Pam Lanhart - 2nd Interview, episode 58

0:00 Welcome, welcome back to When You Love a Prodigal podcast. 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 help and hope for your own life journey. Speaking of hope, I hope that your heart was encouraged by the series we did on hope, that it actually lifted you some and gave you hope that all is not lost, there will be good things that can happen. And today, I am confident you will find both help and hope for yourself, your family, and your prodigal, especially if he or she struggles with addiction.

0:50 Today, I am chatting again with Pam Lannhart. Pam says, I'm just a mom who's become a warrior. Growing up with family addictions, she was determined that that would not come into her family, but it came anyway. Pam's long journey and battle for her son's freedom has benefited many families through her book, Praying Our Loved One Home, and a ministry, Thrive, Family Recovery Resources. So as Pam and I chat, and you listen in, be sure to jot down any action points that you should seek to do as Pam shares with us.

1:36 She's gonna have a number of things that she's offering with her ministry, and so don't miss it, don't think you'll remember, be sure and jot it down. When Pam was with us two months ago, she was kind and so vulnerable to tell us about her long journey with her son, Jake's addiction, his getting clean and making good plans for his life, and then one slip while helping an overdose friend. That one slip took his life, and if you haven't listened to her story, check out episode 49 on When You Love a Prodigal. Today Pam will update us on her journey of grief, and also acquaint us with the wonderful resources she has developed through what she learned and experienced through Jake's battle with addiction.

2:32 So welcome back, Pam. We are grateful to hear how you are doing and what has happened because of Jake's story, and then we want to know about your resources that could benefit our listeners. Well, thank you for inviting me back. I always feel like, you know, I get invited once and that's a good thing, and if I get invited back, that's a better thing. That usually means I didn't do so bad the first time around. Oh, you did great the first time, and I know you will this time as well. But first, why don't you just kind of tell us, bring us a little up to date on what's been going on.

3:15 First with you and your heart, but also what's happened with Jake's friends. Yeah, you know, we are now not quite six months into the grief journey. And it's, the way I would describe it, and this I think is the same, whether you have lost someone or, you know, you just discovered, or you're just starting to have these problems with your child or your loved one and your life isn't really playing out the way that you think it should, or the way the story in your head would go, there's grief.

3:58 And we had a therapist describe it initially as there's 10 foot waves and they're coming one after another, and you can't feel like, you feel like you can't breathe. And then, you know, the waves come a little bit farther apart, but they're still all consuming and they fall, you know, on you and you just get sucked under. And then eventually they're a little smaller, they're eight foot waves. And then they start coming farther apart and then there's six foot waves and they're even farther apart. And pretty soon you can manage the waves and you can breathe it through the waves. And I would say we're in that, you know, six foot wave phase where the waves still come every day.

4:42 And you know, the thing about grief is it's not, and there is a season, the Bible says there's a season for everything and there's a time to mourn. And yet when you lose a child, that I don't think you ever, I never win a day without thinking about my son. I can't imagine I'll ever go a day without thinking about him. Even in this loss. Yeah, so, you know, last night I was listening to a song and it brought tears and I had to get the clinics out. And every day there's something that chokes me up, it makes my heart hurt, makes me cry.

5:29 But there's, I think something that someone said or you've probably heard it, I don't think it's an original quote, but you know, the greater the grief, the greater the love was. And the beauty of our journey, I think, is that, you know, I wouldn't be able to definitively say that Jake as a prodigal had come home in the sense that, you know, he'd embraced a Christian faith and he had started living that out. That wasn't the story. But the story was that we radically loved him and we repaired our relationship with him even as someone would define him as a prodigal.

6:20 So even in his journey through his discovery of who God was and his discovery of spirituality didn't necessarily match ours, but that relationship was intact and it was beautiful and there had been so much healing that we really have the benefit of knowing, as I talked about last time, that we had loved him well. We really had. That's such a blessing to know that you loved him well. And that helps at least lift any sense of guilt because so many people who love a prodigal and they lose them have a lot of guilt.

