God Does Answer Prayer - Val's story, Chap 14

I had been praying for Val for years. Praying that she quit drinking, that she quit doing drugs, that she quit letting losers move in with her.

I thought of all the good she had done in her short life. The mission trips to Mexico and Kenya. The nonprofit she spent hours and hours building only to watch it fail. The dogs she rescued. The two different houses she had bought and worked so hard to renovate.

          But through it all, she kept drinking. And driving while intoxicated. Even though she got two OWIs within a few years, she somehow never had an accident.

And I kept praying. Praying that her guardian angel wouldn’t give up on her. I believed that because she was such a caring person deep inside and she wanted so much to help others, the devil felt threatened by her. He made sure that bad things kept happening to her – the failed nonprofit, the OWIs, even all the illnesses and injuries from her childhood – as a way of trying to knock her down.

And I kept praying. Praying that Jesus would hold her in His hands, even though at times she denied Him.

In addition to her day job working from home, she started bartending a few nights a week. She said that she needed the money and also needed to get out of the house to socialize. In reality, it gave her a couple of nights to get drunk for free.

Until Thursday, January 26, 2023.

Years and years before, both my kids set me up on Google Maps so that I could see their location – or at least the location of their phones. They knew that I spied on them, but they never turned off the notification. Once, when my husband and I were on vacation, we were riding on a ferry across a canal in Virginia when Val texted me.

“Where are you?” she wrote.

It immediately dawned on me that she had been spying on me and saw that my location was in the middle of a body of water! So this worked both ways.

That Thursday night in January, like many nights before, I checked her location when I went to bed. She was at the bar.

          I had a bad feeling and started praying.

I woke up at two a.m. and checked her location again. Still at the bar. It was “bar time,” which probably meant that she was closing up and then driving clear across town to get home.

I lay awake praying for her through the night.

God, please watch over my baby girl. Please get her home safely. Please let her figure out that she needs help and that she needs to quit drinking. I am so sorry, Lord, that I failed her, that I didn’t shelter her more or come down on her harder when she messed up. If her drinking in any way is my fault, punish me, but please save her.

Or something like that.

          Early the next morning, as I dragged myself out of bed, I checked her location and saw she'd at least made it home. As I was groggily getting ready for work, one of her friends called me.

“Momma,” she said, “Val hit rock bottom last night; she wants to quit drinking and needs our help.”

Oh, dear God, heavenly Father. How can I ever thank You enough.         

~~~

I was scheduled to work all day, but I found a co-worker to cover for me in the afternoon. I texted Val as I was leaving the clinic around noon and asked what she was up to, totally playing dumb.

She texted me right back and asked me to call her.

She told me that she was done drinking, that she had finally realized how it was ruining her life, that she had so many things she wanted to do, but that with her drinking, she would never be able to do them. She said one of her friends was with her then, and another was coming over after work, and asked if I could come down too.

“Of course, Baby Girl,” I answered through tears.

I got home, told her step-dad what was going on, packed a bag, and drove the 45 miles to her house.

Her friends and I spent the weekend watching over her, keeping her hydrated and rested. We all knew that detoxing on your own could have serious consequences, even death, but she refused to go to the ER.

We cleaned her house from top to bottom, played with her dogs, and watched sappy movies. She looked up AA meetings in the area and called around to rehab centers. She made lists of things she wanted to do and things she needed to do to get sober and stay that way.

By Monday morning, she was still tired, but her headache and stomachache were gone. She finally felt like eating a little bit. She had found a women’s AA group and was excited to go to her first meeting.

God always answers prayer, and sometimes He even answers in the exact way we hoped.