The Works of God

As I lingered over some of the pictures in Just the Way I Am yesterday morning, the thought struck me:  will people going through hard times look at these pictures and not see their family situation?  The pictures of the children with disabilities (and their siblings or parents) are beautiful.

Frequently our lives are not like that.  My child has times when he does not carry ANY external manifestation of beauty.

That thought was quickly followed by this one:  of course the pictures are beautiful, because the children are beautiful!

Josh Hackney, the photographer for this book, overcame the Western cultural expectation that to look at or photograph disability is to look at and capture something strange or hideous or sad.  Josh worked hard to capture the children as God sees and created them – as God’s very own, for his glory.

Thus, Josh captured beauty!

Paul sometimes has bad days, and sometimes that results in my wanting to weep and hide over how hard everything seems to be.  And that doesn’t have ANYTHING to do with Paul or the situation. On those days, I have taken my eyes off  Jesus.

The fact is that God will supply all my needs (Phil. 4:19) in those moments, for me and for my boy and my other two boys and their sister and my wife and everyone else in Paul’s life.

How?  “According to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:19).  That kind of wealth is both infinite and indescribable!  Easily God can supply every need, no matter what it is.

So, I am grateful this book is full of beautiful pictures of extraordinary children, even if some people, at first, will struggle that these are not their experiences with the children with disabilities they know.

Because together with the words from the Bible that accompanies every picture and the work of Holy Spirit, God can turn their mourning into joy, like he has done so frequently for me:

For the Lord has ransomed Jacob
and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him.

Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance,
and the young men and the old shall be merry.
I will turn their mourning into joy;
I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.

Jeremiah 31:11,13

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I loved this reminder from Josh Harris, author of Dug Down Deep:

“Theology matters because if we get it wrong, then our whole life will be wrong.”

The more I see people advocating for various forms of eugenics or aborting children with disabilities, or making God small in light of hard things like disease, or earthquakes or poverty, the more I see it isn’t a problem of information or education.

But if we know who God is, what he’s like, and how he loves, our whole perspective changes.  And not just head knowledge, but a heart-driven desire to know this God, the way a man wants to know the wife he passionately loves.

I know that has changed how I think about God and disability.  And it was God who did it!

I am grateful God replaced my foolish, small, sin-filled, man-centered concept of who he is (one in which I not only felt I had the right but the responsibility to question his wisdom, care of, and love for me and my boy) with actual statements about who he is from his own word, like this from Psalm 89:1-8:

I will sing of the steadfast love of the Lord, forever;
with my mouth I will make known your faithfulness to all generations.
For I said, “Steadfast love will be built up forever;
in the heavens you will establish your faithfulness.”
You have said, “I have made a covenant with my chosen one;
I have sworn to David my servant:
‘I will establish your offspring forever,
and build your throne for all generations.’” Selah

Let the heavens praise your wonders, O Lord,
your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones!
For who in the skies can be compared to the Lord?
Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord,
a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones,
and awesome above all who are around him?
O Lord God of hosts,
who is mighty as you are, O Lord,
with your faithfulness all around you?

And to those who still wonder if theology matters, I invite you to watch this short video from Josh Harris:

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Abortion is a horrible thing.  Framing it in research or clinical language cannot hide that fact.

Judith L. M. McCoyd, PhD, LCSW, in her article, “Discrepant Feeling Rules and Unscripted Emotion Work: Women Coping With Termination for Fetal Anomaly,” in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry makes many horrifying statements, most of which I think are made unintentionally.  For example, on the decision to abort a child with a disability:

Women’s decisions were often framed by feeling rules such as “I feel like I should be a saint and love and accept this potential baby,” but this came into conflict with awareness that they had to consider the implications of disability and its impact on every member of the family—especially living children. (p. 448)

This one paragraph highlights several things that are wrong with our cultural understanding of human life:

1. These ‘feeling rules’ are framed by the culture, not by anything solid or transcendent.  We have relegated something as important as the killing of babies with disabilities to the whims of a childish, self-absorbed culture.
2. The title of the article indicates the goal is coping with abortion better.  This paragraph, like the entire article, makes no moral distinction between letting a child live or killing the child through abortion.  We should be clearly advocating for better decisions – like letting the child live.
3. There is no such thing as a potential baby; if that woman is pregnant, there is a baby.  Some babies will come, and even die from, their disabilities.  That should not place them in a different category of human life.  Aborting a ‘potential’ life is still aborting a living human.
4. The conflict listed here is entirely culturally created and could just as easily be reconstituted as normal and positive.  My family and many others view our disabled member as uniquely gifted by God to make us more aware and compassionate of others and more dependent on God.  In other words, the child with the disability has had and continues to have a positive impact on others.
5. The unborn baby is just as living as the already born ‘living children.’

There were other statements that were equally chilling:

The intersection of disability with decision making due to fetal anomaly reveals another place where societal norms differ and the feeling rules are discrepant. The women in this study all had desired pregnancies that they would not have ended had an anomaly not been diagnosed. Women’s ambivalence about the justification of ending a pregnancy intersects with the ambivalence about the nature and quality of life with a disability as lived in the United States. (p. 447)

So, rather than attack the ambivalence about the “nature and quality of life with a disability,” we simply remove the person with the disability.  That is not ambivalence, that is a final, irreversible act of violence done by the powerful against the powerless.  In any other context except this one, we call that wrong.

No, let us attack those societal norms and bring them down!  When women and men create a child, let them get fully informed responses when the child is coming with a disability, and not just from medical professionals.  Let them hear from other parents with similarly-disabled children, and siblings, and grandparents and friends and church members and pastors.  Let that family be showered with people who care about them and the child who is yet to be born.

We will tell them the truth about how hard it will be and how much they will all suffer.  And we will tell them the truth about the sovereignty of God in all things, his sustaining power and overwhelming love.  We will tell them about the mistakes we have made, and how God has worked even through our mistakes to make his name glorious in how he helps us.

Lord willing, there will be fewer women ‘coping’ with the effects of abortion and more women triumphing as God-centered mothers, parenting in the strength that God supplies.  And the fathers who were largely absent from this journal article will take their rightful place as guardians and guides of their children – all of them.

Then we will not be ruled by our feelings which change quickly, but by the One who created and sustains us, including our children with disabilities.  And together we will declare with the Psalmist:

Praise the Lord, all nations!
Extol him, all peoples!
For great is his steadfast love toward us,
and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.
Praise the Lord!

Psalm 117

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