No verse

Dear God, I was perusing some headlines this morning when I woke up and I saw that Tom Petty died of a drug overdose. I clicked it and found a pretty good list of drugs in his system. Frankly, it made me wonder whatever happened to medical privacy. When it comes to death, is it more important that the public know that a death wasn’t homicide so they tell us everything? It seemed like an invasion of his privacy that I should be allowed to read details from his autopsy report.

I guess the reason I’m really talking about this with you now is that substance abuse seems to be impacting our society more and more. I have a lot of opinions about this, but they are largely uninformed or only partially informed so I’m not going to pray to you about them here. But I guess what I do want to pray about is healing for my world, country, state, community, friends, and family in this area. Yesterday, a coworker had to deal with a nephew who was busted for drugs at school and through it they were able to find a pretty significant dealer. I have family member whom, at a minimum, I know abuse alcohol. The clinic where I work has patients who abuse a myriad of substances. When I think about it (and I know there are plenty of Christians who abuse substances) I wonder how many of these people reject the idea of you as their God and embracing a life of submission to you, but go right ahead and try to fill that hole on their heart through the escapism of substances.

Father, show me the role you have for me to play in our community and my family. Maybe it’s just praying for people. Maybe it’s addressing it head on. Maybe it’s creating a new program at work to deal with it. I don’t know, but I do know that it’s destroying our society in too many ways to be ignored. Lord, help us.

In Jesus’ name I pray,

Amen