Tonight I helped a friend to get into drug rehab. She was not too happy with me when I left her in her room at the rehab center. I had to draw on all the resources, pastoral, psychological, spiritual and some just plain ole Texas orneriness to make it happen. I feel like I have been in a wrestling match. Physically I am pooped, corporally I feel battered and spiritually I feel spent. But in the heart of my heart, I know I have done a good thing.
I feel like Jesus in the wilderness. I have driven halfway across the country to make this intervention happen. I could not have done it without the deepest sense of prayer and support and help from a treasured colleague. But I feel that I have met evil in this disease—not in the person who has it. I deeply love this person and long for her return from the disease that has taken her personality, her faith, her wit and her self-respect and made her fearful, unable to grapple with th day to day living that most of us take for granted.
I don’t talk about evil much. I don’t believe in a devil. I cannot personalize or even anthropomorphize evil. But I certainly know that evil exists. Evil is that which takes away our ability to be free in God—free to know how much we are loved, free to be about being all that we can be. Tonight I know I have grappled with that evil. I will not know if I have won that battle—it will be my friend who will have to grapple with it now. But I have won Round 1 and that is good enough for this moment. Now I have to hand my friend over to God so that she has the strength to embrace the strength that God has for her. One day at a time…
6 comments:
Thank you for this, Lauren.
Jeri+
Been there, done that. It's always absolutely exhausting and deeply satisfying. You - and your friend - are in my prayers of thanksgiving and gratitude.
Glad to hear that this went as well as could be, even if it was exhausting. But I just wondering, why don't you 'believe in a devil'?
Anon,
(Please give me a name of some sort so I will not confuse you with another Anon.)
I don't believe in a personalized devil because:
1.) I do not believe that there is another "god" out there other than the one that I worship.
2.) I do not believe that the God that I know and worship is capable of creating that which is evil.
3.)I do believe that there are elements or principles that are created by humanity that function for ill whether they are spirits or just accumulations of ill will that produce that body of ill that we claim and know at some level as evil. Sometimes it functions as a combined effort of many people and sometimes it is just the participation of meanness that a single person participates in.
Addiction takes away the human will and the sickness allows the diseased person to participate in such self-destruction that it is often impossible to reach the loving creature that once was there.
That is certainly the case with my friend. Please pray for my friend.
Add me to the "been there done that" with a physician colleague. Got called every name in the book at the time. Let's just say the intervention caught him completely by surprise. He was not expecting the director of our state Physicians Health Program in his living room to personally take him to rehab.
Your friend has my prayers.
Prayers for strength for you and for your friend.
I've never commented on your blog before, but have been inspired and touched by so many of your posts.
ginny--another exile from a warmer place, aging, but still evolving
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