Chemical Chains

This Monday in Tent City – St Louis’s long-term gathering of homeless people – I had the sad news that a friend named Blake was kicked out for good and not welcome back. He had fallen asleep in his tent smoking… something, and it caught the tent on fire. He escaped, but absolutely everything he had was lost. Shoes, clothes, phones, cans of food, backpacks, prescriptions to several drugs, ID, everything. In a drunken rage he blamed other people, burned their chairs, beat up a guy and a lady, and then got beat and kicked out for good.
 
When I’d talked to Blake two weeks previously I could hardly believe he’d do it (but the list of stuff in his body helps me believe) because he was of a very sound mind in conversation. Other people were saying he was a violent guy though. But he’s looking for work and willing to, wanting a new life, searching for meaning and saying he ‘needs to pray more.’ Further, the Lord spoke to me saying why he was being so violent lately, and that it was because of the approaching anniversary of the death of both his wife and daughter in car crashes. When I told him this he almost started to cry and admitted he needed help through it. But at that point he wasn’t up to going and getting the help.
 
So my prayer in the two weeks between St. Louis trips was that Blake be brought to the place of surrender. To lose everything he owned, his ‘friends’ and his place in the city did that well. And the lack of prescription drugs would give him some clearer thought, though he insists it’d make him hallucinate.
 
            “Life comes at you in waves you know, and I’ve hit some pretty big waves. I’m not sure that I can get through this wave right now. It’s gonna be a long haul to get though this one.”
 
            “Blake, you know this is about as low as God can possible get you now right? You have nothing. It’s His work. You’ve got to stop and get help.”
 
Blake has a tiny hobby; collecting metal trinkets. Old fashioned keys, rings, necklace pendants, figures, tiny metal art pieces. After the fire, other people high graded the ashes for anything unburned. A pair of shoes, some rubber fishing worms… that’s all that wasn’t burnt. I wanted Blake to have something left to remember from his old life. So I went down and sorted through the soggy ashes of his old life looking for his collection of metal trinkets to give him. At last I found a key. Just one; the antique winding key to a grandfather clock, tied to the remains of his melted cell phone.
 
I gave it to him at a meal at the Bridge, and his face showed both confusion and joy.
 
“Look at that! You got a key? Do you know where that came from? An antique clock!”
 
To get the key made his morning, but more important – to a skeptical person it sealed that I cared. Later on outside he told me that he was going to look into getting into a Peter and Paul 90 day program, to get clean and make a go of it again. I don’t know what made him change his mind, or even how honest he was about it. He still wants to be drunk, but it’ll be different without 6 drugs mixing with the alcohol to make him violent. But living alone on the top floor of a 6 story building, the only person he has to be violent to is God. And he wasn’t too interested in yelling at God for problems he knows he made.
 
I think Jesus will get to Blake up there, and reassure him that His love is enough for a lonely man, His is grace enough for the violent parts he needs to give over, and His power is enough to set him free of the chemical chains and the desire for them.