Pedro the Lion is loud in the speakers, and the city waits just outside
our open windows. She sits and sings, legs crossed in the passenger
seat, her pretty voice hiding in the volume. Music is a safe place and
Pedro is her favorite. It hits me that she won't see this skyline for
several weeks, and we will be without her. I lean forward, knowing this
will be written, and I ask what she'd say if her story had an audience.
She smiles. "Tell them to look up. Tell them to remember the stars."

I would rather write her a song, because songs don't wait to resolve,
and because songs mean so much to her. Stories wait for endings, but
songs are brave things bold enough to sing when all they know is
darkness. These words, like most words, will be written next to
midnight, between hurricane and harbor, as both claim to save her.

Renee is 19. When I meet her, cocaine is fresh in her system. She
hasn't slept in 36 hours and she won't for another 24. It is a familiar
blur of coke, pot, pills and alcohol. She has agreed to meet us, to
listen and to let us pray. We ask Renee to come with us, to leave this
broken night. She says she'll go to rehab tomorrow, but she isn't ready
now. It is too great a change. We pray and say goodbye and it is hard to
leave without her.

She has known such great pain; haunted dreams as a child, the
near-constant presence of evil ever since. She has felt the touch of
awful naked men, battled depression and addiction, and attempted
suicide. Her arms remember razor blades, fifty scars that speak of
self-inflicted wounds. Six hours after I meet her, she is feeling
trapped, two groups of "friends" offering opposite ideas. Everyone is
asleep. The sun is rising. She drinks long from a bottle of liquor,
takes a razor blade from the table and locks herself in the bathroom.
She cuts herself, using the blade to write "FUCK UP" large across her
left forearm.

The nurse at the treatment center finds the wound several hours later.
The center has no detox, names her too great a risk, and does not accept
her. For the next five days, she is ours to love. We become her hospital
and the possibility of healing fills our living room with life. It is
unspoken and there are only a few of us, but we will be her church , the
body of Christ coming alive to meet her needs, to write love on her
arms.

She is full of contrast, more alive and closer to death than anyone
I've known, like a Johnny Cash song or some theatre star. She owns
attitude and humor beyond her 19 years, and when she tells me her story,
she is humble and quiet and kind, shaped by the pain of a hundred
lifetimes. I sit privileged but breaking as she shares. Her life has
been so dark yet there is some soft hope in her words, and on
consecutive evenings, I watch the prettiest girls in the room tell her
that she's beautiful. I think it's God reminding her.

I've never walked this road, but I decide that if we're going to run a
five-day rehab, it is going to be the coolest in the country. It is
going to be rock and roll. We start with the basics; lots of fun, too
much Starbucks and way too many cigarettes.