WHEN IT HITS HOME (or Why You Haven't Heard From Me)

It is possible, that a few of you wondered why I stopped blogging so abruptly, a couple of years ago.  In short, my "societal observations" became so up close and personal that I was not only too traumatized to comment, but doing so would have breached a delicate trust.  Well, it's still tender territory, but a couple of years distance, and witnessing the power of God, without any involvement on my part, whatsoever, kind of obligates me to "testify".

Why did I come "home"?  Why have I felt so much pain and worked so passionately on behalf of our youth?  What have I learned ultimately?  I wrote this back then when "it" happened, and maybe sharing it now, will help build your faith in your own prayers.

God IS.

He's always, "right now".  He didn't drop back and let you get ahead of Him.  He didn't speed up and leave you behind.  He didn't go away with plans to come back "one day".  He's right now.  He's right here.  God IS.

              ...........and don't you forget it!

Love you all!

                                  WHEN IT HITS HOME

Over the 14 years I was in California my stomach would get tight every time I saw my mother’s number pop up on my cell phone.  It was never good news and pretty much, that’s the only reason she’d ever call… to deliver bad news.  It was typically some terrible thing going on with one of the children in my family.  Young cousins, my nephew… and I’d only get cursed out if I tried to explain that the refusal to discipline or put time into them was “setting them up for the prison or the grave”.  My encouragement to pray was met with the bitter, “YOU pray!” or, “It don’t take all that! or “Don’t you go calling her trying to pray for them.  She aint into all that!”  And so, the situation became worse and worse.

Sometimes, I’d get so worked up and frightened, I’d hop on a plane, delaying paying my rent for a last minute flight to Chicago dropping everything to help in an “emergency” situation.  I’ve messed up jobs, blown opportunities, I even rejected a grant to conduct my Youth Program for an organization in Cali after getting one such phone call, determining instead, to pack up and move to ATLANTA, GA!… and another time, to BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA to get my then much younger nephew out of Chicago and out of their reach.  But only getting to Chicago, over and over again and then being told, “You stay out of it.  It’s fine now.  We don’t need you.  You think you’re so…” blah blah blah… you get the picture.

About six years ago, I even got a 13 page letter from my sister begging me to “come home” because I was badly needed and her son was out of control.  I packed up my place, gave notice, then when I asked her if she had done the three simple things I needed her to do to get the ball rolling on getting him into the awesome high school I went to, she went flip mode.  “We don’t need you.  He needs his mother!”  When I reminded her of the 13 page letter she wrote, she retorted, “I was emotional then.  And, emotions change.  Get over it!”

He eventually didn’t go to ANY high school and dropped out of school in the 8^th grade.  He’ll be 19 next month with only an 8^th grade diploma.

Now, I hear you.  That should have been the end of it.  I SHOULD have finally learned my lesson.  But I love her son.  And, because he was once reading at the 9^th grade level in THE SECOND GRADE, and was only given an eighth grade diploma because his national test scores were high enough to go straight to college, it was breaking my heart to see him lose all that potential and be even more solidly placed on track to become a statistic.  I just couldn’t give up.

So, I redirected my efforts to bringing him to Cali instead.

Two years later I did, but he’d been groomed by a lifetime of watching his mom and grandmom call me when they need me, then kick me in the teeth, that he cursed me AND my prayer partner out the first day he arrived.  Why not?  He’d watched THEM do it all his life?

I sent him back to Chi and things just got worse and worse.

So, six months ago, I came back home --to try “one more time” to pull him out of the fire, and also offer my Youth Program (born of this heart to give our kids emotional tools to create a better life), to the other at risk kids out here.  In my first blog, you read how that initially turned out.  Got cursed out royally and he got on a bus to Iowa.

But, needless to say, that didn’t last a good month.  He was determined to get back to Chicago and the life he knows.

But by then, I had backed off.  However, I got another call from my mom Saturday night.  Just two days ago.

He was in surgery.  Stabbed in the chest.

I thought about it.  Texted some close friends to pray and got down on my knees to join them.

Didn’t want to talk to anybody because if I started talking, I would cry and I just didn’t want to cry.  I wanted to think.  I wanted to hear from God.  I prayed in the Spirit.

