Like this:

I don’t even remember this woman’s name.  I can only remember her story.

I know a lot of my blog posts have come from work experiences, but a lot of those experiences make me think deeper.

A few days ago a young lady came to the police station.  She was not there to report a theft.  She was not there to make an accident report.  She wasn’t even there to say she had lost her purse.  She was there because that was the last place she felt she could come.  She had come for advice.  She had come for support.  She needed help.

She proceeded to tell me that she has had an addiction to heroin.  She told me that her addiction has been so overwhelming that she has put her family at risk.  She has been putting her family second to her addiction.  She told me that her addiction started about a year ago.  She was having some physical struggles and was taking pain medication.  A friend of hers gave her some heroin and told her it would take away the pain better than the conventional drugs.  And it did…for a while.  Then the addiction started.

I don’t know how much you know about heroin, but it is a very addictive drug and it is very difficult to break the addiction.  Breaking your addiction causes you to become violently ill.  People have told me that they cannot even begin to describe the feeling of coming down off of heroin.

The woman told me that even as she spoke with me she was high.  She told me that she, her husband, and their very young daughter were living out of their car because they had lost everything to her addiction.  She began selling small items in their house to provide the money needed to buy her heroin.  After she ran out of small things she began selling other things and slacking off on monthly payments to fill her desire for more heroin.  She said she had lost everything, including her house, and the car they were living in was on the verge of being repossessed.

This woman told me that she did not know why her husband was still with her and hadn’t taken their daughter away from that situation.  Her husband was with her and told me that he loved his wife so much and wanted to help her get better.  She told me she had tried to break the addiction and had made it two weeks until she found some heroin in a drawer and the demons inside her came out again.

I asked her why she wanted to quit.  She told me she had to…for her daughter and her husband.  I told her that she had to be an example for her young child.  I explained to her that her daughter has seen this mistake in her mother’s life.  She is going to grow up seeing this mistake materialize every day.  I asked the woman what would be better, for her daughter to remember the mistake or for her to remember how hard her mother fought to combat her illness.  How hard her mother fought for her daughter.  How hard her mother fought to correct the mistake in her life.  I believe that the example she would set for her daughter would be tremendous.  “Yes, dear, your mother messed up and messed up big time.  But I fought because I wanted you to see what I did was wrong and I worked to fix it.”

Now, I know most of us are not and probably will not be in a situation like this.  But how many times have we made mistakes and just swept them under the rug?  What a great example we could be to our kids to let them know that we make mistakes and making mistakes is part of being human.  But the real example comes when we show them how to handle the mistakes we make in our lives.  Then we can introduce them to God’s grace, how we can never mess up so much that we are not covered by His grace.

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