7:10 They think, what could I have done differently? And what a blessing that you can know that. And, you know, honestly, there's always that. Even when you have loved well, there's always those images of guilt and like, could I have done something different when we have had a different outcome if we would have done this or that? I mean, I think that that's normal and natural. And I do love the idea of grace and self-compassion that we're not gonna go through life perfectly. There's no guidebook really for how to do this thing, especially when addiction is in the family and it isn't a linear journey.

7:57 It is definitely a crooked path. And it's not a perfect path and we can never be perfect people. We have a perfect God. And we're coming up on Easter and we have the benefit of Sunday. In fact, I'm doing a retreat this weekend and my talk is about stepping into a new day. So you might be sitting in Friday today and Friday might be the wondering, the grief, the questioning, like, where is God in all of this?

8:38 You know, you said my son was gonna do great things. Mary sat in Friday and said, you told me my son was gonna be a king and rule over all of the nations. And I'm sitting in Friday and Saturday and I don't see that coming to fruition, right? But he didn't know Sunday was coming. Praise God. And we know Sunday came. We have the benefit of Sunday. So grateful for that, definitely.

9:20 So I read something that you wrote about your son's friends and an event in Colorado. Can you tell us about that? Well, you know, after Jake passed, we really got together and wanted to celebrate his life. And I think the most significant part about that was the, I might have a little hard time talking about this. But the person that Jake saved wanted to come to that event.

10:06 And, you know, as a friend, and if you are a friend of, you know, someone who struggled, you feel guilt and you feel shame. And this young man, I'll call Dee, wanted to come and his sister brought him. And he was not well, even though my son had saved his life on that Friday night. This was the following Thursday and he had been in and out of a couple of detoxes already. And he left. And when he showed up, he was not well.

10:49 And what happened in that moment was that in spite of the feelings that we might've had about what happened that day, we walked right up to him and he was hanging his head down and he was feeling a lot of shame and a lot of regret. And I hugged him and I held him and I said, you don't look down, you do not look down.

11:30 You look up. You look up. And you find strength, because you are loved. And you find strength. That's beautiful. And you know, I think that throughout this journey, we have really tried to respond the way we imagine Jesus would have. Yeah. You know, Jake had a lot of friends that had no faith, even exposed to Jesus.

12:15 This particular young man grew up in a Jewish home. And what I try to imagine as I walk through this and as we were walking through our journey with Jake is, how would Jesus have responded? What would he have done if someone would have walked up to him who was a friend of Lazarus and Lazarus has died? You know, what would Jesus have done? I mean, we see a little bit, Jesus wept, he was sad. And I think he would have comforted the lost.

12:57 He would have comforted those people that that we're struggling and we're questioning and we're wondering. And I do believe Jesus would have embraced them. I think that's true. Jesus showed compassion all the time. Absolutely. And the beauty of this journey and looking at it in hindsight and even moving forward is I don't think we really truly knew what compassion was until we walked through this with Jake.

13:45 And you know, it's a big word and there are a lot of things that are thrown out about compassion in the world today. And thankfully we're having conversations about it through some of the works of people like Brene Brown. But it's one thing to say it and it's another thing to practice it. And it takes intention. And trying to seek the Lord, I think every morning and ask him, you know, how do I wanna be?

14:29 How do you want me to be? What is my intention for this day, for the people in front of me and for my light? And we had the opportunity that day to really respond to this friend, Brene Brown. And to this friend with compassion. I mean, he felt guilty. He still struggles. Of course he did. But yeah, compassion and mercy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he does struggles still with horrible guilt and wondering if there was something he could have done different.

15:12 And you know, the truth is this journey on earth is riddled with, you know, those kinds of regrets. Could I have done something different? Should I have done something different? So many what ifs. And we don't have answers for them. Only God knows. But what if is what has happened. We have to deal with and live with. Yeah. You know, God is just so gracious and good. Yes. This is what Christ did on the cross, right? That he took all of that, all the shame, all the guilt, all the what ifs.

15:58 And he says, you know, I'm gonna take that burden for you, right? I'm gonna carry that so you don't have to. So other friends of Jake's were involved in honoring him? Yeah. And you know, it was a hard time. He had been out there in a community, in a sober living. And you know, there definitely were people that were struggling. And you know, it was really a beautiful, we had it in an environment that was right below the Flatirons in Boulder.

