“You have to do the right thing… you may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Life is really just a stream of happenings. While Joel was spending a year going through the strict program for troubled teens at The Institute, I suddenly found myself within one of those unassuming moments. It was a moment so understated, one would have to be listening to hear. And at the same time, a moment so significant, one would have to be a corpse to miss its resounding ring. Such was the moment of Jonnie’s Kiss.
Jonnie was our “Family Advocate.” Her job was to facilitate the details for healing the ruptured families and their wayward sons and daughters at The Institute. As fate would have it, Joel ended up assigned to her. And therefore under her wings.
When Joel first made his debut at The Institute, the staff had assigned him to a rather mild mannered man. It became obvious within days that Joel had “read” this hapless man effortlessly. During our first Family Counseling phone session, Joel mentioned that he really liked his Family Advocate and things weren’t so bad there after all. My immediate thought was, “Well, that’s not going to work at all. This kind man must be a tender-hearted soul. Joel will eat him alive.” Of course, since this man was on the phone with us, I said nothing about the inevitable carnage that lay ahead. Fortunately the staff had seen guys like Joel before. Although Joel had figured out he could get any female (including me) to do whatever he wanted by the time he was 3 years old, there was one exception. The staff brought in “The Big Gun”.
And that was Jonnie.
Jonnie was a youngish woman; probably in her early thirties. She was definitely tough as nails and able to easily see through any teenage lie. Any attempt at manipulation from any of “Her Boys”, merely amused this gorgeous icon of all that was female. Those boys were very lucky to end up in her nest. Jonnie and I had known each other through the weekly family advocate phone session calls for around 8 months–although we had never laid eyes upon each other. But even so, Jonnie was fully aware of everything I was daily doing to support my son. Jonnie and I finally met at Joel’s graduation.
Inside the sturdy structure of The Program at The Institute lay an ingeniously motivational step…something to give the kids hope. A hope that was within their grasp. It was a ceremony held not at the completion of The Program, but when they had reached certain level of hard earned responsibility. And at these ceremonies all the undergraduates were required to attend. And not only attend, but sit there watching those who had succeeded and think about why they had not. Usually, depending upon the progress of the wayward teen, their graduation was about 4 to 6 months into the duration of the completion of The Program. This ceremony heralded the first time the family was allowed to see their child in person, hold them in their arms and actually spend a 4 day visit with them. In Joel’s case, we waited for an entire 9 months. Probably a record…
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At first, Joel said he didn’t like Jonnie at all. I asked him, “Is that because you can’t play her?” Even over the phone, I could tell he was smiling. “Yeah, something like that”, he replied. So from that day on, Jonnie was there to do whatever she could to help heal our fractured family. She was a no nonsense Truth-Teller. And she was very good at her job. Jonnie was the only person on staff who worked with kids of the opposite gender. And they all loved her. Including Joel. It might have taken him a week or so, but Jonnie was the Mother of the Lost Boys – just like Wendy in the story of “Peter Pan”. If Joel had decided to remain in his attitude of animosity toward her, he certainly would have been chastised by the other guys. Being liked by his peers, and most of all, “being cool” were paramount motivators for Joel. And so, it wasn’t long before he joined the ranks of The Lost Boys under Jonnie’s tough but constant love.
During that horrible year when my enigmatic son was separated from our family – early November, 2009 through early November, 2010 – Steve was pretty much the only rational voice in our world. But his work in South Africa with the Lausanne Movement was nearing its apex. Steve had spent a substantial amount of time doing complex, grueling volunteer work over the last 4 years in South Africa. At the same time he was continuing to handle his intense full-time job as the President of Masterworks; a company he had built from a handful of employees to what now employs over 100 people. Masterworks is an advertising/marketing agency dedicated to raising funds for non-profit charitable ministries. Needless to say, this was an all-consuming and extremely stressful time for Steve. And as the opening day of The Congress grew closer, his travel to South Africa became more frequent and the trips grew longer.
So Heather and I basically had our nervous breakdowns together.
Together…and separately; both of us fighting our crushing sorrow in our own ways. I immersed myself in coordinating every detail of Joel’s life at The Institute. And at the same time, I was working with a doctor who specialized in medication management to help me out of the brain-numbing hole I knew I had fallen into. During all of the chaos that had taken over my life, I had somehow found myself seriously over-medicated with prescription medications. More than one of my doctors were very concerned that the inescapable stress in which I was drowning, would literally cause me to have a heart attack. Bit by bit, the medication specialist and I worked together to reduce and eliminate these dangerous, extraneous prescribed medications. This task took me 18 months. It was hard work. It was also an amazing experience. My brain was literally waking up. I could actually feel it happening. With each slight dose reduction, my energy level, my basic level of intelligence and my creativity greatly expanded. I was beginning to remember who I was.
But unfortunately, something else was exponentially expanding. My feelings of anger. Growing and growing until they became an overwhelming mountain of…
RAGE.
