It’s Friday morning and I get the call from the lobby that my 10:00 appointment has arrived. I open the door and call out his name. A young man in his late 20’s stands up and walks toward me. I introduce myself and he does the same. I point him toward my office door and he walks past me. As I follow him in, I can’t help but notice the large numbers “5150” tattooed on the back of his neck.
Before I can even get seated I ask, “So, what does 5150 mean?” He smiles and says “criminally insane”. Well okay then…I guess you’re in the right spot here at Probation. No…that wasn’t really my response, but I was suddenly looking forward to wherever this conversation would end up taking me.
I’ll fast-forward to the gist of this story, because at some point in our conversation, I stopped seeing another convicted felon covered in tattoos here for another dance with probation; I stopped seeing a former meth and heroin addict; I started seeing something different…not sure what at this point….but I sensed this was going to be different.
As he spoke to me, about his newborn daughter with his eyes welling up in tears, as he talked about the fight he’s had with meth first and then heroin, as he talked about the beatings he took from his father between ages 7 or 8 and about 16, because he was the oldest of three kids, noting that his siblings never got hit because he was dad’s punching bag…the phrase came drifting into my consciousness…”Diamond in the Rough”.
As we progressed through the assessment, I began to realize that no matter how he scores out, I have to keep this kid on my caseload. I need it for me… I’ll admit I’m being selfish here, but this work can suck the life out of a person…and right now, I needed this kid on my caseload because I need to work with someone special…and I felt I was sitting across from such a person. Time will tell if this young man wants to truly evolve into the man he was created to be…we’re just getting started, but I thought of him several times over the weekend. He made an impression on me for sure.
It’s Monday morning now, and the young man had to return to Probation to meet with me to go over all the terms and conditions of his probation sentence. As we wrapped up the paperwork I told him I had a strange question for him. I asked him if he would allow me to take a picture of his tattoos for a potential blog article that was kicking around in my head. He quickly said he would not mind at all. I briefly shared that names would be withheld and I told him a bit about my story on the “Soldier Hiding Inside the Drunk”.
He told me that he wrote a story and would like to share it with me sometime. He then pulled off his coat and showed me a tattoo going up the inside of his arm. He described it as an angel with demons pulling at the bottom of the angel, trying to bring it down.
We scheduled his appointment for next week and he left. About 30 minutes later I’m getting calls from our lobby phone. I then get a message over my computer from the front desk informing me the young man has returned because he has a question. I’m involved in a very lengthy discussion with a different client at this point so could not break away. About 20 minutes go by and I’m finished with my next appointment and as I walk into the lobby, there sits the young man still waiting to see me.
I quickly realize he has no questions at all…but instead, pulls out a 6-page story folded up in his pocket. He asks me to read it and says that I can return in next week at our appointment. I take the story into my office and begin to read.
It’s his story… oh my……. A diamond in the rough is an understatement!
The story is his, but it’s told in 3rd person…it also has a “hypothetical” slant to it…like he’s telling his story, but if at any point he feels unsafe disclosing such things, he can quickly cover himself by saying it’s not his story…but I know…it’s his story.
I’ve caught a glimpse of where this thing is going…an angry kid growing into an angry young man. Somewhere along the path he’s involved in an accident. He gets T-boned by the grace of God. Love begins to absorb into his skin, down, down, down into his heart…it softens just enough to enable the young man to respond to the invitation of inviting the Lord to save whatever’s left of his ruined life. God brings the love…and with it hope. Chains begin to break as addiction starts to lose it’s grip….the hardened ground cracks and something flickers in the Light…..
There! Did you see it? It looks like a Diamond…