16:44 And you know, he had climbed a lot of mountains with those kids. And he had spent a lot of time with those kids. I call them kids. They were, you know, in their 20s and kind of early 30s. And it really was just a really, really sweet time of just coming together and ministering. And I think this is another lesson from that, is that even in our deepest pain, we can minister to others. Yeah. In fact, sometimes more powerfully in our deepest pain. Yeah. And one of our greatest ministries has been to Jake's love.

17:25 He had a sweet young gal named Maddie that was a part of his life for two and a half years out there. And since Jake passed, we've just embraced Maddie. Like she was part of our family. Like she would have been our daughter-in-law. She's come and stayed with us. We've been able to really minister to her. And you know, this is the thing that's so sweet about these friendships that our kids have, is that it brings insight into our lives about who they were apart from being our children. You know, we tend to only see like this...

18:07 True. ...of our kids, right? They're always our babies. And then we're always evaluating, you know, their lives. And, you know, we're sort of that. We're the, you know, we're the parent, right? We have that parent role. So sometimes our interactions with them, our, you know, mothering them or fathering them. And the beauty of that gathering was that there were many people that stepped up and shared, and they shared things that we didn't even know about Jake. And we got to really see this part of Jake, especially in his sobriety. He hadn't lived with us for so long that we hadn't seen that part of him.

18:52 And you know, and this is something I think God's putting on my heart to share right now, is that when you lose a prodigal, there's these questions about whether or not they're in heaven. You know, did my person know God? And was his heart a heart of God? And especially when there's been maybe some long-term substance use and their behaviors are sometimes harmful towards you, you know?

19:34 Oh, definitely. But what was so cool is that that gathering of his friends and that time afterwards, and this time with Maddie really has shown us the fruit of the faith that he grew up in. You know, train up a child in the ways of the Lord, and when he's older, he won't depart from them. And one day I was sitting in church, not long after he died, it was the first time we had gone back to church, and the message was, do you know for sure? And they talked about that Bible verse, you know, faith without works is dead. Faith without works is dead.

20:14 And you know, it got me wondering about Jake, and this was such a Jesus moment, such a God moment. I came back home and I picked up his big book. And that's the AA book, the big blue book of AA. And I loved to look through it because he would have notes written in it, or he would have certain things underlying. And that day the Lord led me to that book, and three different times in that book, it was highlighted by him, faith without works is dead. Those exact words that I had heard in the message that day, and it was God's way of telling me that, yes, Jake did have faith, and that was manifested in the relationships that he had fostered with his friends and with Maddie.

21:11 And we get to hear all these little stories that Maddie tells us about his kindness and his compassion and his love. And sometimes that was lost in the addiction and that was lost in the pain, but it was never lost, it was always in him. We didn't necessarily see it, but the beauty of those friendships, and sometimes it's really hard when we have these preconceived ideas of who those people are, right? He had a lot of friends who were in active use or in recovery, and yet through our experiences working with the homeless and really trying to embrace some of those friends that Jake had, we can just see that those are the most beautiful human beings with the most giving hearts that would give you the shirt off their back, or the last half of their sandwich, and how kind and generous they really were.

22:16 And we saw that manifested in those days right after Jake died at that service in Colorado, and here in Minneapolis, I think that honestly, we had probably judged some of his friends a little bit too harshly. And the truth is they're just human beings that God created and the same as we are. Yeah, and they have this struggle, and we have another struggle, and that's such a gift, such a gift. And another gift is that you have taken before Jake's death, but continuing the hard things, and you've turned it into gifts to other people.

23:06 Can you kind of give us a little sense of the journey as you began to work through what you were going through to help other people, and how your ministry evolved from that? Yeah, and we have done the work of our ministry for six years now. And one of the things I think I mentioned last time was the what ifs. If Jake didn't make it, what would those last days have looked like? What would those last text messages have been?

23:49 And we look back at that, and we are so confident that we really did love him well. And our ministry was really born out of that idea of how can we really interact with our son in a way that honored God? And then out of that, really helping families. There's so many families that have been told to walk through this in a way that didn't align with their values, that they were supposed to cut someone off, or disconnect, or let go.

