My friend Lanny died last week. I met him in early 2000 when I was assigned to mentor him through the local mission. He was living at the mission because he had just gotten out of jail and had nowhere else to go. If I told you about his past, you would find it hard to believe that we had anything in common, but for some reason we hit it off. He was a motorcycle rider and had owned several Indians in the past, so we had that in common. He was a few years older than me but we grew up in pretty much the same era, so we had a lot of shared memories of the 60s and 70s. We met every week or two at a local restaurant for a meal and fellowship, and I would have to say I spent more time discussing the scriptures with him than any other adult male of roughly my age.
For those of you who didn't know him, Lanny was an addict. His addiction had wreaked havoc with his life. He had been in and out of jail before I met him, and he was in jail twice during the time I knew him. (I don't know if you've ever visited a friend in jail, but trust me it ain't fun.) When he was in jail, he was very much focused on God, but when he wasn't in jail, he struggled with setting boundaries for himself. He was a compulsive person, even with things outside his addiction. When I saw him start to isolate himself from others and act compulsively, I would warn him he was headed for trouble. Sometimes he would listen to me, sometimes not, and he paid the price when he didn't listen. I was somewhat on the outs with him when he died, because he was headed for trouble again and got very angry when I pointed it out to him, but in the end cancer took his life before his addiction got the best of him again.
I have more conflicting emotions about Lanny than anyone I've ever known. Love, anger, frustration, sorrow, bewilderment, sympathy - these are just a few of the feelings I had toward him over the years. Regardless of these feelings, I always tried to make our relationship about helping him and not about me. I have to be honest and say I don't know where he stood with God when he died, but then only God truly knows a person's heart, and he is the righteous judge, not me. You can do your very best to teach someone the Bible and point them in the right direction, but in the end it's their choice (and their consequences). As Joshua says in Joshua 24:15, everyone has a choice: "choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve"----"but as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD." My choice was to help Lanny because it was the right thing to do, and in the process I gained a dear friend that (if it is according to God's will) I will be reunited with someday.
