Prison minister makes habit of offering heartfelt advice

The girl behind the paint counter at Home Depot wore a T-shirt that stopped at her rib cage and revealed a sexy tattoo slightly above her tailbone.

Leone Johnson glanced at the woman’s backside briefly, and then noticed a man at the opposite end of the counter doing the same. A prison minister, Johnson recognized the man as a level 3 sex offender. She could see that the tattoo had the man entranced.

Now, Johnson isn’t the kind of person who holds her tongue, at least not when it comes to things that matter. You’ll never hear her utter the phrase, “I would have said something, but. …” This say-what-you-believe attitude results in spontaneous prayers with teenage boys in the middle of Spokane Valley Mall and discussions with smokers skulking outside public buildings about quitting tobacco cold turkey.

She subscribes to the philosophy that there’s sin in not doing good when you know there’s good to be done. And the principle goes beyond tossing out opinions like some head shrink on the radio.

“Leone is a woman who absolutely walks the walk,” said Gary Hebden, pastor of Valley Open Bible Church. He’s known Johnson since 1976. “She knows the right thing is not connected to religious ideology and she knows full well that it is not about the church. She is fully committed to helping people to discover there is real love in this world.”

Love doesn’t come naturally at the paint counter of a big box store, a place where shoppers wander the aisles anonymously. It meant telling the clerk about the presumably unwanted attention she was attracting with her bare back. Johnson, 67, didn’t broach the subject right away. She slept on it, but returned the next day.

“Do you remember me from yesterday?” Johnson asked. “Yes,” the woman replied. “Do you have a large tattoo on your backside?” Johnson said.

“Yep.”

The older woman laid out the scenario with the sex offender from the following day, as only she could, with a calm voice and her clear blue eyes dispelling any hint of confrontation. Johnson is, after all, a grandmother, used to dealing with an eclectic list of characters: cons and sex offenders, the homeless and the recently rehabbed, and of course the children of all the aforementioned. Her home is a kind of way station for the downtrodden, a place to regroup before hopefully setting off for smoother byways.

So here’s how the clerk at the paint counter responded: by giving Johnson a “thank you for telling me” while the clerk’s male co-worker endorsed what Johnson had to say.

Maybe the woman was just being polite, sort of taking “the customer’s always right” mantra to the nth degree. Others have reacted to Johnson’s input in gratitude, embarrassment or offense. When she offered to sew cummerbunds to cover the midriffs of the young girls at her church, they didn’t exactly embrace the suggestion.

But what can be said to a woman who literally hopped in her truck and toured the country to find out just what was plaguing the nation’s worst inner cities, and went to the Middle East to work the streets not unlike how missionaries go door to door here. Do you suppose they just turn off the TV and hide when there’s a knock on the door in Lebanon?

Johnson’s life has moved fearlessly forward since she was 14 and standing on the banks of Liberty Lake on her last night of church camp. The kids were lighting candles and floating them into the dark water. They sang “This Little Light of Mine.” And as the lights drifted in opposite directions, Johnson got the impression that she was meant to send the light of the Gospel into the world.

Should she ever come up to you, at a hardware store or in Wal-Mart, to offer a piece of advice, maybe you’ll want to say something. Maybe it would be better if you just smiled and listened.