Scriptural Reflection: Working with a Prodigal

I have a friend who's been a gang chaplain and a jail chaplain in a city next to ours in Northwest Washington. He made the observation that there are the same number of people in prison in the state of Washington as there are the number of churches in the state of Washington. And his proposition was, “What would happen if you hooked up every church in the state with every prisoner in the state?”

And we thought that was cool. Our church became one of 33 churches that is doing that, and it's now growing as a model even around the country. The inmate we got for our church went to prison at age 13. He was in a gang and got beat up. He went home, got his dad’s pistol, came back and killed the kid that beat him up. And he was sent to adult prison at age 13, where he stayed for 20 years.

When he got out of prison, he got married to a gal who had a young son. And then he started using and dealing drugs, and went back to prison. While in prison, he was involved with a gang and became a real power in the gang. And that’s when he signed up for this program.

So we started communicating with him, and he’s an incredible guy: very sharp, very aggressive, good sales skills and verbal skills. He took and aced all the college courses that the prison made available to take. And when he got out of prison, he was able to get a great union job and everything was looking good.

Then I found out that he was starting to take pills again and got himself re-addicted. He also went out and bought a $70,000 new pickup truck, which we advised him not to do. And then he bought his wife a $45,000 BMW.

Fast forward and he’s still taking pills and making poor decisions. He got hurt and then got laid off from work, and now he’s under tremendous financial pressure with big car payments and being on pills. Finally, he came to our core team. And confessed to us that he’s addicted and taking pills, and says that he’ll get off by himself.

But as I try to work with him and support him, I see that he won’t commit to a date to be off the narcotics. In fact, he is still on the pills three weeks later with no indication he intends to change.

Long and short of it is that he’s still using, he has not come off, and I’ve struggled with what to do. What can I do to help him?

I finally went to talk to the chaplain that started the whole program, and he had some comments that I thought were insightful. He said this:

“You can’t coach or help manage addict friends out of it. In doing so, you become part of the same delusion that we can use our intelligent effort to pull somebody out of drugs. And that's not going to happen.

When you try to coach, manage, and give dead lines, the person simply won’t be able to comply, and then there’s their crushing sense of disappointment, which drives them to cycles of shame, which only fuels the addition.

What’s key now is shifting gears into a no-pressure, no-expectation, compassionate presence with boundaries. This means waiting, even while your friend is going back into the shadows or the addition that will lead to the shadows within weeks. It means waiting like the father of the prodigal son.

There’s no pleading, no begging, no frenzy to fix the situation. This means entering into grief and maintaining open hope. It means light check-ins via text messages, saying, “We miss you. Come on by if you want.” But it also means watching all their work unravel, often issues with job, car payments, marriage, and housing. We often want to spare them of this avalanching loss, and strong-arm them into sobriety. All our amazing work comes undone, and that’s only half of the pain.

This point in the journey helps remind us of the core of our OPOP (One Prisoner, One Parish) methodology: relationships of embrace and trust. Maintain that so he knows that he's loved no matter what, and that you’re not just a charitable re-entry program team that he's let down if he's not complying. But he's actually loved. That is a mystery that feeds the soul and is the face of God, and we can only stay in the place of love and openness if we are frenzied, disappointed, and betrayed by our rescue missions being spurned.”

It was profound for me to make the connection with that picture of God and the father of the prodigal son. And I started to imagine that I don’t even know how much I’m loved, even as I’m making choices that are breaking God’s heart. This notion that God is grieving while he unconditionally loves and cares for me, and his willingness to be patient and not chase me, but wait for me to come back to him, even with all the pain of waiting.

This connection between God the Father and the prodigal father brings me back to a newer, deeper, stronger recognition of the depth of God’s love for me. And I think it’s a new recognition of how blind I’ve been to both God’s love and God’s pain when I’m doing things that end up hurting me or others. In so many ways I’m an addict and God is the patient, loving father who’s waiting for me to come back to Him. And this perspective helps me to show love to this friend that I’m working with.