24:30 And whether those messages, a lot of times they're distorted by human beings, right? So everybody's trying to do the best they can, and there's no judgment on that. But people were drawn to me, my writings. It all started with my Facebook page, and writing my prayers, which there's a page on Facebook called Praying Our Love When Home, and I post my prayers every day. And my ministry was born out of that. And wanting to help families move through this journey with love. And most people came to me because they felt like there was a disconnect between how they wanted to be, the fruits of the spirit, and how they were.

25:18 So I want to be patient, kind, loving, caring, compassionate. And right now I'm anxious, fearful, angry, frustrated, mean. All of those, yes. And there was a disconnect. And what I found in my own life was that nobody ever really showed me how to be that way. And so our ministry offers actionable solutions. So when we have our groups, we have support groups that meet every week. We have seven of them that meet, and sometimes there's as many as 35 or 40 people in the group. We use breakout rooms on Zoom. It's always actionable solutions.

26:00 So it's how do we communicate more effectively so that it does come off in a loving way? How do we become emotionally healthy in our own lives, taking care of ourselves and activating our own wellbeing? Or the word recovery means a return to health and wellbeing, a return to what was lost, right? So if I have surgery and I've lost my strength, I return to recovery by doing physical therapy, by practicing, by building strength, right? So when we think in terms of substance use or how the family is impacted in that, we talk about recovery for an individual, but I talk about recovery for the family, which is how do we return to that place that we once were, or that person that we once were?

27:00 Or maybe you never were that way because maybe you did grow up in a family that wasn't very healthy and you never could figure it out, right? And so what we like to do is equip families with tools and skills, how to- Can you give some examples of what you do then? Tools or skills? Okay, so this just came up today, which was a gal that I'm really good friends with and she has a girlfriend who's using alcohol pretty problematically and probably will die from her alcohol use.

27:45 And she has lost her job, she's done treatment three or four times, she's 60, she probably doesn't have a long time to live because of her alcohol use. So we were processing this visit that was gonna be coming up. And my recommendation from a kind of a coaching standpoint was don't tiptoe around it, right? Bring it up and just say, hey, I love you, I know you're not well right now, I know you're coming to visit and I really wanna know how you want us to be.

28:25 What do you need when you come? That would be revolutionary. Yeah, like thinking about that person and their suffering and the fact that any moment they could die because we all can, we never know the number of your days. So we use some skills I call more superpowers, which are things like validating our loved one. Beautiful, yes. And validating doesn't mean we agree with their decisions.

29:09 But validating means I hear you're frustrated, I understand you're angry and I'm sorry that you're struggling. Or it might be little things like, yeah, that does sound really hard. I used to be an invalidator, what are the examples? My daughter comes downstairs and she's like, oh, I'm so tired. And I would be like, how could you be tired? You just slept for three hours, right? You just took a nap in the middle of the day. That's invalidating that person. And instead we can say, wow, you must really be exhausted.

29:58 Those are simple things that we can learn to do. Right, and that's the thing is I didn't need complicated, I needed simple, affirming our loved ones, speaking life over them. Like, you know, I am so confident because of your determination and diligence that you will be able to find this pathway. Or I know that you are a strong person and you're independent and I really believe that you'll be able to figure this out. Or I really do think that you have the ability to take this next step, right?

30:43 Oftentimes we sort of get into this idea of like what I call toxic positivity, which is I know you can do anything you set your mind to. And it sort of inadvertently sends this message of, you're not living up to what we expect. And so taking that idea of being positive or affirming your loved one, but making it small and specific. Like, it must feel really good that you filled out that job application today. You must be really proud of yourself that you went to that interview. I see you doing this work.

31:27 And the truth is it doesn't matter whether it's what we want or not, because their pathway isn't our pathway. And their pathway is under God's control, not ours. That's really hard for parents to recognize. They have a vision for what this kid should become or could become. And yeah, to recognize, you know, God might have an entirely different plan. And so that's beautiful. You know, the God's word says that his plan is a good plan.

