Have you ever had a bad day? I have. Mine lasted almost ten years.
It began the day I was framed for a heinous crime I did not commit, convicted, and sentenced to forty years in prison. Forty years.
I’m sharing more about this directly in the video below.
There are moments in life when everything changes in an instant. One minute you recognize your life; the next, it is gone. Your freedom, your reputation, your family, your plans for the future — even your identity — can suddenly seem to belong to somebody else.
I wish I could tell you I discovered some magic formula for surviving what happened to me — a secret I could hand you, a magic wand to wave, a silver bullet that could make pain, injustice, fear, and despair disappear. There isn’t. But I discovered something far more powerful: there are truths that do not change, and when you finally understand them, they have the power to change you.
It Starts With Your Thinking
Changing your thinking begins with changing your focus. When you focus entirely on the problem, the problem begins to consume you. You replay it, analyze it, argue with it in your mind. You wake up thinking about it and go to sleep thinking about it — until eventually it becomes so enormous that it blocks out everything else.
You begin to see yourself only as a victim. And once you accept yourself as a victim, you begin to accept the life of one. You become like a dog chasing its own tail, running furiously but going nowhere.
At some point, you have to break the cycle. You have to stop staring at the problem and begin searching for the solution. That doesn’t mean pretending the problem doesn’t exist or denying the pain — it means refusing to allow what happened to you to determine what happens next. There is a profound difference.
A Modern-Day Job Story
In many ways, my story reminds me of the Biblical story of Job — one of the most extraordinary examinations of suffering, faith, perseverance, and the limits of human understanding ever written. Job lost virtually everything: his wealth, his family, his health, his standing, his sense of security. He was stripped down to almost nothing and forced to confront questions people have wrestled with for thousands of years — why did this happen, why me, where is God when everything is falling apart, and how do you continue when there appears to be no reason to continue?
Job is a story of devastating loss and suffering, but it doesn’t end there. It’s ultimately a story of endurance, faith, redemption, and restoration.
So is mine. This book is about losing everything — about injustice, despair, and sitting alone when the world seems to have forgotten you. But more importantly, it’s about what comes next: redemption, restoration, work, faith, and the realization that sometimes the only way out is through.
You Can’t Change Yesterday, But You Can Change What Happens Next
You cannot change what happened yesterday. You cannot rewrite history, crawl backward through time, resurrect what was lost, unsay the words, undo the betrayal, or prevent the injustice. What happened, happened. But you can change your response to it — and by changing your response, you can change what happens next.
That realization changed my life. If something has already been taken from you, why surrender today to it as well? If yesterday has already caused you pain, why allow it to steal tomorrow, too?
No One Was Coming to Save Me
For five years, I sat in prison waiting for the legal system to act. I waited for someone to recognize the injustice, for an attorney to uncover the truth, for elected officials to do the right thing, for the system to correct itself, for a miracle. Day after day, month after month, year after year — and the miracle never came. At least, not in the form I expected.
Eventually I came to a terrifying realization: no one was coming to save me. If I was ever going to walk out of that prison, I was going to have to become an active participant in my own rescue.
I believed the system that convicted me had been corrupted by politics, power, and people determined to protect themselves, and that no attorney working within that same political and legal structure would attack those officials with the ferocity required — doing so could be career suicide. So I made a decision: I would do it myself. From inside a prison cell, I would investigate the people who put me there. I would uncover the contradictions, expose what had happened, learn the law, find the evidence, and keep digging when everyone else told me there was nothing left to find.
Every Mountain Is Made of Smaller Stones
For the first time, I stopped waiting for someone else to move the mountain. I finally understood that the mountain was mine — and it was enormous. Forty years enormous. The legal system was the mountain. The political establishment was the mountain. My conviction, my fear, my anger — even my own thinking — had become part of the mountain.
But every mountain, no matter how enormous, is made of smaller stones. And stones can be moved. One at a time. That became my mission.
I was in the fight of my life, with no guarantee that I would win. But before I could ever move that mountain, I had to accept two things: first, that there was a mountain standing between me and freedom, and second, that I was going to have to move it.
No Mountain Can Be Moved Until You Know It Can
And then came the most important realization of all: you will never move a mountain you have already decided cannot be moved.
Faith begins before the evidence appears. Victory begins before the battle is won. Freedom begins in the mind long before the prison door opens. You have to see something that does not yet exist — you have to believe in the possibility before you can create the reality. Because when you can see the invisible, sometimes you can do what everyone else believes is impossible.
No mountain can be moved until you first know that mountains can be moved.
Mark Timmons writes more about learning to look through the windshield in The Mountain Mover — the true story of surviving a wrongful conviction and finding the strength to move forward. Get the book →
