He Ain't Lettin' Go

John 6:37

Near then end of my first week in treatment, a rather negative, opinionated girl came to join our community.  Fresh out of detox, she was sick as could be and the only words that came out of her mouth were complaints – usually littered with the “f-bomb” – about how awful she felt, about how much pain she was in, about how she didn’t want to be there, about how everyone was irritating her, about how she couldn’t get what she needed (*ahem* wanted).

Many of the other women in the community paid her no mind except to complain about her as she was always negative, always making our group late, and in general, just a miserable person to be around.  Another young, Spirit-filled lady and I pounced on her the first night we found her unhappy self slouched on the sidewalk by the clubhouse, wrapped in a flannel blanket, pale, shivering and sweaty, freezing and looking like death on a glorious, warm Florida evening. 

She was too sick to get away from us, and complaining or telling us to go away did her no good.  We raved about how life can get better, about the amazing things God could do, about how turning her attention and all the focus from all the bad stuff to something good, even if it was just the thought, “Today, I feel a little bit better than yesterday,” could make an incredible difference in how she entered and came through her recovery.

Queen of the “yeah, buts,” she slowly started asking questions, bringing up issues and ideas that kept her from wanting to believe in God or accept any kind of spirituality into her life.  Many of the other ladies started to see that there was something much more valuable in this young woman and came at her more from a caring mother/sister viewpoint rather than the irritated co-worker viewpoint.  My roommate took her under her wing like a child and all of us worked to show her the love she’d never had in her life. 

I’ll never forget the morning she got into the van and was as bright as the sun.  She’d figured it out, and was experiencing the newness of God’s joy.  That night she handed me a prayer she’d written about accepting Christ into her life and asked if I would find something just for her in the bible to read when we said the prayer together. 

I’m not sure why God worked it out the way he did – it’s not for me to understand – but we never got to pray that prayer.  God had me place her prayer in my bible next to the verse he’d picked just for her, but I never got to read it with her. 

Filled with this new joy and getting this new attention from the kind of people who before may never have given her the time of day, she got distracted.  She fell for one of the guys in treatment and he was good to her, which was also foreign, new and exciting.  The enemy, angry that she had thought about walking away from him reached in and grabbed her and took over just long enough to create a situation which resulted in her removal from the center. 

That night, as my roommate and I sat on our patio, praying for her, I opened my bible to where her prayer and my highlighted verse were.  The verse God had chosen clearly illustrated he knew it would be more for me than it would be for the young lady who wanted him in her life.  He knew we would never read it together, that it would be I coming back to it when I needed to hear it, to be comforted by it.  Because I knew more about the life she’d led, I had grown to love her like a part of my family, and now I watched her having been tossed back into the world unprepared.  I was worried and scared for her, understanding I may never know what happened to her.  But God pointed out to me that Jesus said,

“Every person the Father gives me eventually comes running to me.  And once that person is with me, I hold on and don’t let go.” John 6:37 (MSG)

Amen.  :D