Every Sunday, Our American Stories host Lee Habeeb speaks with Mitchel “Big Mitch” Rutledge, who has spent more than forty years serving a life sentence in Alabama. Each call traces the shape of faith, regret, and forgiveness inside a place built for punishment.
In this fourth installment, Mitch reflects on what love has meant to him after decades behind bars. It wasn’t romance that changed him, but a friendship that grew slowly and taught him what genuine care looks like. That bond opened his heart to a different kind of truth that he began to find in the books of the Bible. As he turned to his daily readings, the stories of endurance and redemption took on new meaning. The lessons of those Bible stories guided him toward forgiveness, both for others and for himself.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories. This next story is about a friend of mine. We’re close in age, but have little else in common. Mitchell Rutledge aka Big Mitch, was born black and poor in Georgia. I was born kind of brown and middle class in New Jersey. He never met his father. I still talk to my ninety four year old father every week. He dropped out of high school in his early teens and was illiterate into his early twenties. I was surrounded by books growing up and finished graduate school in my early thirties. Big Mitch spent the last forty four years of his life in Alabama prisons for killing a man. But this is not a story about an innocent man sentenced to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Big Mitch never denied the crime or made excuses for it. This is the story of my friend’s spiritual transformation while serving his life sentence. It’s also about a friendship. Only God could have engineered a friendship that began with a single Sunday morning call. Through these weekly conversations, I hope you come to know and love him as much as I do. Welcome to Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch. Here’s episode four, My Conversation on February fourth, twenty twenty four, where Mitch has his first encounter with true love.
00:01:43
Speaker 2: This is a free call from an incarcerated individual at Alabama Department of Corrections. To accept this pre call, Press one to refuse this pre call, press too. Thank you, Producing Securis. You may start the conversation now.
00:02:04
Speaker 3: Every summer she’ll come down and visit me and stayed a couple of months down here and go back to California. And hey, this right here was like I couldn’t believe it. You know, I’m going on the visiting yard, I’m calling people. So God didn’t really just change my life. Now I’m learning how to read a little better. Now I can spell a cat, cause before that I couldn’t even spell a cat. I don’t be honest with you, And to be honest with you, I couldn’t even spell. My last name is the r U T l E d g E. But before I learned how to read and write, I was spelling my last name wrong. So it’s just God that changed my whole life. And she stayed in my life until she played for thirty three years thirty four years by break for God. So now I got somebody saying that they loved me. You see, Oh my mama loved me. I just I just know that. I knew that my grandmama loved me. I knew that. I knew my great aunt Douville loved me. I knew that. But they didn’t really just kill me. So I thought loved when nothing was just a joke. It’s not real. So when she said she said, well, God sent me in your life. I love you and I’ll be here to help you. Well it sound good, but okay, you don’t really know. So in six months now we’re talking on the telephone and I got somebody to call. I got somebody to kill again about me.
00:03:43
Speaker 1: Big Mitch and I talked a lot about a lot of things, and one of them we love to talk about what stories from the Bible so important in the story of Big Mitch and so many millions of people here in America. Here’s Big Mitch on the story of Peter and lessons on the Devil’s deception from Sister Lilian.
00:04:05
Speaker 3: I ran across the situation. I would read one day, and I mean that was Matthew Chapter sixteen, verse twenty one to twenty three. And that’s when Jesus called his disciples around him until them say, Hey, I’m going to go to Jerusalem, and this is what they’re about to do to me, and so on and so on. And Peter pulled him aside and told him said, Master, this is not going to happen. What you said is not going to happen. In other words, and Jesus said that I rebuke you. Get be behind me, Satan.
00:04:44
Speaker 4: Last you said you would going to Jerusalem, and in Jerusalem they would kill you. If that’s true, then it’s our duty to keep you from going. You must not allow it to happen. She was thinking as men think, not as God thinks. It’s definitely speaking through you.