32:12 It's a good plan. And I'm not gonna lie. Like this has been part of the grief journey is, you know, what does that mean for me? It doesn't look good to me. Yeah, now in the context of this loss. Yeah. I sit on my chair and I write and I ask God that. Like this does not feel good right now. Well, and to divert here just a little, I think that's very important. We are afraid to ask the questions of our fears, our doubts, our anger of God, that we don't feel like we can. And I think he invites us to ask the hard questions, to tell the truth about what we're feeling.

32:59 And this is the discovery that I've made, is that there are questions that we will ask that will never be answered this side of heaven. Right, true. I will never know why Jake's life ended at 24 on the 23rd of October, 2021. I will never have that answer. I don't know that. I can't tell you. And I know I never will get that answer, you know?

33:43 Sometimes we have the benefit of looking back and being able to see. Something that God has used things for. The pathway, right? Of the why. Just kind of a quick little story. My husband is a, he spent the first year of our marriage in jail, and he was a convicted felon. Long story, but we see how God wove that into us moving, living in a certain place, getting a marketing brochure, and going to the church that we go to, and living that out, and how it brought us to our faith.

34:28 And now my husband works for that church, and it doesn't matter that he had this felony, he's been pardoned. But actually, no, it's kind of fun, because when we do ministry with the homeless, he can be like, hey, yeah, I know how it is. I spent some time, I did time. I did time, yes. So sometimes we have the benefit of looking back, and we can see that trajectory, and sometimes God even gives us that benefit with our prodigal, because things sort of work out well, and everything gets wrapped up in this tidy little bowl. But that's not the way my life is gone, and it's not ever gonna be that way now with Jake.

35:08 I mean, in my imagination, I thought Jake would somehow end up, and in fact, the day that he relapsed, so he died on a Friday night, he relapsed on Thursday, and I knew about it that evening. And my response was, okay, God, what are you up to here? Hmm, I guess he had one more use in him, and now maybe he'll get to that place where he has a spiritual experience, and he becomes sold out for Jesus. And 24 hours later, he was not alive. And so, you know, we have these ideas and imaginations for our loved ones, for our kids, and sometimes it doesn't work out that way.

35:57 And I think faith is knowing that God is good. If we know the character of God, he's always good. He's always wonderful. He is. That's not God's plan for our life. That our life would be shortened, I don't believe. And it certainly is not God's plan for our life, that Jake would die at 24. And God gives us free will. He does. And he gives us free will to interact with our loved ones, kind of circling it back to how are we gonna show up?

36:43 And this is the work that I do to help families is to really align their Christian values or their values with how they're acting in their behaviors. And so many times the disconnect is just that they don't know what they don't know. I don't know the language. I don't know, you know, like how... So they need to be taught. Right, right. And coached. Yep. So if somebody, not in Minnesota, not in Minneapolis, is struggling and would love to connect, to be able to get the kind of help that you're talking about, what would they do? How would they do that? Well, the first thing is if they're on Facebook, we do have a large Facebook group.

37:28 It's called Thrive Family Addiction Support. And it is informed by approaches that we have vetted that we feel aligned with how we do this. It's Crab Community Reinforcement and Family Training. So you can request to join on Facebook. It is a group that is founded in faith. So you can ask for prayers and you can talk about Jesus. And we have many people that don't have a faith that join that group because they love that it is so loving and so kind. And then we have a website, Thrive Family Recovery Resources.

38:12 And we host workshops. For example, we have a workshop coming up at the end of April called Better Boundaries from Tough Love to Love You Well. So depending on when you play this, it may or may not have happened, but on our website we post our events that we have coming up. And everything we do is founded in this compassionate, loving, collaborative approach where, you know, and I think I mentioned this last time, we want to be loving, but I can assure you that often in that journey, I did not act loving. Love is not a feeling.

38:52 Love is a verb. And what we try to do is help people walk love out, which really means things like kindness and the verbal words that you say and how you make someone be seen and heard and validated. And when someone is in that place of being a prodigal and they're filled with shame and guilt and, you know, regrets and they know that maybe they're not on the right path, we can take shame out of it and just be kind and honor that person. I call it unconditional positive regard.

39:34 How can we practice unconditional positive regard for a family member? So joining our Facebook group, we have groups that meet, we have virtual support groups that meet, we have seven of them that meet every week, including a men's only group on Wednesdays, which is a beautiful group. And then we have other activities where we engage our families that sign up to our newsletter or are part of our group. So yeah, lots of ways to get involved. Okay, we will be putting in the show notes this information to tell you, our listeners, how they can get in touch or get connected to the Facebook page.

