Tou Thao grew up in church and hated it. His family were Hmong Christians from Laos. Missionaries had reached them with the gospel, and when the communists drove them out after the war, they carried the faith to Minnesota.
Tou became a Minneapolis police officer because one had rescued him as a boy, the night his father beat him with an extension cord and then went for a handgun. He served eleven years as a police officer in Minneapolis. On May 25, 2020, he was Derek Chauvin’s partner at 38th and Chicago.
Just a month before that day, his brother had asked him a question: “Are you sure you’re a Christian? Your life doesn’t really reflect it.” Thao’s answer was that he was a part-time Christian. As he knows now, there is no such thing.
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The Bible as an exit
When Thao walked into his cell, a deputy offered him a book. He saw a Bible on the rack and took it for the reason a lot of men take one. He wanted out and figured the Bible might have the answers he needed.
He read all four Gospels but nothing changed his situation. On the seventh day a letter came from a Christian he did not know, pointing him to the book of Job. He read the whole thing and liked it even less. Job suffers. That was not the answer he was hoping for
So he paced the cell and prayed the prayer of an unconverted man: God, if you’re so good, why am I here? Are you even real?
Minutes later a deputy walked in, went straight to the Bible without being asked, opened it to Job, and told him to read the first two chapters.
Thao was a cop. Cops weigh evidence. A stranger’s letter and a stranger’s visit, both landing on the same book, inside of the same week, in a jail cell. He ran the odds and that was when Christ called him.
“God, I have sinned against you. I have rebelled against you my entire life.”
What Job actually gave him
Reading Job did not get Thao out of his cell. He was convicted in federal court and in state court. He maintains his innocence to this day and says so plainly in this episode, along with his own account of what happened on in May 2020.
But notice what the first two chapters of Job do. They pull back the curtain. Job never sees the throne room but the reader does. Suffering is not random and it is not unsupervised. It is under the providence of God.
That is what a man needs in a cell. Not an exit. A sovereign.
Thao’s first day in federal prison, someone tried to kill him. He was moved to the hospital ward, and there he found a congregation: sick inmates who would listen. “What was meant for evil, God used for my good.”
The plea he would not sign
Thao was offered a deal but he turned it down. He believed that putting his name under a statement he held to be false would be a sin against God.
You can think what you like about the case. A man who will take more prison over what he believes is a lie has a conscience that answers to God. And at sentencing he stood before the judge and preached the trials of Jesus.
A word to the church
Thao learned from prison that a theologian he respected had named him and pronounced him guilty before the evidence was in. He does not name the man. He quotes John 7:24: “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.”
In 2020 a great many pulpits did the first and skipped the second.