Help-Hope in Grief, episode 142

0:00 If you love a prodigal, you can discover help and hope for your wilderness journey right here at When You Love a Prodigal and also hope and help for your own life journey. Last week I shared with you several major grief events in my life because I think it's good to recognize that grief is a normal part of life. Disappointments, losses, hard situations come, and grief is often a major thing in those experiences. But when you love a prodigal, grief can become an ongoing reality as the journey goes on and on.

0:47 The hardest part of our journey lasted about 15 years. Grief was ever present, but so was God. Today I want to share with you some of the ways God met me and sustained me and even freed me. I hope you can grab hold of some of these to help you through your grief. A little more backstory for those of you who don't know it. I was married to wonderful Steve. We had two wonderful daughters who were just in early elementary school. And I was loving my ministry with Campus Crusade.

1:28 And one morning, as I was reading God's word, I heard him say to me, I'm going to send you a son. My immediate response was, no, thank you. I'm happy with my life, my family, and my ministry. And God said, no, I'm sending you a son. Time passed. No boy. We were preparing to move from California to Florida, where our ministry was having its headquarters. And as I talked with the Lord one morning, I heard him say, when you get to Florida, I will send you that son.

2:11 So I thought, if that happens, I'll realize this really isn't my imagination. We had been in Florida for three weeks when a new friend, as she was leaving, turned and said, do you know someone who could take an eight-year-old boy? My first response, without even thinking, was tears. And then I said, we might. So that began our journey. It took a year for Josh to come to live with us as a foster child. He came from living with his grandparents after he was removed from his drug addict mother.

2:52 For his first eight years, everything was risky. They mostly lived in a small trailer where there was lots of drugs and alcohol, men in and out. Sometimes his mom would take off on a bench. Food was uncertain. School mostly nonexistent. So we welcome him as a foster child, believing that we could provide a stable, loving home and family. We were not prepared for the results of fetal alcohol syndrome, reactive attachment disorder, ADD.

3:35 He was shocked that we had a regular bedtime and that he needed to go to school every day, that he had limits on what he could watch on TV, that we went to church every weekend, and we ate dinner together at a table. All of that was new and different to him, and naturally a hard thing for him. And he was experiencing a lot of grief because even though his mother was not a safe place for him, he still loved her. And then he was with his grandparents. He also loved them, but they said they couldn't keep him.

4:16 They were already raising his half-sister. And so he felt fairly abandoned, and that's a very hard thing. So we worked together and we made progress. And after three years, the county terminated his mother's rights because she hadn't done what she needed to to get him back. And he was up for adoption. We had first choice. That was not the easiest decision because the three years had not been easy years. They hadn't been terrible, but they were challenging. But God made it clear to all of us, my daughters and my husband and me, that he had not sent us a son for three years, but for life.

5:04 We thought the security of being adopted, the assurance that we loved him and would not abandon him, would help him to settle down and move on into a good life. Except that he was starting middle school, sixth grade, but he was two years behind, and basically the size of an eighth grader. This began his real wilderness journey. Josh found size mattered, and he became a bully. His ADD was so great teachers couldn't teach with him in the room, so he spent most of his time in an alternative classroom.

5:44 He got kicked off the school bus. He joined a gang, a group he identified with. The principal said if there was one more incident, he would have to leave. He was sure that we would also abandon him as everyone else had, and in a way he felt we did. We placed him in a local Christian residential program for troubled teens. That was the beginning of our real grief over our son. We felt like we'd failed him. We hadn't been able to hold him up and get him on a good track.

6:25 He and we had to go through the program. He had school daily, many chores, immediate consequences to bad choices, counseling, a weekly chapel, and a weekly required two hours with us. At first they were awkward as we all sat there together, but eventually he became willing to talk with us, mostly asking us to take him home, but giving us an opportunity and him a willingness that we actually began to bond and have relationship. Then one night his house dad called and said, Josh, invited Jesus into his heart today, and we baptized him.

7:14 We rejoiced. Josh became happier. He worked the program. He graduated. He came home committed to walking with God and making good choices. We were hopeful. However, that was bore the beginning of a pretty wild roller coaster ride. It took him only a short time to reconnect with his old gang friends. He began to skip school. His grandparents, he was 16 by now as a freshman, and his grandparents were so kind to give him a car. He skipped school more, and within a month he had ruined the car.

7:58 That was the first of 17 cars that he had over the next five years. We were not providing them. Increasingly, drugs and alcohol had control of him. I can name all the girls in his life that I knew about. Lying was the norm. He stole from us and his sisters and got really angry when his friends strolled from him. He overdosed on the pain medication that he was given when he had his wisdom teeth out and decided he was leaving us. My husband said he couldn't drive in the state he was in. Josh went in the house, got some more stuff, called 911, and said someone is about to get hurt.

8:43 Then he came after his father with a hammer. Fortunately, the police arrived. The police he had called, and they took him to juvenile detention. He called about 2 a.m., begging me to come rescue him. But he was there for two days. In Boys Town, three weeks until his hearing. And the judge let him off. One time he came home terrified. A gang conflict somehow focused on him. And another gang was coming after him. He begged us to send him out of town so he ended up spending the summer working at a Christian camp.

9:29 We laughed at God's sense of humor. That was one time his choices had a good outcome. There were other times that God sent angels into his life. Author and Speaker Josh McDowell appeared at our door one summer and said that he wanted to take Josh on vacation with his family for a month. We said, okay. It was a wonderfully positive interlude with Josh, who came home once again wanting to walk with God. Another time a friend of ours flew Josh to California from Florida to spend a week with a surfing pastor.

