The Works of God

This has been posted a lot of different places, for which I am very grateful!  As Justin Taylor said when he posted it, “We need to see and hear testimonies like this over and over.”

Make much of God today; tell your story of what God has done for you.

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When I first saw the video of Eliot Mooney and his parents, Matt and Ginny, I thought to myself, “these are people who understand something about God and life and death and suffering that is precious.”  I’m grateful God gave them – and us – Eliot.

Matt went on to create a ministry, 99 Balloons, to serve families like ours.

So when they said they wanted to tell some stories of God’s goodness in disability and invited me to join them, I gladly accepted.

They’ve posted it this morning: God’s Kindness Through My Rube Goldberg Boy.

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The fourteen young men in the first row of this picture are the newest seminary students of Bethlehem College and Seminary.

I learned Saturday night that one of them is a father of a baby with Down syndrome.  I can’t wait to meet that young man.

For the past several years I’ve had the opportunity to talk about disability, the Bible and our church with these first-year students.  I’ll get to do so with these young men in about three weeks.

But I have a feeling the real, lasting learning will come from within their midst.  Because these cohorts work together over several years, the men get to know each other pretty well, and their families.

And isn’t it kind of God to give them a little one to help them learn about God’s good design in disability up close?

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This year for our family vacation we took Paul with us.  It worked out pretty well, though it wasn’t simple.  And we experienced some benefits, like being able to enter any National Park for free and using our handicapped parking sign in a tourist town at the height of tourist season!

But yesterday we had another family outing and didn’t include him.  The Great Minnesota Get-Together started on Thursday and my other three children were excited about going (and my daughter won two tickets from the local library). Dianne and I talked about one last family outing before school, but ultimately decided it would be better if Paul stayed home with Dianne.

All the same issues came up for me as they have in the past about what it means to be a family with one member who lives with multiple disabilities.  It isn’t debilitating, especially since it was only for part of a day, but these moments still make me pause to pray for wisdom and then peace about what I’ve decided.

As it turned out, it was a good decision.  We hadn’t been to the State Fair for three or four years and I had forgotten how loud the music is, how hot it can get, and how chaotic the streets are.  My middle son commented as we left, “Paul would have hated this!”  And my other children loved being able to move freely and quickly; something that isn’t really possible when Paul is with us.

We’ve been at this for a while; for my other children, their entire lives.  So far, my fears that they would prefer he not be around for family activities haven’t proven true.

But I still pray for God’s help in making decisions like this (as small as it may seem) and for God to protect their hearts about their brother’s standing in our family and his worth to the world.

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Two weeks ago on my birthday my sister and niece took my family out to a wonderful Mexican restaurant.  After ordering our meals, a stranger approached me and asked if he could pray for Paul.

As I’ve written before, this happens occasionally when people notice he lives with disabilities.  After asking permission, he then asked this question:

Do you have any unrepentant sin in your life?

If you go to the link above, you know that I struggle when strangers intrude into my son’s life with unsolicited offers to pray for him. And a question like that is full of self-righteous opportunities for reply!

But this was different; God protected my heart this time.  God used that episode back in February, and Dianne’s wise counsel at that time, to get my heart oriented differently.

I engaged him in conversation, discussed some of the Biblical texts around disability and healing, and found a man who didn’t know all the Biblical texts I brought up, but he knew Jesus and was confident in his salvation because of who Jesus is.

So, I let him pray for my son.  Paul was not healed, but I think Larry from Texas and his family were encouraged that they had met another family that trusts the promises of God.

And Dianne remarked later at how kind it was that he took that bold step to approach a stranger.  He could not have known how we would respond, but he came anyway, in faith.

I don’t think I would ever start a conversation with the same words that he did.  But that really isn’t the point, is it.  He acted for the good of his neighbor who he didn’t even know, because Jesus was very real to him.

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Thank you to Ray Ortland for posting this video on his blog.

Dr. Zahl makes the strong point in this video that suffering people need to hear about grace in their hard circumstances from the pulpit.  That has made a huge difference in my life – hearing the Word of God proclaimed clearly and passionately over and over again!

That is part of the gift of the ebook, Disability and the Sovereign Goodness of God.  Pastor John uses the words of the Bible to help us understand something about God and his purposes, which puts my circumstances into proper perspective in light of God’s sovereign goodness and power.

And that is why I so strongly recommend this ebook to pastors.  You have members with disabilities in your churches, or affiliated with families in your churches. They will benefit from your carefully using God’s word, including the hard passages related to disability, sickness and suffering, to reveal more about the character, promises and sovereignty of God over all things.

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Tim Challies recently stated on a podcast that when he sees a child with Down syndrome, he assumes the family is Christian.  Why?  Because so many children with Down syndrome are not allowed to be born.

Al Mohler wrote yesterday (scroll down almost to the bottom) on two recent articles that Dr. Peter Singer wrote, one for the New York Times and one for the Guardian.  I agree with Dr. Mohler’s opinion about Dr. Singer:

Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, Peter Singer is one of the most reprehensible intellectual forces alive today.

And yesterday I read that scientists have found a genetic link for autism.  Even if it does explain only 3% of autism diagnoses, it is a beginning to unraveling the mystery that is autism.  I’m all for unraveling mysteries and helping more kids.  But one significant result of better knowledge about Down syndrome is that more kids with Down syndrome are being killed before they are born.

What you believe about God matters a lot here.

Much more comes to mind with all the above news, especially about Peter Singer’s new idea (mostly tongue-in-cheek and simply meant to provoke, I’m guessing) that this generation of human beings be the last generation.

But this one thought kept coming to mind as these articles swirled around in my head:

Is the church ready for what’s coming concerning our children with disabilities?  Is the church preparing people right now for the suffering they will experience when a child is diagnosed with a disability?

In one sense, yes.  University professors like Dr. Singer have been mocking the notion of a transcendent, sovereign God for centuries.  Our most recent murderous decades with abortion were preceded by the murderous eugenics movement by almost a century.  The church is still here, and God continues to call some to stand against such evils and some to live with disability in their families.

But it seems like it is coming faster and sooner than before.  Prenatal diagnoses of increasing numbers and types of disabilities are becoming more common.  Rates of abortion for children with disabilities are at stunning levels.  Men and women can take tests to determine the likelihood of their conceiving a child with certain disabilities, with the assumption that this is not to prepare them to raise a child, but to help them avoid having such children.

We need the church to help their people now, before the diagnosis comes.  What we believe about God and other people and how we spend our lives is at stake:

The ultimate purpose of the universe is to display the greatness of the glory of the grace of God. The highest, clearest, surest display of that glory is in the suffering of the best Person in the universe for millions of undeserving sinners.Therefore, the ultimate reason that suffering exists in the universe is so that Christ might display the greatness of the glory of the grace of God by suffering in himself to overcome our suffering and bring about the praise of the glory of the grace of God.

O Christian, remember what Carl Ellis and David Powlison and Mark Talbot and Steve Saint and Joni Eareckson Tada said: they all, in their own way, said that whether we are able or disabled, enduring loss or delighting in friends, suffering pain or savoring pleasure, all of us who believe in Christ are immeasurably rich in him and have so much to live for. Don’t waste your life. Savor the riches that you have in Christ and spend yourself no matter the cost to spread your riches to this desperate world.

Pastor John Piper, from The Suffering of Christ and the Sovereignty of God at the 2005 Desiring God National Conference.

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