The Works of God

This is a special Thanksgiving Day in our home, and my gratitude to God is simply overflowing!  The gratitude is heightened because I have memories of holidays that were, at best, an obligation.

God is kind to have changed my heart so dramatically over these years.

There is a whole list of things that have never happened in my home before, that, Lord willing, will all come together at noon today:

• 20 people are coming.  We’ve never had that many on Thanksgiving before.
• We have no kitchen (long story).  There are ways to have a meal for 20 that doesn’t include a kitchen, but it’s complicated.  But there is also relief – whatever happens, happens!
• Four generations of Knights are gathering!
• Three generations of Hahns are gathering!
• My children have never had all their living grandparents together for a holiday, ever.

The group includes 7 children under the age of 16; my four and my nephew’s daughter and unborn twins!  (Yes, I include my unborn grandnieces or nephews or niece and nephew in the count!)

It also includes two multiply disabled children in my son and my niece on the Hahn side.

Best of all, up and down the entire group that is gathering are experiences of ‘as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.’   The struggle of this life has not ended; there are hard things everywhere.

Yet, God is good, always, in all circumstances.

May you experience that comfort that comes from clinging to Jesus this day!

Here’s a silly picture explaining how we’re all related:

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Thank you to Justin Taylor for posting a video on Charlotte Elliot, the author of the hymn, Just as I Am.

I had no idea she lived for decades with infirmities that kept her bed-ridden in her home.  It adds several layers of seriousness to the words she wrote, calling out to God for help.

May we all say to the Father with her, ‘thy will be done!’

“My God, My Father, While I Stray” by Charlotte Elliot:

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I can tell that some people feel sorry for Paul when they first meet him.

On days when it snows, however, his brothers are not among them!

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If you haven’t listened to David Mathis’ interview of Justin Taylor on abortion, please ignore this post, go there and be blessed.  It is 16 minutes and Justin’s observations about God’s grace and God’s design are thrilling!

Ok, back to today.

Some thoughts I had:

• More than 90% of women who discover their child has Down syndrome choose to abort
• Health professionals tend to assume that when Down syndrome is discovered, the mother will choose to abort; some women report they really didn’t feel like they had a choice
• Currently, relatively few women actually have the test because of the danger to the unborn child
• New and safer diagnostic tools are coming in 2012 that will allow for more accurate determinations of genetic issues like Down syndrome earlier in a pregnancy
• There is a general movement amongst health professionals to encourage most or even all pregnant women to have these tests
• These new tests will undoubtedly reveal more unborn children with Down syndrome, particularly in younger women who currently are not advised to have any tests.

So,  I have assumed that even more children with Down syndrome will be aborted when these tests appear.

But what if the opposite happened?

But what if people right now spoke the truth about God’s sovereignty over all things and the value of little ones with disabilities, about the heartache and the joy?

What if mothers of unborn babies and fathers heard that message and responded differently than expected to the news that their baby has Down syndrome?

What if doctors were confronted with lots of parents who were passionately in favor of letting the child live, ready to take on the responsibilities and heartache and joy that God has given to them?

What if that started a change of heart in more medical professionals, guiding them to see that they had not really considered the inherent value of that little growing life, and then considering how they could be more compassionate toward the mother and the child?

What if more mothers and fathers, rather than feeling pressure to abort, were encouraged to let this child live?

What if that actually increased the number of children with Down syndrome being born, which increased their visibility in the culture, which opened people’s eyes to the beauty of God’s master plan in designing some to live with disability their entire lives?

Which made all human life look like the extraordinary gift that it is.

What if God used tests designed specifically to rid the world of people with Down syndrome to break the back of the abortion industry?

Crazy, I know.  Fewer babies with Down syndrome being born is obviously more realistic.

But is my thought really crazier than dead people (like us) being awakened to new life in Jesus?

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Here is a statement about abortion laws by a pastor:

I felt then and I feel now that the church has a certain obligation because those laws are on the books to do something about changing them. That’s our penance, to change those laws which are so unfair and unreal. I’ve been swimming upstream a lot of my ministerial life.

Nothing objectionable there, right?

This pastor, however, was advocating for abortion through his church, developing networks of pastors to assist women in finding abortions in the 1960s.  Organizations like Planned Parenthood continue to look for clergy of all denominations to endorse abortion because they know that even today clergy have moral authority among many people.

If you read the article linked above, you might notice that there is no mention of fathers.  Not one.  And the only reason adoption was mentioned was if the woman ‘couldn’t do it’ (have an abortion).  This evil in the name of the church is breathtaking.

I am encouraged that today when people think of church and abortion, they assume the position is against this vile practice.  That’s a good thing.  And polls suggest that even with abortion being legal for decades and whole movements dedicated to ‘educating’ people about the necessity of this ‘choice’, most Americans do not embrace it.

May that increasingly become the case for our unborn babies with disabilities as well.  May pastors who speak strongly and without equivocation about abortion be sure to include our babies with disabilities as those who deserve to live.

And may those clergy who endorse the killing of babies continue to fade into obscurity and irrelevancy, for their own sake as well as for the sake of families:

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness (James 3:1 ESV).

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It was surreal.  I was carrying my 16-year-old son through a sea of typically-developing high school students.  They were all so. . . . independent and articulate and put together.

What does a boy who lives with blindness, autism, cognitive disabilities, and eating, sleeping and seizure disorders have in common with these young people?

It made me ask of myself, do I really believe that my son is indispensable to this group?

Yet, when Pastor Kempton said, “he is welcome here,” the tears came, because I believed him.  And he wasn’t speaking to me, but to that same sea of young people now seated in the young adult Sunday School class.  It was a personal, public proclamation.

