We’re continuing to occasionally offer excerpts from my work in progress, When Christian Parents Hurt. There’s some good news and bad news on this end: so many of you have read excerpts and told me, “I need this book yesterday!” The good news is, my publisher is now fully on board and putting it on the schedule. This will be my next book. The bad news, for some of you, is that the pub date is the Fall of 2027. Larger publishers take time to get a book out, but the promising part of it in this case is that we’re going to have time to do some extensive pre-research to craft what I hope to be the most thoughtful and pre-reviewed manuscript possible. (About 20 Substack subscribers are commenting on the entire manuscript, as I type this.)
This chapter shares the heart of the book: comfort for parents who feel excruciating pain over what is happening with their adult children. The good news is that God tells His prophets to comfort a guilty, rebellious people. God’s comfort isn’t reserved solely for those who have done everything perfectly and are being treated unfairly. On the contrary, He wants to comfort those who know they’ve messed up, are agonizing over the consequences, and finally turn to Him for solace. This chapter shows the heart of God in that regard. The next post will have a few more practical considerations from the writings of the apostle Paul.
Comfort, Comfort Ye My People
“As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you.”
Isaiah 66:13
Jacqueline reveled in the smell of her newborn baby’s head. It was intoxicating to her, eliciting a love she had never known was possible. She was holding the most precious, the most perfect, the most wonderful baby ever born to a mother.
How could she know that twenty-five years later, this daughter would disappear for eighteen months, only to return with an entirely different kind of smell? She would stand on Janice’s doorstep with a frighteningly skinny torso depleted by drug use, arms marked by injections, eyes that were hollowed out from the hell she had lived, and the smell of a woman who had lived a brutal life.
When Danny held his firstborn son (he had two prior daughters), showers of joy sprang up around him. This was his boy. This was the one who would carry on the family name. They’d play catch, build forts, watch rodeos, and he’d pass on his love of fishing.
While Beau initially showed prowess in the rodeo (even riding bulls), he was lured into an entirely different crowd as soon as he hit high school. Danny’s not sure where or how his son contracted the virus that leads to AIDS—part of him really didn’t want to know—but it was at a time before retroviral drugs were available, meaning an AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence. There was to be no male heir to carry on his last name, and Beau died while languishing in prison. Not only did Danny never hold a grandson, he only got to hug his son twice a month until he died. The prison refused to let Beau die at home.
If you talk to Danny, you might think, “Boy, that must have hurt.”
“Must have hurt?” Danny would respond. “It still hurts.”
Beau died decades ago, but his death still rips Danny’s heart in two every time he passes a rodeo or sees a father and son fishing in the river.
Continue reading this blog on Substack HERE.