Seasons of Doubt

Hi Friends, it's April! I can't wait to see flowers start to bloom and trees start to bud after this winter season. Living in northern Indiana, we get to experience all four seasons very distinctly.

The theme in the Hope Anew Online Community this month is Questions, especially regarding God, Scriptures, and faith. This journey in disability and special needs has a way of making us question and rethink our worldview and priorities. Sometimes, whether we want to question them or not. We want to encourage you that if you are going through a time of unrest in your view of life and God, the Hope Anew Online Community is a safe place to voice those doubts, ask those questions, and work through that process. 

God is incredibly patient and understanding with us. He invites us to come to Him with our cares, fears, doubts, disappointments, misunderstandings, anger, and grief. He offers salvation because He knows we are a mess. He doesn't expect us to come to Him polished and perfect. He holds His arms wide in welcome, loving us as we are, and holds our hand as we take the next step in becoming more like Him. 

If you are currently in a time of questioning God, feeling abandoned and disillusioned by Him, keep asking, keep seeking, keep bringing those doubts, fears, anger, and grief to Him. Just as winter in Indiana can seem like it will never end, time and history show us that it will. Spring will come, flowers will bloom in their own right time if we wait for it.

If you keep pressing into God, asking questions, seeking HIM for who He is, He will meet your need for Him. His answer may not be what you were expecting or desiring, but it will be a good answer because that is His character. He is a good Father. He sees you and has promised never to abandon His children. 

All fees related to the community have been waived, so you can now join for free. I’m loving having a supportive, encouraging community of parents who “get it” and would love to have you join us!

Sarah McGuire  is the Mom of two boys and co-founder of Hope Anew, a nonprofit that guides parents to Christ-centered hope and healing. You can follow Hope Anew on Facebook here. You can also check out Hope Anew’s Online Community here!

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

Yes, my son was definitely onto something. Thank you God for Jesus!

May we be able to grasp God’s unstoppable, never-ending love for each of us this Holy Week and always. 

Bio: Jenn Soehnlin is a middle school English teacher and mother to two boys who are precious blessings and who both have special needs. She is the author of Embracing This Special Life: Learning to Flourish as a Mother of a Child with Special Needs.

Jenn enjoys blogging about faith, praying Scripture, and special needs parenting at www.embracing.life. You can join her Facebook group for special needs mothers Embracing This Special Life for online support, community, and encouragement. 

Asking Why

I have always been a firm believer in starting with why. I think that it’s the most fundamental human question and far too often we simply drift through life trying to keep ourselves busy or amused or whatever just so we don’t have to face that question.  

Every parent of an autistic child asks why. Why did this happen to my child? Why did this happen to me? Why is my child acting this way? Why can’t I have one normal day? Why, God? Why? (With alternating exasperation and rage, I find.)

I wish I had a good answer. I don’t. But then I am not a finished product yet, and neither is my autistic son. Sometimes there simply isn’t a why, at least not one we can get to in the here and now.

In my self-pitying moments I wonder if God ever asks himself why about us. I have multiple theological degrees. I can give you the arguments and the clichés about God not being surprised by the dumb things that we do.

But then I think about Matthew’s account of Jesus on the cross and that most disturbing question: “About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ (which means ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’)” (Matthew 27:46, NIV).

Jesus asks why. He knows the answer. That’s not the point. The point is that God himself, the second person of the Trinity, knows such extreme agony, such extreme suffering that he calls out, “WHY?!” to the Father.

For most of us, when it comes to our kids, when it comes to the pain in our spouses and all of the lost hopes and dreams, “why” is less about a good reason than it is a demand that this all matters somehow, that it means something. To be sure, we would like reasons too.

I am learning to come at why from new angles. And I am learning that sometimes why is less important than I thought. Sometimes you need to get in there and do even when you don’t have all of the right answers or even half of the information that you feel like you need.

As much as I want it, Nate can’t give me a why. He can’t explain it. And he gives few clues to figure it out. And that is perhaps the hardest part. Sometimes you have to break things down into component parts to figure out how they fit together, to get to why. I would have never thought that years of oil and sawdust and hammers and wrenches and watching my father tear apart cars and rebuild garage doors from scratch—and well, a hundred other things I don’t remember—would help me to understand my son. I never would have thought that it might take a son with autism to jump-start me from being paralyzed by why and start doing something.

Jesus asked the Father why.

The answer was us—was me.

Which means that He is with us through all of our whys.

Adapted from the chapter “Why Versus What” in Life on the Spectrum.

Written by Kevin O’Brien

Kevin O’Brien is a freelance writer and marketing consultant living in the far western suburbs of Chicago with his wife, 3 children, a dog, and a cat. Kevin’s middle son, Nathan, is autistic. He is a contributing author to Life on the Spectrum, a book to encourage and inspire parents and caregivers of children with autism, by parents of children on the autism spectrum  An ordained minister and veteran of the Christian publishing industry, he has helped develop, write content for, launch and market several Bibles. Kevin loves to learn new things, and would prefer to spend his time reading, speaking, writing, woodworking and watching the Chicago Blackhawks. He occasionally tweets @kevinrobrienthm and can be found online at www.treadingthedawn.com .

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