00:05:13
Speaker 3: Get it behind me. Said now he wasn’t taken to Peter, to person Peter, because prior to that verse chapter sixteen, verse seventeen eighteen, Jesus said that he was gonna build his church upon this rock, which is Peter. So he and Jesus don’t make no mistake, God don’t make no mistake. But he recognized the spirit, that enemy spirit that was trying to deceive God. And so when I realized and began to investigate and study that verse particular, after my God the enemy trying God and he came through. The individual was that God said that he was gonna be a his church home. So then I began to think. I said, okay, because I’m around a men praiser. There’s so much deceitfulness and kind and and manipulation and all kind of stuff going on. So I said okay, And I began to tell guys what I received from that, And it’s this. And we had to be mindful of what we hear at times from the individual that’s closest to us. In other words, I give you an example. Let’s say you have an addiction problem. You had an alcohol problem, and you and your friend you have a party, and this is your best friend, and he know that you have an alcohol problem. But this particular time he calls you say, hey, it ain’t gonna hurt you to take one drink just trying. It’s not like you’re gonna do it every thing. And you know, and you look at your friends, you say, well, why would he say that or why would she say that? Knowing what I just came through, knowing what I just almost lost. So what have you knowing almost aws, my job, my family and what have You’re gonna tell me to take a drink. Well, that’s not your friend talking to you at that time. That’s the endemy, that’s Satan. But what it does, he’ll come through at that moment with a whisper and a word to deceive you. And if you are not spiritual incline, if you don’t have a connection with Jesus Christ, if you don’t have that relationship with Christ, where the Holy Spirit in you? And you’ll be able to recognize because you’ll know because you even read the Bible, and you’ll know that, hey, this is not my friend talking to me, because my friend wouldn’t tell me this. So you you know. In other words, you said, well, you don’t get mad with your friend. You don’t feel your friend trying to deceive you. You don’t feel your friend is trying to hurt you. You understand what can you follow us here understanding the best staying in the world. So you understand through the Holy Spirit in you that this is the dea of a talking to me. This is the intimate trying to deceive me to get me to drinking again. And he used it. My best friend to do it. You got to best create this spirit. Oh you don’t, you’ll be deceived. And it’s leading.
00:08:33
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Big Mitch and that’s Mitchell Rutledge and he has spent almost his entire grown life in various Alabama penitentiaries. And I got to know him over this year through these series of conversations. I felt the deep pull on my heart for you to get to know him too. His story of redemption, of forgiveness. It’s a remarkable thing. When we come back more with our Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch series episode four here on our American Stories. And we returned to our American Stories and episode four of Sunday Mornings.
00:09:45
Speaker 3: With Big Mitch.
00:09:46
Speaker 1: Let’s pick up where we last left off.
00:09:50
Speaker 3: I have a reader about Joe, and Joe cursed to say that he was born at one point because of all the trial was a tlation that came upon him. And at one time when I was on death row and I was going through so much, and I looked back over my life and how I had came up as a child, and I came from an abusive environment, you know, not necessarily physically, but I should have went through what I went through as a child, and so I’m sitting on death row and I’m reflected back on all of that, and I said, wow, So I cursed the day that I was born. I said, well, I shouldn’t. I should have died, you know, while I was in my mother’s womb. You know, I felt that way that at that time because with my life had yield. Looking back on it, A lot of people talk about Joe. Satan tried Joe because God was branding on Joe, and Satan told God, I said, well, he’s serving you and doing everything that you want him to do. His because you gave him everything you want, said, well, take everything you got and he’ll curse you to your face. So God told Satan, said we’ll go forth and do everything that you choose to do to him, but don’t get it. And that’s what Satan did. And so that situation right there, I launched something about Joe. Joe felt entitled because it took the youngster. Allows you to tell Joe that God didn’t owe him no explanation. Joe wants to know why God was doing him like that, that he deserved that that I don’t deserve to be treated like this. I shouldn’t go through this. A lot of people said, well, you know you had the faith that Joe. Well, yeah, Joe had faith. But at the same time, when you read closer, Joe felt like, hey, I don’t deserve this, and he ily told him that God don’t owe him no exponation. So in other words, a lot of peoples will be like Joe, you know, well, I haven’t did anything wrong. I go to church, I pay my tithes, I don’t do anybody wrong, or what I have you What I learned from that situation right there, is that peoples are like that in life. Well, I don’t deserve it. Why God don’t help me? Or why God, I