After 16 years, disability is no longer a new concept in our family.  Yet the same questions still rise in my mind – will he be accepted?  Will he have a place?  Will he be safe and affirmed and loved?  God grants Paul inherent dignity and value, but it is still nice to hear words of affirmation.

We have details to work out; Paul may never be a regular participant in that class.  He slept through his whole introduction because his days and nights are mixed up again.

And I have no illusions about American teenagers at my church.  I know some of them may have our culture’s strange, unbiblical view about the worth of people with severe disabilities confirmed by Paul’s unusual movements and noises, or sleepiness.

But how sweet it is to hear those words of welcome and not have a single doubt those words are true not just from this one man, but from the very heart of my church.

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I’ve thought a lot about my St. Louis Cardinals-loving Great-Aunt Ella during these past couple of weeks of baseball.  So in honor of her and the World Series Champion Cardinals, I’m reposting something I wrote in May of 2009: Persevere to the end, like Ella.

Memorial Day brought up thoughts for me of other people who have since passed from this life to the next.  I am blessed to have many in my extended family who are easy to respect and love.  One of the best who went to be with Jesus a few years ago is my Great-Aunt Ella. 

Ella was a pistol.  She was a product of the South, living her entire life in Missouri.  She loved her church and she loved her baseball Cardinals.  Her southern accent tickled my northern ears – I remember many happy gatherings at my grandparent’s cabin in southern Minnesota that included Ella.  After her brother, my grandfather, died in 1991, she told my mother that she had never liked the name Ella and wanted to be called Francis.  And that’s what they called her until she died.  In her 70’s she traveled to Haiti on a short-term mission with her church.  Well into her 80’s – maybe even longer – she was active at her church.

I write about her on this blog because Ella was also the mother of a severely disabled daughter.  Dorothy, my mother’s cousin, suffered a severe injury at the hands of the doctor delivering her. There were no lawsuits against rural doctors in those days; it just happened.  But there were institutions for such severely disabled children, to relieve the burden, and probably the shame, that was foisted upon these families.

That wasn’t how it was going to be for Ella.  Dorothy was her child, and Dorothy would live at home and be raised by her parents.  In the early 1960’s, Ella’s husband suddenly died of a massive heart attack.  If I’ve done my math correctly, Ella would have been in her 40’s, and Dorothy nearly 20 when that happened.  Now a widow, Ella would take care of Dorothy on her own for the next 20 or so years, until Dorothy also died in the early 1980’s.

This was all before Section 504 of the Voc Rehab Act, mainstreaming, Americans with Disabilities Act, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or even curb cuts and ramps.  It was a time of great prejudice against African Americans and an expectation that people with disabilities be hidden away from public view.  And my Aunt raised her daughter and cared for her for more than 40 years.

I never once heard her complain about her daughter.

I only met Dorothy a couple of times – she couldn’t travel with my Aunt – and she had very little language.  To my childish eyes, she was scary, with sudden movements and loud noises.  I was afraid to ask questions, and didn’t quite know what to think about her.  Dorothy was not hidden away; when we visited Ella in her home, there was Dorothy.  When Dorothy died I was a teenager, and not sure if I should be happy that Dorothy was gone, or sad for my Aunt.  When we traveled to Missouri, I saw that Ella grieved deeply, but as one who has hope.

When my Paul was born, it was my Great Aunt who understood how my wife was feeling because she had been there.  When Dianne would talk about people staring at Paul and at us, Ella had her own stories, and that beautiful Missouri accent was a balm to my soul.  She loved me, my wife, and my son deeply.

Most of all, Ella loved Jesus.  She understand “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.”  And she persevered, right to the end, not wasting her life, because she believed in the promises of her God, for herself and for her daughter:

Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. Psalm 68:5

I look forward to seeing her, and Dorothy, again someday – worshipping together our God who gave us my Paul and her Dorothy to help us see Jesus more clearly.

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A guest post from my friend, Chris Nelson.  He is the dad of three (one of whom has severe disabilities) and the husband of a remarkable, Godly-steel-in-her-spine woman.  Everything he writes is worth reading!

“Daddy?”

“Yeah, Joe?”

“Why did God make Andrew’s brain work different?”

That profound question was lobbed my way by a four-year-old theologian who happens to be my middle son, as I sought to shake the cobwebs from my Monday-morning-mind while cleaning up the lower half of my 10-year-old son after a particularly explosive situation.

Joe is getting to the age where he understands that Andrew isn’t like “normal” kids.  He’s different.  God made him that way.  And God is good.  And Joe wants to know why God, a good God, made Andrew the way that He did.

“Well, Joe, the Bible teaches us that God chooses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.”

That’s the first thought that popped into my mind.

“And I don’t know all the answers, but sometimes God does things to teach us things about ourselves, to show us our sin.”

Perhaps it was poetic that I was cleaning up feces at the time.

“What’s sin?”

“Sin is when we do and think and say bad things.  Those things come out of the bad in our hearts.  Sin is always against God.  But you know what?  God loves us and sent Jesus to pay for our sin so we could be forgiven and we could be God’s friend.”

“Oh.  Daddy?”

“Yeah, Joe?”

“Do we have any yogurt?”

“Yeah, Joe.”

As I’ve thought about that 20 second interaction, I am really encouraged by Joe’s first question.  Perhaps I am reading too much into it, but he is asking about Andrew through the lens of God’s sovereignty over all things.  Even hard things that don’t always make sense, at least to us.

I’m not sure if Joe understands any of what I told him or even if it was the right response in the moment, but he’s asking God-centered questions and as his dad that warms my sin-stained soul.  And hopefully, through the gift of a brother with various disabilities, he is learning that “good” is not necessarily synonymous with “easy.”

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