The Vodka Wake-Up Call
Now no chastening for
the present
seemeth to be joyous,
but grievous:
nevertheless afterward
it yieldeth
the peaceable fruit of
righteousness
unto them which are
exercised thereby.
— Hebrews 12:11
She was 15, full of fun, and she wanted to be the life of
the party. So when she and her girlfriends were invited over one Saturday night
by some college boys, she was excited.
Yes, she realized that the parents wouldn't be home. Yes,
she knew there would probably be drinking there. But that was OK. In fact, it
was better than OK.
Even though she was a normal, exuberant, teenaged girl,
alcohol had been controlling her weekends for months. She had fallen hard into
a pattern of substance abuse. She was lying regularly to her parents, even
though she was being reared in a strong Christian home, and attended church on
Sundays, a Christian youth group at school on Tuesdays, and another
church-based youth group on Wednesdays.
Her parents were stricter than most any others, Emily says,
and kept her "isolated" from many of the tough challenges of being a teenager
in today's world. They wouldn't even talk about the big issues, such as sex and
drinking, that teenagers are deluged with in their peer culture. Her parents
might have gone too far the other way to try to protect her.
"I have always had that mindset that, when I'm told I can't
do something, I want to do it 10 times worse," she said.
So that night, she wasn't planning on getting drunk, "but
everybody was . . . you know . . . 'C'mon! C'mon!'"
She knew a big part of her behavior was "that rebellion
thing." Her friends had been reassuring her that it was no big deal, getting
wasted every weekend. They claimed that "everybody" was doing it, and if she
wanted to be with them and be in the "cool" crowd. . . .
She knows now that she was just going through the motions in
her faith life, acting as if she were participating, to please her strict
parents. The surface image she presented to the world was still that of a good
Christian girl.
But in reality, her spiritual condition had deteriorated
rapidly. "It just kind of (she snapped her fingers) switched." During sermons,
she would text-message or "zone out." She knew she was being hypocritical and
damaging the reputation of Christian kids at her school. But she didn't know
how to stop herself.
So that night, she found herself walking around at this
party with a bottle of vodka, chugging it. "I thought I was real cool," she
recalls, ruefully.
That's the last thing she remembers. Within an hour of
arriving at the party, she had blacked out. She was laying unconscious on the
floor as the party went on around her. She was supposed to be home at 11:30
p.m.; she never came home. Her parents were freaking out and calling her cell
phone, but her friend had it and didn't reply. The whole group left her all
alone on the floor, at one point, to drive someone else home.
There she lay, alone, in the dark, unconscious, in a strange
house, in immediate danger of choking on her own vomit and suffocating herself.
When the friends came back, they tried to wake her up by
pushing her body around and even kicking her. They finally realized that she
was so messed up, her life was in danger.
So they called her parents . . . who got an ambulance . . . but
Emily looked so terrible, like a dead person, from alcohol poisoning that her
dad wouldn't even let her mom into the house to see her . . . and as emergency
workers placed her on a gurney and rushed her to the Emergency Department, her
dad said later, a police officer hung his head and muttered audibly, "This
makes me not want to ever have kids."
Emily woke up at 6 o'clock the next morning in the ER, with
her parents by her side. "It was the worst feeling in the world," she recalled.
"They weren't angry. They were just so disappointed."
She remembers thrashing around and crying, so mad at
herself, and so upset at where she was going with her life.
Why alcohol? "I didn't even like the taste," she said. "I
don't know why I ever even took the first drink. But fitting in and having
everyone like me was really, really important."
The next Wednesday night, she went up to her youth pastor,
hung her head, and, sobbing, confessed. Immediately, he put an arm around her,
and told her, "God is forgiving. It's going to be OK." He called for other
leaders to come around her, lay their hands on her, and pray for her. That felt
good.
Her relationship with her parents was rocky. Disappointment
glared from their eyes. They took away a much-anticipated trip, and made her
feel as though she couldn't be trusted at all. It hurt, but she understood that
she had hurt them first.
It was all so overwhelming, so confusing. Finally, one
night, she got down on her knees in her room, and simply talked to Jesus.
"I was just, like . . . Change me. You know? Bring more
positive influences around me."
It was as if she had awakened from a deep sleep. "I started
feeling things more, you know," Emily said, smiling and shaking her head.
"Things started making sense. Every sermon seemed pointed right at me, but it
wasn't weird. I liked it! It was as if I literally came alive."
Her youth group leader asked her to tell what happened in
front of a ballroom of 1,000 people at a fund-raiser. She did it without a
speck of nervousness or shame. Amazing! She knew it was part of God's plan. He
let her go to the brink - but not over - to wake her up, give her a second chance
at life, and put her naturally engaging and enthusiastic personality to work
helping others wake up about alcohol and drugs, too.
Suddenly, she was determined to fight mindless peer
pressure, not give in to it. She stopped buying pricey clothes at Hollister and
American Eagle just because "everyone else" was wearing those clothes. Instead,
she enjoyed bargain-shopping, and proudly wore cute clothes from ho-hum places
like WalMart.
"Everyone else" was straightening their hair; she put gel on
hers to make it even curlier.
"Everyone else" was caving in to pressure to negate the
Bible and censor freedom of religion. But she didn't. An agnostic science
teacher put a series of questions on a test that preassumed that the theory of
evolution is totally correct. She answered the questions as she knew he
expected, to get a good grade, but over to the side, she listed Bible verses
and unanswered questions that debunked evolution. Her boldness sparked his
interest and opened up a teacher-student dialogue that wound up teaching them
both some things.
She was swimming against the current of today's
often-destructive teenage culture, and moving forward to the beat of her own
rhythm. And it was fun! Alcohol is only a dim memory now. She never even thinks
about having a drink.
Her world opened up. She wants to perform on Broadway. She
wants to be a missionary. She wants to teach music. She wants to train dolphins
at Sea World.
Life has made a giant course correction for that comatose,
nearly-dead little girl, all alone on her back on the floor of a stranger's
house.
And Emily knows exactly Who was orchestrating that
horrendous crisis, for her ultimate good: God.
"I don't think there would have been any other way for me to
learn," Emily said, "because I always, you know, push the limits." †