10:12 Josh loved to surf. Josh helped teach young boys how to surf and helped set up for church. Again, he came home with a renewed faith. But his renewed commitment to Jesus rarely lasted very long. Both friends and ongoing addictions had a hold of him, just gripped him. When the gate at a friend's apartment complex wouldn't open, he had the code. He pushed the gate open and that broke it. A resident saw it and called the police. He spent the night in jail.

10:53 He was given community service. When he didn't do it, the judge put him on two years probation. That helped him make some better choices. He was pretty terrified of going to jail. He married a girl he was living with. That marriage lasted seven years. When they were breaking up, he took his gun. He was working as an armed security guard. He took his gun, drove out into the woods, and texted me, goodbye. I texted with him for an hour and finally convinced him to put his gun down and go home. I don't really like to tell all these stories on Josh's bad choices, but I wanted to give you a realistic picture of the pain and grief that we experienced over those 15 years.

11:46 The hour texting with him when he said he was taking his life was one of the hardest of my life. And this wasn't all. These were just some of the big items. So how did we survive the turbulence for so many years and have a wonderful relationship with our son even now? Well, of course, we grieved all the bad and sad choices that he made. Sometimes those caused friction between me and my husband. We didn't agree on how we should handle that. But we talked and prayed and committed to working through the hard times together to supporting each other rather opposing the other.

12:34 And we prayed a lot. And I would encourage you, I'm sure that as your loved ones make those bad choices, that it sometimes creates a lot of tension between husband and wife. And you need to come to a point where you say, we're doing this together. We will work through our differences. We'll come to an acceptable action point or approach. And we'll be one as we approach this person we love so much who's breaking our hearts and causing friction between us. He also created a lot of grief for our two daughters.

13:17 First, he required so much of my attention that they were robbed of a lot of what I would have given them because I had to focus so much on Josh. On one time, Debbie said to me, why do you let him get away with those things? And I said, Debbie, I could be after him all the time. I can't follow up on everything that he does wrong or thing he doesn't do that he should do. I have to focus on the ones that will save his life. I don't think she understood that then, but I think she learned it later.

13:58 But we really had to also work to make sure our girls did not get hurt. And we really wanted them to come out of this with a loving relationship with their adopted brother. But he really was a pain to them a lot of times. And sometimes when he and his friends were over and it was clear that they were high, that was usually when we were somewhere else. They were afraid of them. They didn't even feel safe. And we would talk to the girls and we would ask for them to help us, which they love to tell us what Josh was doing wrong.

14:41 And we prayed with them and I've asked for their forgiveness for not being with them and available to them as not. The night that Josh met Jesus, I had a vision from God. I may have talked about this in another episode, but it was a major point in my life of surviving this journey. The vision, I saw God over me and he had this huge vat and he was opening me up and he was about to pour what was in this vat in me.

15:23 And I said, so Lord, what is that? And he said, this is my love, God's love, my love for Josh. I'm sharing it with you, you're going to need it. Meaning there was still more ahead. And he said, one more thing. He said, when you make mistakes with this boy and you will and I did, make them on the side of grace. So what I'm telling you is that not only was it important that we work on our relationships as we worked with Josh and our children's, but that we had available to us two amazing things.

16:13 We had the love of God that he's giving to us, his love for that one who's causing you so much pain. He loves them. He loves them. He loves them. And he will give you the love that he has for them so that you can keep loving even when you grow weary and you're ready to give up. He also gives grace. Most of us don't do grace real naturally, but God's grace, which is what saves us, what gives us anything we need to live, is available to us as we work with them.

16:54 One of the most important things we did was invite others to pray with us. I was like, okay, my prayers don't seem to be enough to break through with Josh. And so I asked some other people who had experienced similar things and I said, would you pray? And then I said, we're going to have a worldwide day of prayer for Josh. And we asked our friends and because of our ministry, we have friends around the world. And so many people began to pray with us. And one day God said, you know, there are other people who could use some prayer.

17:34 He says, why don't you open it up? And so our day of prayer for Josh became what is now the Worldwide Prodigal Prayer Day. Every June 2nd was Josh's spiritual birthday when he met Jesus. And so we pray on that day and we have a list of now after 20 years is about 8,000 names that people have asked us to pray for. They're all just first names and it's coming up and I'll talk to you more about that in coming sessions. But it was a wonderful thing because we did see answers to prayer.

18:16 We saw God doing things in Josh's life. Some of what I mentioned to you came straight from that, I'm sure. So you probably know people that you trust. You don't go to people that you're not sure of that you don't trust. But if you have friends, people at church, people who are struggling with the same thing you are, feel free to go to them and share a little of your journey in heart and grief and ask them to pray with you and you can pray with them. And that United Prayer is a wonderful thing to help you handle your grief and keep going on this hard journey.

19:06 I mentioned that on June 2nd there's a Worldwide Day of Prayer. I will put in the show notes for today's episode, some links to tell you about that so you can look for yourself. Giving you a few helps, just a few for your grief working with not against your spouse, praying together and attending to your other children, asking forgiveness when you need to, and especially love and grace from God. But I have quite a few more thoughts. And in the next two episodes, I'm going to tell you about some special gifts that God gives you freely.

19:51 They will be always available and will be so valuable for you on this journey. So you won't want to miss these next two sessions because you're going to get some help you might not have thought of. Take a few minutes now to ask God from what I've shared today that could especially give you some peace in the midst of your grief. God bless you.