would be used to further carve within him the Lord’s own image and likeness.

From that day on, Carlos began to study the Bible.  While in prison, he developed his faith and his new character.  When he was eventually released from prison, he was ready to start a new life with his family, who also came to share his faith in God.  Completely committed to the Lord, Carlos attended the Medellin Bible Institute in 1994 and in 1999 joined the staff of PF Colombia in Antioquia.  “Today from my own experience, I am helping other young men who come out of prison and need the encouragement to start a new life in Christ,” Carlos says.  “It is a great joy for me to  ...serve with the prison team in whatever way I can for the praise of God’s glory.”

Still a talented wood carver, Carlos uses his gift to glorify God.  Recently, one of his carvings, a life-sized sculpture of Jesus, which is outside the Asbury Theological Seminary, had suffered from splitting and rotting wood, so Carlos came back to repair it.  As he worked to restore it to its original lustre, Carlos told the president and publisher of Good News magazine, which published his testimony, that “there is nothing struck by disaster or disease that cannot be transformed by the Master’s hands.”  A profound lesson Carlos learned firsthand while inside the notorious Bellavista Maximum Security Prison.