Embracing God’s Love for Special Needs Parents
This special needs parenting journey is challenging. Sometimes it feels like we’re drowning in appointments and anxiety, and other times it all seems manageable, but either way, something will happen to throw a monkey-wrench in everything. Something hard, as if we weren’t experiencing enough hard as it is. A rough day. Another diagnosis. A financial hardship. A sickness or hospitalization. Or our current situation of the spread of coronavirus and our social distancing and losing the village that we relied on--our churches, schools, children’s therapists and specialists, etc. It is easy in times like that to feel overwhelmed and to ask God a plethora of questions.
A few years ago, I was having an exceptionally hard day and I felt myself getting angry at God. “Why God? Why is everything so hard? Where are you? You’re supposed to be a good God and I don’t see you doing any good in this situation.”
I raged silently at a God who felt just as silent.
I knew I desperately needed some time to be alone with God, but my boys needed dinner and attention. And then, bedtime rolled around.
After my older son, about four or five years old at the time, was all snuggled in bed and we had read his book before bed, we prayed together. Sometimes I did the praying, sometimes we did prayers fill in the blank style as he could only say one or two-word phrases. I would say “thank you God for ____” and then he’d respond with something he was grateful for. Usually it was Mama or Dada or Baby (his little brother) or Birds (what he called his ipad because he loved to play Angry Birds on it) and so I decided to go with the fill-in-the-blank style prayer.
Me: “Thank you God for ____.”
“Eesus!” he said with a grin.
I choked back tears as I told him, “Yes, thank you God for Jesus.” I’ve never had any indication that he understood anything relating to God, Jesus or Bible stories, except for identifying “baby Eesus” at Christmas time. I’ve never prayed before using the words “Thank you God for Jesus.” It was his own spontaneous thought and it filled my heart with hope and joy.
We finished our prayers and I kissed that precious little guy goodnight and as I left his room it hit me: God had answered my angry prayers through the mouth of a child who would need years of speech therapy to be able to talk like his peers. I had demanded God tell me where He was and why it felt like He wasn’t caring for us. And He gently reminded me that He loved me and my children so much, He gave us Jesus.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16 NIV
Oh, how amazing, how incredible is that?
The more I thought about God giving us Jesus, I realized that the Creator of our universe can relate to our special needs parenting journey in three unique ways that can encourage us:
God treasured His child, even before His child did a single thing.
“After his baptism, Jesus came up out of the water and the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and settling on him. And a voice from heaven said, This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.” (Matthew 3:16-17 NLT).
Jesus hadn’t yet done a single miracle or shared a parable and yet God was proud of Him. He called Jesus His beloved Son. He found great joy in Him.
And as parents, we do the same thing. We love them the moment we first meet them, and even though they need us to do everything for them, even though they cannot do a single thing for us in return, we love them. No matter how much care they need in their lifetime, we will still love and treasure and advocate for our child. They don’t have to do anything to earn our love, we just love them with all of our beings and are willing to do anything to help and protect our children.
God watched His child be rejected, struggle, and suffer.
God knows what it’s like to see your child suffer and struggle. He watched people not understand His son, watched them mock and test His son. He witnessed His child get beaten and whipped, carry a heavy wooden cross, and then have nails hammered through His wrists and ankles pinning Him to that cross. His son suffered for hours, and I’m sure God longed to take His son off of that cross, to hold Him tight in His arms, and take His son far away from the cross. Oh, yes thank you God for Jesus!
He knows how much we love our children, and the greatest thing of all is that He loves our children even more than we do.
He joins in our heartbreak when we watch our children experience pain or go through medical procedures. He grieves with us when we watch our children struggle to do things that come so effortlessly to other children. He understands our longing to change the circumstances for our children. He understands our pain when we see our children not be understood by others or mocked and excluded by others.
God had a greater plan, and it was for our good.
But God had a plan. He knew there was a glorious purpose in His dearly beloved son’s struggles and suffering. I’m sure that didn’t make the pain and helplessness go away as His child hung on a cross. His love for His son was as fierce as ever, but His love for you and me and for our children and all of humanity was steadfast and unwavering. Yes, thank you God for Jesus!
Sometimes we have a plan for our children they cannot see. They cannot see the purpose in a medical test or a procedure or the therapies they go to, but we know the purpose for it. They don’t always see us advocating for them with schools and insurance companies and our churches, but we advocate because we have a plan and goals in mind to help our children be included and get the supports and services they need.
We may not see all the details of God’s plan and purpose on this side of eternity. We will see glimpses of it here and there, but it is in trusting that God has a plan that will help bring hope, purpose, and meaning to this special needs parenting journey.
“God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him.” 1 John 4:9 NLT