Though it was raining and my windshield wipers had stopped working, I decided to drive the long distance to the hospital he was in after the surgery was over.  He was in ICU.

I walked in and he looked like he did in the emergency room at 4.  All hooked up to tubes and machines.  He’d spent a lot of time in emergency rooms as a child from neglect.  I took him then back with me to California but the lack of support (from my family, and the fact that I had just arrived in California and didn’t know anybody), pressed my hand to send him back once I got him well.  His life fell down the rabbit hole after that.  And that’s why I always felt such a huge pall of responsibility for him.  I KNEW his life would turn out tragically unless I kept him.

But, it was too hard, my faith wasn’t strong, and I sent him back.

That was when he was 5.  And now on this day, fourteen years later, he lays there unconscious at 19.  The doctor said his lung and the tip of his heart was punctured but he was young and would pull through.

I looked down on his unconscious, skinny little body.  I’d recently learned that over the years, he’d already been shot in the chest AND in the head.  But he kept on going and going like a ghetto Energizer Bunny, which would be funny except there he was with this tube down his throat now.

I asked for privacy so I could pray over him and I did.  I prayed and prayed.  I laid delicate hands on him, spoke life and God’s Calling for his life into his ear.  I finally wept and I sat at his bedside for a couple of hours until I decided to just go home.  But I still couldn’t sleep.  At home, I surfed the web til 5am, realizing now that’s what I do when I’m agitated and want to avoid my feelings.

The next day, yesterday, I went to church, then came home, changed, ate, walked the dogs and went BACK way up there, again in the rain, to see him.

I was stunned to see him sitting straight up in his bed, arguing with the security guard about his property which they were returning to him.  “I’m not signing this!” he was declaring.  “This says I can only regain my belongings between 8am and 5pm Monday through Saturday.  This isn’t Saturday!”

“But you already have your things,” the officer was trying to explain, referring to his money, cellphone and keys on his lap.  “No!  This says…”

The officer was exasperated.  I was almost speechless.  This child had his chest ripped open less than 24 hours earlier and he was sitting up here, inventorying his property and arguing with the guard like NOTHING had ever happened!  He turned to me.  “Ma!  Read this!  See if this is right!”  He thrust the bag toward me. Gently, I urged, “You’ve already got your things.  That is just to acknowledge that you’ve received them.  You can sign it.”  He read it again and signed it.  The frustrated guard walked out.

My nephew commenced to grilling me.  “Did you leave that stuff for me?”

You mean the scripture? (I’d written  out some scriptures and left them under his pillow the night before).  “Yeah”.

“How did you know I was here?” he demanded.  Apparently, I didn’t answer fast enough.  “How did you know I was here?!” he demanded more loudly.  I told him my mother told me.  He then commented about the person who stabbed him and commenced to recounting his money and checking his text messages like I wasn’t even there.  “Well,” I said, “apparently, I drove all the way up here, in the rain, without windshield wipers for nothing.”

He started yelling.  He stays amped up, but to be amped up RIGHT AFTER SURGERY ON YOUR LUNG AND HEART DEFIED MY IMAGINATION.  “You always takin stuff personal!  I just got stabbed in the chest! And I…”

 “That’s why I drove up here today AND yesterday,” I tried to cut him off but that’s pointless.

“I love you!” he suddenly barked from a totally stone face.  His intense dark eyes, staring directly into mine.

I put my purse back down and walked over to him, leaning over to kiss his face-- the face that looks so much like mine-- over and over.  “I love you too.”  He kissed me back.  I fought back the tears.

That tender moment was short lived.  “My phone isn’t on!  Let me use your phone!”  Everything he says comes out as a command.  He called my mother and basically ordered her to turn his phone back on.  “I ain’t gonna let nobody take my phone away.”   It was a quarter to four and he told her they close at 5.  In other words, get up and get over there NOW.  She asked about her other car (She has two).  He assured her that it was safe with one of his friends and wouldn’t entertain a conversation about giving her back her keys.  Over the years, I’d warned my mother that you have to train a Rottweiler when it is a PUPPY.  You can’t wait until it’s a 180 pound mass of muscle and teeth and THEN try to train it.  As usual, I got cursed out back then.  Now, she was running out the door to follow THIS Rottweiler’s orders.

