I have to be honest with you... it has been a very rough year in our house. It left me drained in every way. As a kid growing up I watched my father destroy his life and our family with his addiction to alcohol. Then I watched my brother go down the same path but then added drugs to the mix. In the last few years I have watched my son battle depression and addiction to alcohol. I am familiar with suffering but the pain of watching these past several years has torn my heart out.
I would like to take this next season of posts and write about how God breathed life back into my weary soul.
We dropped our son off at a Christian Rehab- Teen Challenge, five weeks ago. I thank God for that place and that he is still there. Even as his dad and he sat in the office five weeks ago signing a pile of papers, I sat at that beautiful campus thanking God that my son was there, alive and safe. For the first time in a long time, I could breathe again. I feel like I have not breathed for five years.
When we got home from dropping him off, I knew my heart was numb. I found a list of Bible verses on Pinterest of all places. It was called "Thirty Days of Reading Bible Verses about Prayer". I decided not to just read it but write down every verse- many a day. As I did this, prayers flowed out of me. Day after day, I just wrote more and more Bible verses down. When I finished this pile, I found another on the topic of " Worry and Anxiety". I am very good at both of these so I thought I would write these out as well. Honestly, I did nothing but write and agree with what I wrote, I prayed and I breathed.
I am continuing to write every day- verses, passages that encourage me or direct me and through this simple practice God's Spirit has breathed His life into my heart. I feel hopeful and I have peace and I even sleep most nights. I have had many sleepless nights over these years.
Our son is not out of the woods yet, but we pray that he will find healing and freedom in these days and months. In the mean time, I will read .write , pray and trust God for whatever lay ahead. My eyes are fixed on the One with whom nothing is impossible. He is bigger then depression and He is bigger then addiction.