The Story of Charles Colson: From the White House to Prison to a Life of Courageous Faith

It was a beautiful evening in Hobe Sound, Florida. A group of wealthy guests gathered under a party tent overlooking a bay full of expensive yachts. 

The hostess had asked Charles Colson to tell his story to her guests. He was well-known to them—for years, he had worked in Richard Nixon’s White House before he was caught up in the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s. Colson spent seven months in prison, but his downfall led to his conversion. He was widely mocked when he announced his newfound faith in Christ.

That night, Colson described his experience to a skeptical and uncomfortable audience. “Most people were looking away, or they had this studied indifference about them,” he told me during an interview. “They didn't want to appear to be affected by it.”

Then Colson took questions from the audience. Most people asked about Nixon or Watergate and ignored his conversion story, but finally, one man spoke up and said, “Mr. Colson, as you can see all of us here live a very good life. None of us, of course, would have any experiences like yours, going from the White House to prison. What would you say to people like us, who have no problems in life?”

I love Colson’s courageous reply: “Well, you may not have had them yet,” he said. “You will. If there’s anybody here who has really had a life without problems, I’d sure like to talk to him afterwards, because everybody has their share of problems. And if you don’t now, you will when you’re lying on your deathbed and all of these things will have no meaning to you because you know your life is about to end.”

Colson said the impact on his audience was like “letting air out of a bellows. There wasn’t a sound. Nobody applauded.” The hostess rose and announced, “You make yourself comfortable, and Mr. Colson will stay and answer questions.”

You can guess what happened next. A steady stream of people came to Chuck and his wife, telling them things like, “My son is on drugs, and I can’t find him,” and, “My husband’s got four mistresses. I don’t know how to deal with it.” They told of divorce, family problems, civil suits. “No one accepted my invitation to explain how life can become problem-free,” Colson wrote. “No one under the tent lived such a life. The attitude was pure façade.”

Think about that situation for a moment. Colson was speaking to an audience of very successful people, many of whom would never admit their need for Christ. But he knew their need because he had been there himself. He knew their spiritual condition, and he knew God had put him there that night to speak to their hearts. So he courageously and graciously persisted in a difficult situation.

This is just one of the stories Chuck Colson told in an interview we just released on Spotify, Apple, and our YouTube channel, Inspiring Courageous Faith. Bob Lepine and I did the interview a few years before Colson died in 2012, and he talked about his book, The Good Life.

If you don’t know much about Colson’s story, you will definitely want to listen to this podcast. He experienced the highs of success and the lows of defeat and brokenness. But his experience in prison became the foundation for a ministry he founded called Prison Fellowship. He told his conversion story in his first book, Born Again, released nearly 50 years ago, and he went on to become a top Christian leader and thinker.

In his book, The Good Life, Colson includes a lot of contrasting stories about people who lived the true “good life” and those who didn’t. In our interview, he contrasted two men and how they faced death. One was John Ehrlichman, one of his colleagues at the White House who at one time had been one of the most powerful men in the world. “When he invited me to see him when he was in a nursing home in Atlanta, everything had collapsed in his life. He'd been through three marriages, his family abandoned him, he had nothing. He was penniless and powerless ... he died alone in the nursing home with nobody around him, having given up on life. I can't think of a more despairing story.”

He compared Ehrlichman’s death with that of Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ (now called Cru), and of the most influential men in my own life. Colson recalled that when Bill learned he had pulmonary fibrosis and would die an agonizing death, his attitude was, “Praise the Lord ... this is what God wants.”

The next couple of years may have been the most productive time of ministry in Bill’s life—even as he was slowly dying. “I'd go see him in his apartment,” Colson said, “and he had the oxygen strapped to him, and he never was without a smile and always giving me ideas and ‘Here's something you can do in the ministry, Chuck.’ He was an extraordinary man. And when he died, [his wife] Vonette was with him and whispered to him, ‘It's all right,’ and he died peacefully.”

I became friends with Chuck Colson is his last years. We bantered back and forth as to who was the better cook ... Chuck even came to my home where I treated him to my “world famous” blackened salmon. After the meal, he invited me to come to dinner with him at his home and try his favorite: Chilean sea bass. He begrudgingly couldn’t confess which one was better.

But Chuck had a more important appointment, with Jesus. He died about six weeks before I was to travel to south Florida.

 I had the privilege of attending his funeral. It was a wonderful celebration of God and a man whom He used in a great way. I miss him. And neither of us will know whose cooking was better.

You can hear highlights of our conversation with Chuck in our latest Inspiring Courageous Faith podcast which we’ve just posted on Spotify, Apple, and our YouTube channel. Come and listen to one of my all-time favorites out of over 6,000 broadcasts on FamilyLife Today.