You can’t think of a way things will get better. Well, you can, but so far none of those 1,762 occurrences have panned out. He’ll meet some better friends at camp. We’ll switch schools and start over. That last punishment will jar him into a new resolve. His most recent tearful, remorseful silence means he’s done with all this. But then there’s the next thing, and the next thing and more things until the only thing that can possibly change anything is a sheer act of God. And God hasn’t acted. 
Remember the last scene of The Passion of the Christ? Crunching gravel reveals the mammoth stone rolling away from the one escape of the tomb-cave-prison-entrapment. The music is eerily tentative as the deflating grave clothes lie in the background of a living Jesus sitting up on the slab. Suddenly, a drum beat starts and accelerates; faster, stronger, louder. He gets up and walks out. Everything is changed.
That last song on the Passion soundtrack was on my iPod. Those earbuds pounded the drums into my head on night walks, at the gym, or in the backyard by the evening fire pit where I would gather up hope that our son would come back to himself. Over and over, the building drums pounded faith into my heart.
A sealed fate was undone with a slow, self-rolling boulder that needed moving. Those drums came from nowhere. It was just time. Yes. Now. Don’t be dead anymore. Swirl the power that isn’t available anywhere else and do what no one expects. This is what I asked of God. “Please change everything.”
Maybe He wouldn’t, I knew that could be true. Maybe He couldn’t… not true.
“Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words. They should remain open. Our only comfort is the God of the resurrection.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer