Four days until Thanksgiving and my niece is at Johns Hopkins Hospital after overdosing on her mother’s prescription medicine Saturday night. We got the news yesterday morning that she’s been cutting herself, the full length of both her arms covered in slices. I don’t feel very thankful today, and it seems a horror to me for the rest of the family to gather at my home on Thursday to “celebrate” while Hannah sits in the psych ward, broken at the age of fourteen.

I am full of so many emotions that are crying out for expression.

Rage. Where are the grown-ups in this child’s life? I am one of them. Guilt. For over ten years my husband and I have watched this sweet child’s life unfold like a slow motion train wreck. Why didn’t we do more to flag down help, to stand in the tracks of her lonely and dysfunctional life and say STOP THIS TRAIN RIGHT NOW! Incredible sadness. I am so easily satisfied by the joys in my own small world, and so easily ignore the injury and brokenness even in my own extended family. And how dare I? Because I am that child, I was that broken. I had a different train wreck of a childhood, more of a Running with Scissors scenario than a slow motion pile up, but I remember like yesterday the feeling of needing to hold the universe together since the grown-ups in my world were so clearly bent on pulling it all down on top of us.

Hannah, the world has failed you. I wish I could fix it, fix you, but I could not even fix myself and my own world. You might look at me and Uncle Bruce, at our family, and think we have everything. We have so very much, and so much that we’ve tried to share with you and with your mom, with your dad when he was a part of your life. But now I see that none of that, not our love, not our concerns, not our interventions, were ever going to make life right for you.

When I was a little girl I used to pray – to God, to Jesus, to whoever might be listening and responsible for the disaster that was my family. When I became a teenager, I decided that because nothing had changed and things had even gotten worse that God did not exist. In college, I thought that getting away from my family would make things better, and they were for a while. After a couple of years though, I was messing up my own life pretty efficiently and realized that the “crazy” was in me, not just all around me. I had given up on God many years before, but it turns out He/She had been listening all those years. I just didn’t hear back from Him until I was twenty-one. At twenty-one, sitting in a jail cell in Washington D.C., the Creator of the universe reached out to me, and I was just desperate enough to reach back. I can’t explain very well how I knew it was God, but I did.

I wish I could say I held onto God’s hand for dear life and never let go, but I didn’t. I’m just not that smart. I did even more terrible stuff and sank into even deeper despairs, but the incredible, powerful Love that reached out to me that day in jail never shrank back, never left. You will hear people ask why God lets terrible things happen, and I can’t answer for the things that happen to other people, but I know for certain that I would never have reached out and found the hand of God if all the bad things had not happened to me. Maybe life would be just fine if everybody behaved themselves and never hurt themselves or other people, but we seem to be inclined toward selfishness and self destruction as a rule. Hannah, you are only fourteen and the weight of keeping the world safe has already worn you down. I don’t know what lies in store for you today or tomorrow, but I know the power of Love and I know the name of Love. Cry out Hannah. Cry out for Love to reach you, and I will cry with you.

Finally I will be thankful, Hannah. I will be thankful for Love- not the love I have for you or you have for your mother, because our love fails. Our love hurts. I will be thankful for the Love that imagined you and had the power to create you, the Love that found me at twenty-one, the Love that can and does hold the universe together. I will be thankful for your future in that Love, and I will wait in faith and prayer for Love to rescue you.