The Prodigal Restored

I haven't updated my blog in way too long. Partly because I haven't wanted to lose any more time in my day than I had to with my normal responsibilities and activities and partly because I haven't really had anything to say. I started to write something a couple of weeks ago and about a paragraph in scrapped the entry due to frustration over not being able to say what I felt I needed or wanted to say. Sometimes I forget that at times you just have to ramble until you get to where you need to go.

About a week ago I received a friend request from an old friend I haven't seen in ages. I had actually looked for him on Facebook a few times over the past couple of years and had not been able to find him. I felt blessed that he had found me, especially since the name I go by now is not the nickname I used as a boy when the two of us were best friends. He sent me a message a few days ago and asked how the past twenty years have been. I haven't been on Facebook much the last week, so I just read the message this morning and haven't responded yet, but the question got me to thinking.

The last time I saw my friend was in 1989, and it had been several years before he stood up with me at my first wedding that I had seen him. In reality, the two of us haven't really spent any time together since I was 11 or so, almost thirty years ago. The few time I saw him or any of his family around the time I was 13 and 14, I had been traveling the road of addiction long enough to have tried to hide it. I didn't try to hide that I had played in the street, but I attempted to disguise that it had become my normal commute. If I remember correctly, the last time I saw his mother was during one of the brief week or so long periods at about 14 or 15 when I tried to clean up my act, and I believe I even may have spoken to her about how God had helped me kick the habits I had so foolishly started. The sad thing is that it was a lie built on the overwhelming need I had at the time for the acceptance and approval of others. The truth was that I had not quit anything for long enough to claim recovery and that I knew that I would use again. I wasn't stopping anything, just trying to pause long enough to postpone the wreck I could see was about to happen in my life. The other sad truth was that I played lip service to a relationship with God that deep down I knew I needed but that did not exist in any real sense. I burned with anger at my Creator and believed deeply that He hated me. My life was worse than empty, it was filled with toxic poisons that had nothing to do with the chemicals I put in my body. The chemicals were simply an attempt to kill the spiritual pain I felt was killing me in slow motion.

Skip ahead about four years, and I asked my friend to be one of my groomsmen at my wedding. He drove up from Huntsville. It was good to see him, but we didn't have a lot of time to catch up. It wouldn't have mattered if we had the time, because there was no way I would have let him see the real me, the messed up me, the me I had learned to hide so well from everyone, including quite often, myself. In many ways, I had become so adept at wearing masks and camouflaging the insanity that on the last day I saw my friend even the woman about to become my bride had little idea of what she was bout to join herself with and the danger that she was in. That was twenty-two years ago, and this morning I have been thinking some about what transpired after. How do I answer the question how was that time?

Of course, like any question so general that covers two decades, there is no simple good or bad answer. Over all, today, I would say that it was good...more good than bad anyway. That's a little strange to me, since I know that it wouldn't appear so to many. There are some good memories of some fun and pleasant times, but they were too few and spread too far apart. Many of them should even be placed in category of riotous living, as the Bible describes it in the story of the Prodigal Son. In the meantime, the uncontrollable mess of my life became more and more uncontrollable while the wreckage became worse and worse.

Between the last time I saw my friend and ten years later I would see actions damage and destroy more and more of my life and the lives of those I cared about. I cut through the life and heart of my first wife like a fragmentation grenade that went of in spurts rather than a single explosion. I remember all too well how it felt to see what was happening in every area of my life and be unable to stop it. I remember thinking, "I need to quit this, and today I won't do (fill in the blank)" as physically I prepared to do the very thing I was thinking I would not do. I felt powerless and hopeless. But I couldn't admit that powerlessness, not even to myself.

Over that ten year period I destroyed the chances to do so much of what it seemed clear that God had given me gifts suited to do. I nuked a career that I loved. About the time that I finally felt a desire to follow in the footsteps of my minister father, I also realized that I had left that road way to far back to do so. Now relax, I am not saying that God can not or will not use me or that I can not minister to and help others. He can and does, and I can and do.