After that call, he said, “let me make one more call.”  I took my phone back.  “Who you gonna call?” I asked.  He was gonna call the person who stabbed him (of course, most folk know the people they get shot or stabbed by).  “Nope.  I said.  Not with my phone.  I’m not getting in it.”

He had rung the nurse.  She walked in.  “Can I get something to drink?  I’m feeling really dehydrated.  My mouth is all dry…”  I noticed there was a cup of ice water beside him.  He didn’t want water.  He wanted what HE wanted.  The nurse tried to explain that though his MOUTH might want something to drink, his BODY might not handle it because he has fresh internal injuries.  She went to the lengthy trouble of EXPLAINING to him that he could aspirate, etc. and in his condition, throwing up would be extremely unpleasant and even dangerous.

He ignored her.  She wasn’t saying what he wanted to hear.  She asked if he’d been using his swabs to swab his mouth and walked over reaching for one of the swabs.  “I don’t want that!” he snapped.  She threw her hands up as if to say, “forget it then”.  I commiserated.  “I hear you,” I said.

“You know, you might want to be kinder and more courteous to the people who saved your life,” I said.  “I ain’t bout to die!” he snapped and kept scrolling his text.  And, true enough, this boy wasn’t even REMOTELY acting like he had just had major surgery.  He had all the strength, energy and focus and attitude he had BEFORE the whole incident!

Now, God has brought me a long way from my OWN temper so I resisted the urge to just walk out.  I sat there forcing myself to keep him company.  Then, he piped up, “You ain’t got to be all fake about your phone!”   Whaat?? I asked.  “Sayin you don’t want to be in it.  You just fake!”  “Look,” I forced myself, like the nurse, to give him an undeserved explanation.  “I am not trying to get in the middle of you guys’ mess.”

Astonishingly, he sat there in a hospital bed, hooked up to all manner of machines and tubes, chest all patched up, and asked, “What mess?”

Crazy makes crazy.  And for a second, I wondered if I was the one out of sync.  Then, I found some words.  “THIS mess,” I said, gesturing to the accoutrements around him. “You are sitting in a hospital bed after being stabbed in the lung and in the heart.  THIS mess.”  Was I really explaining this?

Well, that made no sense to him.  I was the one that was wrong.  He started balling me out.  Loudly.  The entire nurses station looked up with their mouths hanging open.  I walked out.  He kept yelling after me.  “You didn’t need to come here!  And you don’t need to come back!”

Maybe, what he was saying, in actuality, in his own, hurt, twisted way, was, “Please don’t leave.  I’m a f’d up mess that was raised this way and you should have never left me with them!” but at almost 19, he’s gonna need to learn to say just that.

I love that boy/man/mess.  Always will.  And I’ll always keep him in my prayers.  I still believe God has a great Calling on his life which is why God keeps preserving him over and over, and healing him, literally, supernaturally.  And, despite not being in school for the last five years, he STILL recently scored college level on one of the standardized tests.  But, I’m letting him go his path the way he needs to go it… no matter how rough.  He can handle it.  Like I said in my earlier blog, I’ve put in enough years trying to fight through the flames for not only HIS life, but his mother’s before him.  Now I see that God wouldn’t let me get in because the process He has for THEM isn’t the process He had for ME.  God knows I tried to bust down the door.  My love for them is extraordinary.  But God kept it locked for a reason.

But this one thing is clear: “the fervent, effective prayers of the righteous availeth much” (James 5:16).  Even when you need to detach from your family with love, place them in your FAITH IN GOD.  Don’t be like MY relatives.  “Humble yourselves and PRAY!”  (2 Chron. 7:14)  AND don’t let the enemy use them to piss you off so much that you stop praying for them!  Samuel told the Hebrews after they kept going against what God told them, that “far be it from me that I should sin against The Lord and cease praying for you.” (1 Samuel 12:23).

