It’s not yet 5 a.m. as Tom Pace drives his van to the fortress-like county jail in Oklahoma City, where a couple of sleepy guards and the prison chaplain, Argyl Dick, are waiting. They help him unload boxes onto a wheeled dolly and escort him upstairs into a grim minimum-security dayroom surrounded by dozens of cells. Pace pulls copies of The Purpose Driven Life from a box and places them on each of the steel tables. He adds a few copies of his own book, Mentor: The Kid & the CEO, then heads to the next floor. By the time he has visited all 13 floors, he has left 500 books at the jail. “I want to make a difference,” says Pace, 52. “The Purpose Driven Life is a model to follow. It’s about what we contribute to the world, rather than what we take from it.”

In the last four years, Pace has given a copy of Rick Warren’s bestseller—which he has himself read 45 times—to virtually every inmate of every state prison and county jail in Oklahoma. He has also sent copies to prisoners in Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. All told, he estimates, he has distributed 80,000 copies of the book. “Tom has a real passion to reach out to the less fortunate and try to bring them into a life of success,” the chaplain says. “He’s been a tremendous blessing here.”

Judging from the letters Pace has received from his incarcerated mentees, the books have had a positive impact. “Just a note to say ‘Thank You’ for The Purpose Driven Life book!” wrote one convict. “Needless to say, it’s changed my walk with God! I’ve looked deeper into my heart and cleaned it up. I praised God before, but now it’s a constant thing.” Added another: “The book truly changed my life.”

Pace discovered the book after a series of financial setbacks brought his business—refurbishing used mainframe computers—crashing down in 2002. “One day I was worth $2 million,” Pace says. “The next day I owed $2 million.” So depressed he could barely get out of bed, he thought about suicide: “I kept asking God, ‘Why?’ ”

Then someone gave him a copy of Warren’s book. The first time he read it, he wasn’t moved. “The second time I read it, some doors that were closed in my mind opened,” he says. So he read it a third time. “It got me reading the Bible,” he says. “It’s given me new friends. It really saved my life.” With his wife, Leslie, and their two daughters, Pace became a member of the Church of the Servant, a large United Methodist congregation. Just sitting in the church sanctuary during his darkest days, “I would feel somewhat safe,” he says.

Pace rebuilt his business—this time buying and reselling used cell phones—and by 2006 he was back in the black. He had already begun giving away copies of The Purpose Driven Life.

In 2005, he says, “I went down to Wal-Mart. I bought 20 copies. I knocked on my neighbors’ doors in Oklahoma City and gave them a copy of the book.

“Then I thought I should give everybody in the neighborhood a copy.” He bought another 250 and distributed them.

Then he got copies for each of the 1,800 houses in an affluent area near his home. “I put a copy on every front porch in that entire neighborhood,” he says.

Then he gave another 2,500 copies to everyone in another section of town.

“Then I thought, Who really needs this book is the people in jail,” he says.

It was a population he had come to know 25 years ago while leading group meetings at the Joseph Harp Correctional Center, a state prison in Lexington, Oklahoma. Pace wasn’t an inmate himself; the meetings were part of his own recovery from drug and alcohol problems. When he first visited the medium-security institution, he realized the inmates reminded him of the kids he knew in high school growing up in Oklahoma City, not so different from himself. “I’ve hired some people that have gotten out of prison—quite a few,” he says. “It is very difficult for people getting out of prisons to get jobs.”

One of those former inmates is Misti Kuykendall, 32, who read The Purpose Driven Life while serving a two-year federal prison term for identify theft, a crime fueled by a decade-long methamphetamine and alcohol addiction. The book turned her life around, she says, but after her release, she received 150 job rejections before Pace hired her as supervisor of his call center. “He’s an amazing person,” she says. “He does a lot of good things for people.”

“I’ve always tried to help the underdog, because I’m an underdog,” Pace says. “If I’m helping somebody else, I’m not worrying about my problems, and then God can work on my problems for me.”

Photo: Shana Wittelwyler/Redux Pictures