haven’t heard anyone. See, God don’t owe nobody no explanation for whatever happened to you if you’re a child of God. And Joe teaches us not to complain. But Joe complained, but he wouldn’t curse God. His wife told him to cursing and go ahead on and die. So Joe told you, talking like a fool. We get a lot of listens from the Bible, and Joe did complain about what was going on in his life, and a man of God, you’ren’t supposed to complain. Now, is that beyond being a human aid? I don’t know, because you know people will complain about things. But I think that we need understand one thing that if you believe in Jesus Christ, and you trust Jesus Christ, if something going on in your life where something bad and happened to you, your child is seek, your wife is seeking, your mother’s seeking, your other men’s sick or what have you, whatever the trial and trivilation that didn come upon you, then you just pray and don’t blame God. Joe felt that God wasn’t treating him fair. Well, I ain’t. That’s something where human being can said God ain’t treating them fair. The judge and the district attorney denied my hearing, said that I didn’t even deserve a hearing. And once I heard that, it hurt everybody that was in my corner. But when I heard that, I was disappointed. I was so disappointed, but I immediately began to pray. I immediately didn’t blame God. The only thing I said where God got something eff from me. So Job had the faith. But Joe and a lot of people don’t like to talk about it, but Joe complained he felt like he was entitled not to go through nothing in life, and that’s why he felt he felt like he shouldn’t shouldn’t have been had to go through nothing because of who he were, that he was blameless. Why am I going through this? I haven’t need anything, I shouldn’t be punished. And a lot of people feel that way. But hey, God, you never know what God does. Just deal with it. And so at the end, God blessed themselves time more because he didn’t curge him. That’s the main thing he didn’t do. He still believes in God, but he felt that he was entitled not to be treated that way, and peoples to this day feel that way. But you have no control over what may come your way. There’s a lot of guys ain’t with me. They throw me into town. God tell me, said, well, minch man, you are strong, you know God give me a lot of accolades. Now, big minch man, you’re a strong dude. Man, you still got your right mind. You hanging in the hell. You ain’t you ain’t this? You ain’t God? I said, where is Jesus Christ? Really is this Jesus Christ? We cannot subvide nowhere and society, especially in here to go Christ, we need him to make it from one d to the next day. We need him to overcome, say we need him.
00:16:07
Speaker 1: As we wound down our conversation, Big Mitch talked about a turning point in his life and it had everything to do with the word forgiveness. Here’s big miss Forgiveness.
00:16:22
Speaker 3: Is a corner stone of maybe the next transition from one point to the next punt. And because if you can’t forgive, whether forgiven yourself of forgiving others, then you’re a stagnated You’re stationary right there, and you can’t be healed. And you can’t heal without forgiveness. So that’s one of the reasons God asks us to forgive. And then God the main thing God say, if you don’t forgive others, then how can you be forgiven? You know, I think a lot of people uh overlook that uh you know is that uh they are so unwilling to forgive, but at the same time they won’t forgiveness and and and and and forgiveness is like I said, it’s the essence and cornerstone to be able to move from that position to the next position. And to not forgive. It’s like a counsel because it issues up. It’s it has you angry and upset and and and builder and it’s destrawing you. Like when I laid down at night in my bed and I’m in here and uh, when I understood, you know what I need. Uh. This person had a mother, father, brother, sister, kids, you know. And when I realized what I did, it just they were hard to go to sleep that night. They were hard to function. So I had to get that out of me. I had to forgive myself. So solace, you used to tell them all the times that will mention God to forgive you. So now you got to forgive yourself. I had to forgive myself for a lot of things. And the only way I made is where I am now. I was able to forgive myself for what I did. And once I was able to forgive myself, then I was able to be able to function better. I was able to grow in a more positive and productive manner because I didn’t have that burier upon me anymore. I’m free of that God to forgive me, I to forgive me. Now I can move forward in life, and now I can feel positive influence in other people’s life, and.
00:18:57
Speaker 1: A terrific job on the production, editing and story telling by our own Greg Hengler and our own Reagan Habib, And my goodness, the degree to which Mitch’s life intersected time and again with stories from the Bible, and how those stories informed him and improved him and made him see things clearly. And the biggest lesson of them all had to do with one big word in all of our lives, forgiveness. Everybody wants forgiveness, but my goodness, to be able to forgive, and sometimes just to be able to forgive yourself. And my goodness, Mitch had killed a man. Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch, Episode four here on our American Stories
Discover more real American voices.
