Courtyards (also known as Brothers)

 

I had a rotting fence beside a rickety rental I’d just started leasing right after college. That was the season a traumatic experience had broken me open and turned me into a faithful, obedient, prayerful Christian man. I repaired the fence, and then a string of small miracles began.

 

We were living in the rental when a foreclosure notice appeared on the door. The owner had stopped paying the mortgage; we’d had no idea. It made sense—Southern California was reeling after the elder Bush administration pulled the plug on the defense industry. Unemployment hit 25 percent, the housing market cratered, and homes in the mid-to-late 1990s were going for pennies.

 

My young family was suddenly in turmoil, needing a new place to live with almost no money to make it happen. The realtor told us to sit tight: if we stayed, we might be able to buy the house ourselves. We lived there rent-free for five months. In April 1997 (with only $36.36 left in our checking account) we became the proud owners of a dilapidated wreck.

 

Inch by inch, inside and out, I refurbished it—new lawn, fresh paint, every squeak and crack banished. We transformed the ugliest house on the block. When we sold it in 2005, it fetched the highest price of any home within a five-mile radius.

 

My painting is titled Courtyards, though I also call it Brothers.

 

I had become a steady, prolific pray-er at a time when my family—those inside my home and those scattered beyond it—had become the focus of constant prayer but none weighed on me more than than my brother Jay.

 

Jay (the superboy) had fallen into a deep addiction to methamphetamines. It didn’t just rot his teeth; it demolished every facet of his life. I offered God an unusual prayer at a moment when my own life was overflowing with blessings—financial, emotional and spiritual. I asked that my brother, though miles from any thought of Christ, might receive every good thing I had been given.

 

The prayer went something like this: If Jay wants to suck the juice out of this life and nothing more, let him be blessed exactly as I have been…. Let him receive everything that you bless me with. Soon after, Jay endured tragedies far beyond the ordinary growing pains I’d known. They broke him open, reshaped him, and changed him in ways my lighter trials never could.

 

If God gave me a house, a week later Jay would receive one. If I got a new car, Jay would call—before he even knew I had one—and say he’d just bought his own. If I earned a promotion, he’d ring to share news of his own breakthrough. But God did something stranger still: He began blessing Jay far beyond anything I received. I felt no anger, no jealousy, no need to question. Our paths ran parallel yet on wildly different trajectories. Jay’s conflicts—brutal, life-altering—drove him to the end of himself. There, he found God’s grace and was remade. From that heated cauldron, he wrote a labyrinth of books on breaking free from everything from crystal Meth to heroin, every destructive chemical dependency. Today those books are translated into most languages in western civilization. 

 

At the end of Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, the aging Artur Sammler stands over his dying friend, whose carotid artery has burst, and quietly addresses God: Take this man. He has fulfilled his contract.

Jay is still diligently working to fulfill his own earthly contract—and he has far more to offer the afflicted than I ever could. Jaybird, may God continue to richly bless you, far beyond what He has these past twenty-five years.