I spend the afternoon and most of the night trying to help someone in my family. He’s an alcoholic. A drunk. Once again, he has to leave the place where he was living and find another place to live. Once again, he’s stumbling drunk when I get there.

After a while, you learn to judge how drunk they are. Whether it’s a sleep-it-off drunk or a detox-center drunk. He’s in a dingy motel room. I know he’s got liquor hidden, but I can’t find it. I go to where he’s been living, because he can’t go back there, and I load his things. I take them to my place, where I’ll keep them like I’ve done before. I bring him along so he won’t drink. But he can’t live with us. Not with the children here.

I take him to a friend’s house, a friend who’s helped dozens of people like this. He can’t fix him. I don’t know why I came except that I’m at my wits’ end and I thought of my friend and I thought if nothing else maybe someone else can pray for him, too. My friend gets to know him a bit and then reads him the riot act in the loving way he has, and then hugs him.

I take him back to town. We stop to eat. He’s sobering up enough to talk. He can’t eat, so he just drinks coffee and watches me eat. He’s been going down his list of grievances, the people who have let him down, betrayed him, hurt him. I tell him he’s like a broken record, that he’s always got someone to blame, that he has to take responsibility for his life. I tell him there’s no entering heaven with unforgiveness in his heart.

“Aren’t you tired of being in hell?” I ask him.

“I’ve been worse,” he says.

“You’re in hell. Any time he wants, that demon rides you back down into hell, and you let him.”

He sips his coffee. He tells me how he prays, how he’s fighting the battle.

I tell him he’s in the battle alright, but he’s getting his tail kicked. I tell him it’s time he armed himself. He laughs.

“You want to know what saved me?” I ask him. I say it like it’s a long while back. Like it’s not this year and this month and today and right now, while I’m eating soup and smelling his stink and hating that I’m spending yet another night away from my children.

He nods.

I write it on the back of the dinner check: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

I tell him to pray it morning and night. When he wakes, when he’s brushing his teeth, whenever he’s tempted. He’s skeptical. He tells me he prays. That he’s heard you aren’t supposed to repeat the same prayer over and over. I beg him to pray it over and over anyway. To pray without ceasing. To pray it when he can’t think of his own words, when he’s tempted, when he’s angry.

When he wants the next drink.

He says he’ll do it. He folds the scrap of paper and puts it in his pocket.

We find a motel for him. We talk over his plans for tomorrow, for staying sober, for finding another job, for handling his legal problems. I tell him a dozen times not to drink. I bless him. I remind him to pray. I pray.

I drive home with hands clenching the wheel, one side of my back aflame from lifting something the wrong way. I pray as I drive, that he’ll just go to sleep. “Sleep it off. Pray. Please pray.”

I don’t know if he’ll make it. A friend—a recovering drunk—once told me that sometimes you only get saved by dying. It’s not supposed to be that way. You’re supposed to help them and then they come to Jesus and then they’re better.

It’s not supposed to be this way.

Maybe this time he’ll change for good. Every time he’s like this, he tells me to promise I won’t help him again, that I’ll just let him die. How do we come to this? Will this be my child one day? These are the questions that come again and again to mind as I drive home, as I pray over my sleeping children. It’s not supposed to be this way.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us your children, sinners all.