12/05/2025
Will’s Bracelet💜
Last night, I did something I haven’t done in a very long time.
I traded my ball cap and paint shirt for a black velvet dress. I fixed my hair, put on a full face of the “good” makeup, and hardly recognized the woman in the mirror.
Most days lately, it’s been me in comfortable clothes: painting in my craft room, setting up at art shows, or chasing grandbabies. But this night was different.
The Happy Butterfly was able to sponsor a table at the Adult & Teen Challenge banquet—a night filled with testimonies from men who have found freedom from addiction through Jesus.
I invited a dear friend to come with me. She loves the Lord, and she pours her heart into her own events and fundraisers. When I asked her, I just thought, “She is going to love this. This is right up her alley.”
I had no idea what God had planned for her there… or for me.
From the very beginning, the stories started.
Testimony after testimony after testimony.
Men standing up and telling rooms full of strangers, “I shouldn’t be here… but by the grace of God, I am.”
They talked about drugs and alcohol, bad choices and jail, and then the long slow turn toward hope. Each one different, and somehow, each one the same.
And then a young man stepped up to the microphone, holding a piece of paper in his hands.
He smiled a little and said something like, “If I don’t write it down, I’ll get off track.”
He was young. Nervous. So sincere.
He began to read—about where his addiction took him, the things he had lost, the darkness he had lived in for so long. The room was quiet, listening.
Halfway through, something shifted.
He stopped looking at the paper.
His voice changed.
He set his notes down just a bit and began to talk about the voices—the night he planned to end his life. The night su***de sounded like the only way out.
He said he could still hear them.
“I can still hear them so vividly,” he said. “I can still hear the voices.”
His words got slower. His eyes filled with tears. It was as if he had been pulled right back into that night, standing between life and death, listening to lies that wanted him gone.
The whole room held its breath.
And in that moment, my heart went straight to my friend beside me—a mama who lost her son to su***de.
It was only then that the worry hit me.
I wanted to reach over and grab her hand. I wanted to lean in and say, “I am so, so sorry. I didn’t know they’d talk about this.”
But I didn’t interrupt.
She just sat there, steady and quiet, listening with a grace that took my breath away.
Then that same young man lifted his head.
Tears were running down his face, but his voice grew stronger.
He started talking about the grace of God—how he shouldn’t even be alive, how there was no reason he should be standing there. And suddenly his words turned into a kind of shout, not angry, but full of life:
“Because of the grace of God, I have a job.
Because of the grace of God, I’m going to get married.
Because of the grace of God, I’m going to have a family.”
The room erupted.
People clapped and cheered. There was so much joy in that moment—this picture of a life pulled back from the very edge and given a brand new future.
And at the very same time, my chest ached.
Because I knew my friend’s reality.
Her son will not get to say those words. He will not stand behind a microphone and talk about his job, or his wedding, or the family he’ll one day have.
For her, those dreams are already on the other side of Heaven.
I sat there, caught between two truths—overwhelming gratitude for what God had done in that young man’s life, and a deep, quiet grief for what my friend has lost.
Joy and sorrow, sitting side by side at the same table.
When the program ended, I finally turned to her, still wondering what that moment had felt like inside her heart. I started to ask if she was okay, but before I could get many words out, she spoke first.
“I’ve got to find that young man,” she said. “I need to give him one of Will’s bracelets.”
That was her first thought.
Not to run out.
Not to turn away.
Not to protect herself from the pain.
But to go toward it.
To go toward him.
So that’s what she did.
In a crowded room, she went looking for him—the young man who had just stood in front of all of us and revisited the darkest night of his life.
When she found him, she walked up, took his hand, and placed a bracelet in it. A bracelet with her son’s name on it. Will.
She shared a piece of her own story, and with all the tenderness of a mama’s heart, she encouraged him to keep going. To hold on to the grace that had brought him this far. To live the life he had almost given up.
Her boy is already in Heaven. His story on this earth is complete.
And still, she chose to stand there, face-to-face with somebody else’s son, and use her deepest pain as a gift.
I came home from that banquet knowing I had seen something holy.
A black velvet dress I hadn’t worn in years.
A table sponsored by a little business called The Happy Butterfly.
A young man with a shaking piece of paper and a story he could barely get through.
And a bracelet named Will, passed from one life to another in the middle of it all.
It was more than just an event.
It was a picture of how God weaves stories together—how He meets us in the raw, painful places we never would have chosen, and somehow lets one broken heart become a lifeline for another.
Only God could write a night like that. 🤍
