Testimonials |
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To Write Love On Her Armshttp://www.twloha.com/videos.php?id=18 (Renee's testimony) Pedro the Lion is loud in the speakers, and the city waits just outside our open windows. She sits and sings, legs crossed in the passenger seat, her pretty voice hiding in the volume. Music is a safe place and Pedro is her favorite. It hits me that she won't see this skyline for several weeks, and we will be without her. I lean forward, knowing this will be written, and I ask what she'd say if her story had an audience. She smiles. "Tell them to look up. Tell them to remember the stars." I would rather write her a song, because songs don't wait to resolve, and because songs mean so much to her. Stories wait for endings, but songs are brave things bold enough to sing when all they know is darkness. These words, like most words, will be written next to midnight, between hurricane and harbor, as both claim to save her. Renee is 19. When I meet her, cocaine is fresh in her system. She hasn't slept in 36 hours and she won't for another 24. It is a familiar blur of coke, pot, pills and alcohol. She has agreed to meet us, to listen and to let us pray. We ask Renee to come with us, to leave this broken night. She says she'll go to rehab tomorrow, but she isn't ready now. It is too great a change. We pray and say goodbye and it is hard to leave without her. She has known such great pain; haunted dreams as a child, the near-constant presence of evil ever since. She has felt the touch of awful naked men, battled depression and addiction, and attempted suicide. Her arms remember razor blades, fifty scars that speak of self-inflicted wounds. Six hours after I meet her, she is feeling trapped, two groups of "friends" offering opposite ideas. Everyone is asleep. The sun is rising. She drinks long from a bottle of liquor, takes a razor blade from the table and locks herself in the bathroom. She cuts herself, using the blade to write "F*** UP" large across her left forearm. The nurse at the treatment center finds the wound several hours later. The center has no detox, names her too great a risk, and does not accept her. For the next five days, she is ours to love. We become her hospital and the possibility of healing fills our living room with life. It is unspoken and there are only a few of us, but we will be her church, the body of Christ coming alive to meet her needs, to write love on her arms. She is full of contrast, more alive and closer to death than anyone I've known, like a Johnny Cash song or some theatre star. She owns attitude and humor beyond her 19 years, and when she tells me her story, she is humble and quiet and kind, shaped by the pain of a hundred lifetimes. I sit privileged but breaking as she shares. Her life has been so dark yet there is some soft hope in her words, and on consecutive evenings, I watch the prettiest girls in the room tell her that she's beautiful. I think it's God reminding her. I've never walked this road, but I decide that if we're going to run a five-day rehab, it is going to be the coolest in the country. It is going to be rock and roll. We start with the basics; lots of fun, too much Starbucks and way too many cigarettes moreThursday night she is in the balcony for Band Marino, Orlando's finest. They are indie-folk-fabulous, a movement disguised as a circus. She loves them and she smiles when I point out the A&R man from Atlantic Europe, in town from London just to catch this show. |
The death of Richard Jacob Fetchik is very real and very serious to me so please pay attention.Jacob was 17, but regretablly did not live to tell a recovery tale. He was my best friend in South Carolina, and had been going through a really tough time, but didn't show his emotion of it. Everybody loved Jacob he was sweet, generous, and couldn't help being sarcastic. Though now i think back he only did it to make people laugh. I wasnt there when it happend, but i was there when he was put into Rehab the first time he was caught popping pills, doing other unknown substances, and alcohol. Not many people knew that he did all of this, but i was one of the few that knew he cut. Here is what i know about what happend to my beloved Jacob. I got a call from my step-sister Stephine saying that Jacob just got out of Rehab, and i told her that i will see if i could come up to see him. A week later i went up for summer vaction to see my mom and Jacob. I was at home chillen while Jacob and Stephine went out with a bunch of other friends to a party. I stayed home to play video games, and then went to sleep hours later. a few days later i got a call after i was already home that Jacob was dead.... They said he OD on pills and wasnt coming back for they were to late.... I never said good bye to him and i regret it everyday... |