40:24 Tell us just a little bit about your book and then I'm gonna pray for you. Okay, that would be lovely. So the book has been a really interesting part of the grief journey for me. It was written in the darkest days of our journey with Jake and I have a special little chair that I sit on every day and I was praying, I was going through scripture and looking at the scriptures and I just started praying over Jake. I would insert his name. And so this book is a daily devotional, 120 prayers that I wrote on this journey that I prayed over Jake.

41:15 And what we did was we made it really easy so that you can insert your person's name in the prayers. So it says in parentheses, our loved one in where it says our loved one, you just put your person's name in there. And so one of the things I found was, like I didn't know what to pray for and sometimes I felt like I would pray my will for him. I would manipulate, I would wanna manipulate things. I would pray like, do this, but that was out of my desires and I knew that God's word was always true, always faithful. And that if I prayed God's word for my son that that would always be the right prayer.

41:58 You know? I agree with that, yes. It wasn't my will, it would be God's will. And so every single prayer, there's a little devotional. I write in a very sort of poetic way. And so there's a little piece of an introduction to this prayer. It's the scripture and then it's a prayer that's actually written out. It's actually written out so that when you feel that you don't know what to pray or how to pray for your loved one and you're in that place of dark, dark, you know, the dark valley, you can pick up the book and you can mark the pages that you love and you can just pray that prayer over your person.

42:42 And so there's one, you know, there's one every day for 120 days. And I've had moms that have, this is probably one of the greatest honors that I feel God has given me is when a mom sends me a message and says, my person called and I didn't know what to do or how to respond. So I just asked them if I could pray and I opened your book and I prayed one of your prayers over them in that moment. That's beautiful. Yeah, so it's really just prayers for our loved one. I think that will be a great help to a lot of people. I think I'll give away a couple of books and listeners, you can check in the show notes to find out what you have to do to be in the drawing for one of Pam's books.

43:35 So let me say thank you, but let me pray for you. Father, I thank you so much for Pam. I thank you for her willingness to walk through the pain again, which I know she does many times, but to do that here so that others can hear and learn and be helped. And I thank you for the truths that she's mentioned over and over that if something happens to your loved one and you look back over conversations or texts that you've sent them or the words you've said, you'll be able to say, we love that person well.

44:22 And I thank you for her sharing that concept with us. And thank you for the lives that have been touched by Jake, the friends who came to honor him and whose lives were touched by him. We thank you for Maddie and the fact that Pam and her husband are able to embrace her and encourage her because it's a loss for her as well. And I just pray that you would multiply compassion, you would multiply grace into and through, flowing through Pam and her husband to the many others they encounter.

45:10 I pray also that you would just continue to wrap your arms of love around her and keep assuring her that you are still loving, you are still in control and that you will multiply Jake's life even as she thought would be one way, you have another way that you're going to use Jake's life and it will be powerful. So blessings, blessings for Pam. Thank you, Lord, in Jesus' name, amen. Amen, thank you so much for having me, Judy.

45:50 Oh, Pam, I'm just so grateful and I just am so grateful for the wonderful truths that you have shared. And so listeners, I would encourage you because you probably know others with Prodigals to make sure that they listen to this so they can be helped and touched and encouraged and feel the love that God has even in the midst of pain and loss. And I hope also that you will take those things you've jotted down and you will seek to take action steps to show tangible love to a person who's breaking your heart, that you will not return that to them, but you will instead give them love and care and affirmation.

46:44 What is one step you can take today? And you may remember looking to what comes next, that I said I would try to answer some questions that you have. I have decided to tackle one, occasionally two questions at a time. So next week, I am going to respond to the fact that many people always ask me, how do I pray for my Prodigal? Now, Pam said that's where her book came from, and so that's one resource. But you have questions about it, and so our whole time next week will be about how to pray.

47:28 When you have a Prodigal, pray for yourself, but especially pray for that loved one that you care so much about. And I will try to shed some light on praying to God for your wanderer. God bless you.