A few months after the first decade past, I found myself facing a felony less than a month after having tried to kill myself yet again. As angry as I had been with God at the age of fourteen, it did not compare to the anger I felt in 1999 as I faced a world full of the knowledge that God would not help me and yet would not let me die and escape. Of course the truth is that I would not let God help me.

My relationship with my family deteriorated. My brother saw me at my worst and saw the damage I had done to my wife, and our relationship has yet to recover. The marriage ended in an unsurprising divorce. I broke my parents hearts and witnessed the pain in their eyes over and over on visitation days. I spent the majority of the next decade wearing a prison uniform, and my life continued to spiral downward as anger, bitterness, self-pity and fear ate away at me, fueled by the chemicals I continued to assault my body and mind with. It has been barely more than three years since that chapter of my life ended. I have been unable to find steady employment since my release.

I hope my little recount of some of the basics of what has happened over the past two decades doesn't sound like I'm whining or feeling sorry for myself. It is what it is. I did every bit of that damage, to myself and others, and ran with the bit in my teeth through to fields of destruction while cursing God for not reining me in. And please don't forget that I said looking back today I see the past twenty years as more good than bad. How?

Well, for starters I had gotten so far off the right path that I needed the road I was on to turn to rubble so I would see how much I needed to return to the highway my Creator called me to travel on. I had to destroy my life enough to become desperate enough to get past my anger with God and discover that I was truly angry with me. I needed to learn that it was me who hated me and not my Creator. I needed to discover the truth and the depths of God's love for me, and for me, that was only possible looking back over the destruction and danger I had survived when there is no earthly reason that I should have.

While prison would not have been my choice of methods to save my life, God used it do do just that. I am thoroughly convinced that had I not been arrested and caged, I would not be alive today. In many ways, my wounds and addictions and anger grew worse over that time, but in several key ways, I found healing and time to recover. Some of that recovery would not bear fruit until after I was released, but the healing began in the darkest of places.

Thanks to parole, I found the rooms of recovery. At first, of course, I went only to get my paper signed. Meetings were better than prison any day. But God gave me ears to hear, and I became drawn to recovery and sobriety. I began working the steps for myself and discovered in the process how much God loves me, how much my wreckage can be the exact right tool to help others who believe that they have strayed to far have destroyed too much to return to their Creator. Though my recovery has not been constant over the past three years and I have only eighteen and a half months clean and sober right now, that is the longest that I have gone without changing the way I feel with alcohol and drugs since I was 12. That is a miracle. And the greater miracle is that I do not feel a loss of anything. I have a peace and a joy today that have nothing to do with my circumstances or prospects for worldly success or approval.

Once I finally surrendered my will and my life over to the care of the God who loves me and died so that I might live, He blessed me with love and companionship I believed I had forfeited all right to. I thank God daily that He brought Leah into my life and saw fit to join us together. I am so grateful that she said yes to my marriage proposal when on paper I surely seems as bad an investment as giving a loan to a crack head. I am grateful for my relationship with my parents, and my in-laws. So much of the damage I caused in my past has healed, and I have friendships with people, including my ex-wife, who have every right to hate me forever. Most of all, I am at peace with who I am and content with my life. I am no longer driven by the need for approval of others or a hundred forms of fear, anger, self-pity, etc. I have recovered from a hopeless state of mind, body and spirit. Greatest of all, I experience the truth and wonder of a personal and daily relationship with my Creator.

The road from there to here was long and filled with destruction and pain, but it was the road that I had to take to discover for myself what the Prodigal felt when his father saw him returning from a long way off and ran to embrace him and welcome him back into the family. I despised my birthright. I rejected everything. I destroyed and tarnished the gifts God had given me living selfishly and playing god of my own life. And yet, He loved me. He protected me. And when I finally beat myself down enough to say I know I do not deserve to be His son, but even being a servant in the household of my Father is better than this, I will return, I discovered the relief and gratefulness that comes from restoration.