The Roberts in Your Life
I was delivering Bibles last week in an ol’ familiar area of town. Familiar because about 20 years ago, I was an aspiring writer whose passion was poetry, and I would frequent some of the coffee shops and clubs in downtown Dallas with a friend of mine, writing while he sketched, attending poetry slams together. As I turned down this particular street for probably the first time in a decade, my heart sunk as I saw the restaurant this friend worked at so many years ago. You see, Robert died of an enlarged heart in 2007 at the age of 40.
He was an alcoholic.
Robert was a good friend, from the moment I met him in one of those smoky coffee shops to the December day I got a phone call from his sister telling me he had passed away. She had found a picture of me and my family on his fridge, looked up our number, and dialed. I think I always feared that phone call would come.
Drinking was the one stable constant in his life–his trusted friend that he turned to more than anything or anyone else. As much as I tried to “rescue” him, I was in school at the time and couldn’t be with him 24 hours a day. He did not have family nearby, and his drinking alienated him from others.
I still vividly remember the night I was called to come downtown to the hospital. A nurse there told me that Robert, in a drunken stupor, had been picked up by the police for stumbling through the streets and falling down, injuring himself. He had requested they call me. After I picked him up and the alcohol was wearing off, he began confessing, through tears and regret, the secret years of his life that he wasted by drinking, the relationships that were ruined, and the unforgiveable (to him) things he had done during his dances with the drink. It was as if I were a priest and Robert were a parishioner. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a man that broken, that raw, and that honest. Maybe that was a cry for help.
Yet his drinking continued. As a sober man, Robert was sincere, decent, intelligent, and caring. He would give a person the shirt off of his back at the first hint that they needed it. He had a heart of compassion and love. It was painful to watch his nightly drunkenness turn to depression and despair, and in hindsight I myself feel pain when I think of the times I innocently had a drink with him. I know now that I missed many an opportunity, and no doubt simply enabled his behavior.
Although I spoke to him about my faith–he knew that I was saved by grace–and although I let him know that he could be too, Robert was not a believer. After he moved out of state, I sent him a Bible and a clearly outlined salvation message, but in all the years I knew him, I stopped short of knocking down his door, intervening in his life (for his alcoholism) or following up with him as to why he was rejecting Jesus. To this day, I vacillate between the deep regret that haunts me over what I should have done for Robert, and the small hope that lives inside that maybe, in one of his darker moments, he remembered what I shared with him and made a decision for Christ that saved his eternal life.
Nevertheless, there will never be another person that can take the place of Robert in my life, and I hope and pray that there is never another opportunity wasted for me to be bolder for Christ.
And so I deliver Bibles. . .lots of them.
We at UBO deliver them to places that help the alcoholic, the wanderer, the homeless, the lost, the despairing, the addict. . .the Roberts that I have known in my life and the Roberts that you have known in yours. For underneath the stench of alcohol or body odor, there is a man or woman created in God’s image that was made for more than this, and is crying inside to get out and embrace a life of purpose. And at this moment, they may not even know the Creator God who wrote that exact plan for them long before they were even born.
But at UBO we will do everything we can to get them the Story of it!
“Go then and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19).