The enemy knows my gifting is intercession and people have sought my prayers from all over.  My prayers have sent supernatural healing to friends across the country!  Satan would like nothing better than to stick his hand up my nephew’s butt and work his mouth like a puppet to piss me off so much that I just say, “forget it!”  And, the enemy would like to do that in YOUR family too!  But don’t let him.  Jesus is LORD and God is sovereign.  “The blessing is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart,” (Deut. 30:14)

DON’T LET SATAN SNATCH THE BLESSINGS OF GOD OUT OF YOUR MOUTH or worse, OUT OF YOUR HEART!  The POWER of life and death lives in your tongue!  (Proverbs 3:1-12)  Not just over YOUR life, but those around you!  I am CONVINCED that my nephew is still here because I have had a battalion of Prayer warriors praying for him consistently over the years.  And, I am equally aware that there are strong demonic forces that have taken ground in his life because of his family’s rebellion.  I know it’s not even him talking which is why I don’t even feel particularly upset when he goes off.  He’s being used.  And, I know that.  But, GREATER is God in me than ANYTHING in this world.  NOTHING shall befall that child that is beyond the reach and will of my Heavenly Father!  NOTHING!

And, if you walk in holiness and commit your prayers to The Lord (because you can’t activate change in the world while still holding onto your sin), you can CONFIDENTLY bring your petitions before the throne of God.

 Where my nephew is concerned I didn’t always have COMPLETE confidence.  My HEART wouldn’t let me take my HANDS off the situation.  My HEART wouldn’t let me completely believe that my prayers, which sent healing to friends across the country, would be sufficient to uphold and deliver the person I love most in the world:  This knuckleheaded boy. I always felt I had to don my cape and literally fly across the country to help God out.

But, one of the scriptures I left under his pillow was this:

1 John 5:14-15

New International Version (NIV)

¹⁴ This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. ¹⁵ And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.

How about that?!  When I was in Cali I didn’t know that God had already delivered him from gunshot wounds, and all manner of mayhem.  Wisely, they never told me.  But now, SEEING how God brought this child through this critical surgery with basically full strength, literally overnight… like Thomas, I finally believe.

Don’t be a doubting Thomas.  How about all of us FINALLY having confidence in God and not in our own strength?  Finally BELIEVING in the Power of our Prayers?!  The Bible tells us “when we pray, we are to BELIEVE and not doubt because those who doubt are like waves of sea, blown and tossed by the wind. ” (James 1:6)  Do we really want our faith like a little dingy in the ocean or do we want it unmovable, on a rock?

And unlike what my nephew told me, I DON’T take everything personally.  If I did, I would have stopped praying for all of them years ago, and I SURE as heck wouldn’t have come back here.  But when the Hebrews went against Samuel, God assured him, “They’re not rejecting you, they’re rejecting Me…”  Nothing’s changed.

You stay on your watch!  Keep praying for those crazy people!  And don’t attach to outcomes… Because your prayers might not insure you get the results YOU want, but have CONFIDENCE that “if (you) ask anything ACCORDING TO HIS WILL… (you)  have what (you) ask of Him.”

Jesus IS Lord!

Love you ALL!

What do you think?

*Oct. 12, 2013 P.S….  Not long after that, God used yet another tragedy to begin to line my nephew up in his will.  Ofcourse, I warned them all, but, as usual, my mother advised him to ignore anything I have to say.  Naturally, when the other shoe dropped, rather than looking at themselves, my mother directed them to all blame me.  My observation is this is the pervasive mindset and dynamic in Chicago which keeps it firmly established as the “dysfunctional family capital of America”, as one magazine put it, and the “homicide capital”, nine years running.

But this was a true blessing for me!  Not only did it mean they were not going to call me with their drama anymore (yippee!), but this was God’s way of FINALLY wrenching my hands off their lives so that He could finally get a “clear shot”.  They are still dealing with the consequences of their actions, but things are getting better, I hear.  My nephew is growing in the midst of it and the situation has given him a catalyst to exercise his true nature—a brave heart with a TON of love and determination.

And, as for me, it showed me in yet another tangible demonstration, that it’s ok to “Let go… and Let God.”

Jesus IS Lord.

Not me.

Love you all!