Clean/Unclean

By the above title you are probably worried that I’m about to jump into some dissertation of Levitical Law. Not to worry I will spare both of us from such an undertaking…

For many months God has been prodding me to write on a very difficult subject, and last night He revealed to me that He has brought me to a place where I can start this, a place of absolute trust in Him. At first I thought it was just that I have distanced myself from the pain enough not to shed gallons of tears over yet another difficult time. Yet last night the whisper of His voice telling me, it’s not distance you’re experiencing, its complete trust in me in this matter. A place I never thought I’d get to.

It only makes sense to back track a bit to bring you up to speed to how I got to this place of absolute trust, so get your cup of coffee, tea or cold drink of choice and sit with me for a bit.

November 2009 seems like a life time ago, but it was then we discovered that my 22 year old son was addicted to heroin. He’s not been a model child, so this isn’t some “High School Honor Roll, Star Athlete goes to drugs” story. This has been a long painful decline that crashes into a drug addiction that you think only happens in Hollywood.

It was a rainy Saturday, my son had been gone for a few days, and for some reason my husband and I had decided to re-arrange his room. We started to take the bed apart so we could move it and there between the mattresses was a hypodermic needle.

My head started whirling in twenty different directions as I started putting all the puzzle pieces together, his excessive need for money on a daily basis, things had started disappearing, my silverware draw was becoming deplete of spoons, and there were those spoons I had found in the garage with burn marks on them… a hundred thoughts and fragments of conversations and observances came crashing around me and I fell in a heap on the floor sobbing uncontrollably for what seemed like hours.

These last nine months have been a roller coaster of Rehabs, Detox, fighting with Insurance Companies, finding programs that would take him, promises, failures to keep promises, more things missing, another trip to detox and yet another. I could fill numerous pages worth of text with all that has taken place, and one day I will write that book. But for now I will bring you back up to today, to last night after 5 months of being “clean” hence the title of this writing, to the phone call I received at 5:03pm at which time I heard the following

“Mom, I need you to bring me to the hospital.”

This was not the first time I had heard those words, but it was the first time I had heard them without having to beg him for days to get help. Baby steps… maybe

On the ride to the hospital he said “why did I go back? I was doing so good, why?” somewhere inside me my heart broke for him as he struggled with this, but I also heard a voice telling me; he’s in my hands, he’s always been in my hands.

Me and God have struggled over who gets to fix my son. It’s been a tug of war in true biblical Joshua fashion. I must tell you these past five months of “clean” it has been a delight to put down the “rope” and not feel like I had to tug it back from God. He (God) has proven Himself faithful to me countless times on my son’s behalf and as I dropped my son off at the hospital last night at 6:30pm I felt no need to pick the “rope” up. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God, the Great Physician had him in His care.

Trials will come, over and over again; the same trial may befall you. Yet each time it comes God is there, waiting for us to put down the “rope”, to trust Him completely. I praise Him this morning as I have NO desire to fix my son; my desire is to let God fix Him, in His time, in His way.

Unclean… and only God can make Him clean.

Isaiah 11: 1- 3

1 A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
2 The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of power,
the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD -
3 and he will delight in the fear of the LORD.
He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,
or decide by what he hears with his ears;

The last 10 chapters of Isaiah have been a hard read, the harshness with which God dealt with Israel and Judah can give even a well seasoned believer a fresh fear of God. Finally in Chapter 11 a positive prophecy and a promise. After all the Lord had allowed the Assyrians to do to them, they were a mere “stump” cut down and seemingly lifeless. But The LORD wanted them to know that even though the Assyrians and others had come to bring judgment, God would still use them and bring forth life from them. And what a life that would come. This scripture foretells of the life of Christ that would come from the “Line of David”, the “House of David”, and “the stump of Jesse”.

I still sit in amazement that God would send forth his Son through a human like David, the life of David is far from perfect, his life story could make for a bestselling romance novel, or even a “thriller”. And to make it even more amazing, this life of David comes out of a “stump” of a people, who had been cut down. If you look at David for his humanness, you can’t imagine that he’s much better than the stump. But there’s a difference. David continually desires to follow after God. His heart is torn after he sins, and he pursues a “right relationship”. So out of that heart comes a new life, the promised One. The One whom God would send forth filled with His spirit. Christ, God in the form of a man, would bear His wisdom, His understanding, His counsel, His power, the very power that would later raise Him from the dead. This miracle of God in the flesh would come from a seemingly abandoned “stump”. There is nothing like it. Life from what once was dead. A miracle that can only come from the very hand of God.

God longs to do such miracles in our lives too. To bring life, new life where there once was death. Without the breath of God breathing new life into our spirits we will be nothing more than a cut off stump, abandoned, covered over with weedy growth. And who knows what may come from the “stump of Susan” now that His life has been breathed into my spirit. Or from the “stump of YOU”.