Wednesday, March 6, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Ash Wednesday
This past Saturday, I was sitting in a coffee shop working on my sermon for Sunday. I’m kind of a chatty person, as you’ve probably noticed, and easily distracted, and I ended up striking up a conversation with a woman sitting at a table near me. We’ll call her Danielle. It pretty quickly became clear to both Danielle and me that this was one of those conversations that God himself seemed to have arranged. Danielle had been looking for a new church home and was grateful to unexpectedly find herself in conversation with a pastor. And she shared with me some of the struggles that she has been facing recently.
She shared that her 23-year-old son – we’ll call him Tyson – is addicted to meth and that she and her husband had just taken him to a treatment center earlier that week. She talked about the pain she felt at seeing her son being slowly isolated from everyone else because of his addiction. She said that the other members of their family had already given up on Tyson – even his own father. He was angry at her for taking him to the treatment center, but she was worried that he was going to end up dead if he didn’t go. She talked about how hard it can be to love someone who is addicted, and how challenging it is to walk the line between loving someone and enabling them.
This is the Day 