XL Grace

This article is by Cole Huffman:

My oldest son (26) is caught in drug and alcohol addiction, spanning seven years now. Perhaps 2023 could be our family’s jubilee, that biblical relief season Israel’s land received every seven years. In the deep furrows of my heart, seedbed hopes for my children were planted before their births. It feels as though the locusts swarmed this son’s row.

On the inside of his left arm, he has a tattoo in bold black ink: “XL.” Not for “extra-large,” but the Roman numeral 40. Specifically, Psalm 40. A once-aspiring musician, he liked how U2 put Psalm 40 to music on their War album, and that his dad, a Bono admirer, made that his go-to prayer for him.

A friend once gave me an apt childrearing analogy. He said parenting is like driving a vehicle. During the growing up years the parents are in the front seats. We move to the backseats when the child is old enough to navigate life on his own. But if he goes off-road at full speed, bouncing his parents around violently, something will have to change.

I didn’t leap from my son’s life as he sped toward cliff after cliff, wheels on fire. We have a good relationship, all things considered, but it’s hard to relate to someone with an appetite for his own destruction. He’s driven himself to rehabs and sober living houses and AA meetings. But he always peels out of the lots not long after arriving. “Addiction,” as Leslie Jamison puts it in The Recovering, “is always a story that has already been told, because it inevitably repeats itself, because it grinds down — ultimately, for everyone — to the same demolished and reductive and recycled core: Desire. Use. Repeat.”

There is a lot I don’t understand about addiction, it’s cycles and sagas. Whether it’s more disease, disorder, volition, or victimization, I’ll leave it for experts to debate. I think about it in Psalm 40 terms:

“I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure” (vv. 1–2).

A pit was something an enemy threw you into. A bog is something you fall into yourself. That’s addiction. Pit and bog, both. Addiction has imprisoned my son. Addiction could drown him.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, in his memoir Losing My Cool, credits his father’s watchfulness with saving him from a misguided life: “I grew up knowing that no matter where I was or what I was doing, Pappy never stopped listening for the sound of me falling.” His imagery is based upon a time his father dashed out of his study to catch toddler Thomas tumbling down the stairs, just before he hit the hardwood floor at bottom.

When you love someone in addiction, you often wonder where “bottom” is for them. How far do they have to fall before they’ve had enough? I still listen for the sound of my son falling. But God must be the one to catch him now, and for that I wait. The XL psalm holds out hope of freedom and regained footing for him, even as it expresses the anguish of waiting for me: “Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me! O Lord, make haste to help me!” (Ps. 40:13)

Someone once described patience to me as bearing the burden of hoping. I’d always heard patience in terms of virtue, so I took Psalm 40’s “wait patiently for the Lord” as a call to prove my fortitude, to show I can wait on God come Hell or high water. Burden-bearing might require resiliency, but not virtual signaling.

Loving someone in addiction feels like fighting a long defeat, as Tolkien put it. I don’t doubt what God can do. Getting jaded or cynical in the waiting just makes things heavier. My hope in my Redeemer is sure, just not always strong. I’ve met myself in the man who took his convulsing son to Jesus, asking if he could please heal him: “I believe; help my unbelief!”

If addiction has made my son self-destructive, it’s made me self-doubtful. At first, it was the self-doubt of wondering what I did or didn’t do that sent him to the demons. I had to get out from under that burden of false blame. Though it sounds odd to put it like this, I occupy a more positive self-doubt now. Freed from giving easy answers, from doling out fixes or formulas to those living in the same kind of protracted distress.

They once asked the nineteenth century evangelist D.L. Moody if he was filled with the Spirit. “Yes,” he said, “but I leak.” My hope, in relation to my son, leaks. At times I need others to hope for me, sort of like when marathoners hit the wall and go jelly legged and need holding up. I have more burden-bearers in my life, being on this course — even fiction characters like the minister John Ames of Gilead, whose words I lean on a lot:

The story of Hagar and Ishmael came to mind while I was praying this morning, and I found a great assurance in it. The story says that it is not only the father of a child who cares for its life, who protects its mother, and it says that even if the mother can’t find a way to provide for it, or herself, provision will be made. At that level it is a story full of comfort. That is how life goes — we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord’s. I need to bear this in mind.

Keeping hope doesn’t mean expecting our situation will have a happy ending. It means bearing in mind that God is resolved in his Son to “take thought for me,” as Psalm 40 puts it in conclusion. That has to be enough. As Anne Lamott writes of it in her book Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers: “If I were to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.”

So ruined. So loved. In charge of so little. That’s not just my son, a wilderness unto himself. It’s me, too.

How long to sing this song?
How long to sing this song?
How long, how long, how long
How long to sing this song?