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 presece of evil ever scence.
She has felt the touch of awful naked men , battled depression , and addiction , and attempted suicide.
Her arms remember razor-blades fifty scares that speek of self-inflicted wounds.
Six hours after you meet her she is felling trapped.
Two groups of "friends"offering opposite ideas.
Everyone is asleep , the sun rising , she drinks long form a bottle of liquor , takes a razor-blade from the table , and locks herself in the bathroom.
She cuts herself , using to razor-blade to write
FUCK UP!large across her left for arm.
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
To write love on her arms is a wrok in progress.
This began with a broken girl , one painfull night , addiction , depression , cutting.
This is a glimpse , at the 5 days that followed , a decision to love & begin telling a true story
Its the realization of what life can be when we commit to meeting a need.
A friend of mine told me theres no such possible thing as suicide prevention.
This is an attepemt to prove him wrong , to say love can change a life.
We can hold back the darkness.
RESCUE IS POSSIBLE!Love is the movement!!You were created to love and be loved. You were meant to live life in relationship with other people, to know and be known. You need to know that your story is important and that you're part of a bigger story. You need to know that your life matters.
The vision is the possibility that your best days are ahead.
The vision is the possibility that we're more loved than we'll ever know.
The vision is hope, and hope is real.
You are not alone, and this is not the end of your story.
