STRANDED IN SKIN AND BONES

Had a new guy in my group tonight. He doesn't have front teeth.

Maybe James Frey knocked them out. Who knows how he lost them? They're just gone. Hit the floor in some honky-tonk after some old guy's fist hit his mouth. Who knows? They're just gone.

But he smiled and he smiled. And I loved his smile. He raised his hand. He asked probing questions. He raised his hand. He raised it again. He asked probing questions. You could tell he wanted to overcome his addiction.

Said he'd been clean for over 2 years, then the fall. Now he sits in my group as someone's son, someone's father, someone's husband--a child of God.

How did we get to this broken point? How did a lush paradise in Eden become this?

Tonight Danny sat in one of the pews my ex-church donated when the church got different ones. These donated pews once sat in a flooded church back in the seventies. A watermark is on the legs. You can see it. You can bend down and spot it. You can pick it out.

But, like I said, Danny sat in one of them last night in much soul pain. Because pain is no gunslinger. It never aims to kill. It just rises and sets like the sun and moon. It picks up where it left off the day before. Just doing its impersonal duty. This is what we hate about life. It's so painful sometimes.

You would never really pick Danny out of a church line-up. He doesn't look like an addict. He looks like the guy sitting beside you in church last Sunday. He doesn't favor an addict. Who ever does? You would probably never know Danny's pain if he attended church with you.

We don't get too real in church. Hardly anyone goes to church to bare their soul. No one tells of their brokenness. We just go to church wishing we were just a little bit better than we actually are. We wish we had more money, a better looking face, a better voice, then we would sing. And the shocking thing is that God knows pain. We caused it. "The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain" (Genesis 6:6).

We never think of God's pain. The pain He feels when we go astray and get our teeth knocked out. And I'm not trying to be cute here either. Because most of us will never know the battle Danny wages with addiction, a battle that has wrecked his life and scarred his children.



If the gospel means anything, then let it mean everything to Danny. Please, Lord, make him a whole man, a different father, a dependable husband, a faithful man. And make us people who never cause God any pain.

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