The poor, oppressed, prisoners…not throw-away people….

I drove toward the trailer house slowly. Although I was in town, the trailer was isolated, surrounded by a grove of trees. A man rose up out of a chair in front of the trailer and walked toward the car. This was my first home visit as a rookie professional social worker. I rolled down my car window and the man placed his arms on the bottom of the window frame, folding them, and kneeling down. We were eye-to-eye as I introduced myself. He stated his name and the fact that he was just released from prison. I said, “Oh, maybe that is why your son is acting out. How long were you in prison?” The reply, “Well, come to think of it, all my life until now,” astounded me. When I responded by saying, “He missed you. You know that don’t you?” tears welled in the father’s eyes and thoughts sprang to my mind that this man had good in him and he loved his son.

This is how the Lord actively began planting a love for the poor, oppressed and prisoners in my heart in 1996, my first year of employment for the Roswell Independent School District. As the newest member in the Social Work Department, I was not able to select the schools in which I would work. You can probably imagine what happened as soon as I was hired…I got the two schools in what some would term “the roughest area of town.” After the first year, however, you would have had to wrestle me to the ground to take those schools from me. Although I frequently worked with children who were misbehaving in school because the parent/parents were drug dependent and engaged in a life of crime, I held fast to the God-based thoughts that every person is a creation of God, is loved by God and has potential. It was my calling to communicate to the entire family this potential, this hope for a different future.

I continued visiting the homes of the children who were assigned to me and with each visit to the home of the child I was working with, it usually became readily apparent why the child was “acting out” in school. A common factor was parental/caregiver drug and alcohol abuse or dependence. Where does that lead – to death, domestic violence, crime, poverty, unemployment, motor vehicle crashes and other injuries, mental illness, risky sexual behavior, chronic liver disease and a variety of other medical problems – the struggles evident in many of the homes I was visiting.

A few years later I started volunteering at the Rivers of Life Homeless Shelter here in Roswell. For 3½ years, I was the Monday morning devotion leader for the men at the shelter. A few months later, I began teaching at the Chaves County Detention Center. The question “Why?” kept surfacing in my mind as I thought about the guys at the homeless shelter and the people behind bars at the detention center. So I did an informal poll of the ladies and the men in both the homeless shelter and in jail, asking the cause of their homelessness or incarceration. The answer to the “why” readily surfaced. Whether through direct or indirect means, addiction to drugs and/or alcohol was the core factor in the overwhelming majority. 

I shifted gears as a result of the outcome of the poll. I started leading classes in the area of addiction recovery at both the homeless shelter and at the detention center. Although this brought a measure of healing, people from both locations began to make the same statements to me almost weekly. Basically their words communicated these thoughts, “I am in recovery now, and I want to stay there. But tell me Lorual, what about when I get outside these walls. Where will I go? The only people I know out there are addicts. I will just be going back into the very environment, the household, where my addiction started. I want to stay clean and not use drugs, but I do not know how. Where will I go to stay clean?” 

The “Where will I go?” question, to which I had no answer, pursued me and would not leave me alone. I decided I needed to be able to give an answer to that question and so begin Reflections & Recovery Ministry Center. Reflections & Recovery, a safe and healthy place for those who have substance abuse problems to break the bondage of their addictions. 

Reflections & Recovery is an opportunity for you to express your heart for the people in Isaiah 61:1-3. The poor, oppressed, prisoners…God does not consider them throw-away people and neither should we. This is your chance to help. Please join us in “planting” Reflections & Recovery, as we seek to help people recover from addictions so they can be, “a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor.”

Grace and peace, 
Lorual