Dear friend,
LORD, the God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before you. Let my prayer enter into your presence. Turn your ear to my cry. For my soul is full of troubles. My life draws near to Sheol. I am counted among those who go down into the pit. I am like a man who has no help, set apart among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom you remember no more. They are cut off from your hand. You have laid me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths. Your wrath lies heavily on me. You have afflicted me with all your waves. Selah. You have taken my friends from me. You have made me an abomination to them. I am confined, and I can’t escape. My eyes are dim from grief. I have called on you daily, LORD. I have spread out my hands to you. Do you show wonders to the dead? Do the departed spirits rise up and praise you? Selah. Is your loving kindness declared in the grave? Or your faithfulness in Destruction? Are your wonders made known in the dark? Or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? But to you, LORD, I have cried. In the morning, my prayer comes before you. LORD, why do you reject my soul? Why do you hide your face from me? I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up. While I suffer your terrors, I am distracted. Your fierce wrath has gone over me. Your terrors have cut me off. They came around me like water all day long. They completely engulfed me. You have put lover and friend far from me, and my friends into darkness.
I am not going to pretend I know what your house feels like right now. I don't. But I know what it was to sit at a table across from someone I loved and watch them lie to my face about something I already knew, and to say nothing because saying something felt like it would break the whole night open.
What you are living with has a name, even if nobody in your family says it out loud. A family member's addiction. That is the plain shape of it. Not a phase. Not a rough patch. I am not asking you to fix that today or feel a certain way about it. I just did not want to write around it like it is not there.
There is a line in Psalm 88 that stays dark the whole way through. No tidy ending. It surprised me the first time I read it, that something like that made it into scripture at all, unresolved. Some nights do not resolve. You are allowed to be in one of them.
What does today actually look like in that house right now?
A prayer
God, You know exactly what is happening in her family and what it is costing her to carry it quietly. Be near the parts of this she cannot say out loud yet. Amen.