Whenever I need a reminder of how much good there is in the world, I look at my son. He reminds me, over and over again, what love looks like. In the fall, he collects acorns and leaves them on our front step for the squirrels. He always worries they won't have enough food to make it through winter. When his brothers are sick, he gathers up his favorite stuffed animals and offers them as a get well soon present. He wakes me up in the middle of the night, just to say, "Mom, I can't stop thinking about how much I love you." He has a big heart filled to the brim with goodness.
Which is why it is so hard for me to see him struggle - and he struggles a lot. He has what we in the special needs parenting world refer to as an alphabet soup of disorders. They all have important, scary sounding names and they all mean that my son's brain isn't wired to easily function in the chaotic, confusing, complex world we live in.
Everyday life is a challenge for him and it can be gut-wrenching for me to watch him face it.
I have believed in God all my life, but when my son was first diagnosed five years ago, I decided God and I were on a break. I unceremoniously cut Him out of my life. Armed with a 19-page neurological evaluation and a list of recommended next steps, I was ready to go to battle for my son - and God wasn’t invited. Instead, I filled up all the places where He used to be with determined self-reliance and a rather large dose of “righteous” anger.
In the weeks and months that followed, I was on a mission. I enrolled our son in a special needs preschool. I speed-read books about developmental disorders and highlighted the important parts for my husband. I researched therapies, medications and specialized diets. I filled our calendar with therapy sessions and doctors’ appointments.
I didn’t talk to God about any of it.
Then came the day when I finished everything on the list of recommended next steps. “What should we do next?” I asked my son’s behavior therapist, “What else can we do?” “You’re doing everything! You’re doing all the right things,” she told me, “I wish that every parent would be as proactive as you.” I know she was trying to reassure me. Instead, I was devastated and terrified. We were doing everything we could possibly do…and my son was still struggling. He might always be struggling.
Suddenly, after months of having nothing to say, I couldn’t stop talking to God – yelling at Him, actually.
Why would you let this happen to my son?
Why would you do this any child?
Why don’t you make it better?”
I raged “WHY, WHY, WHY… ???
Infuriatingly, no matter how much I yelled, God remained silent.
One night, my son was going through a period of exceptionally awful sleep and I had been up with him for hours. He’d finally drifted off stretched out across my lap and I just sat there in the dark, staring at his perfect little face, experiencing that lost and lonely feeling that is so easy to stumble into at 3:30 am. “Where are you, God?” I whispered, “Where are You? I’m scared. I don’t know how to do this. I need you to help me, but I don’t know where You are.”
A few days later, I got my answer.
We had eaten dinner at my parents’ house and were rushing to get home for bedtime. Tired and overstimulated, my son refused to put on his shoes. He didn’t like the way his socks felt. I sent my husband and two other boys out to the car and knelt on the floor, straightening and re-straightening his socks until the seams finally lined up perfectly with his toes. I shoved his shoes on and ran out the door, leaving my purse behind. When I came back in to get it, my dad stopped me and said, “I can’t believe how patient you are with him. When did you get to be so patient?”
My Dad and I have a lot of things in common, but patience has never been one of them. Yet, somehow, I had become patient - endlessly patient - with my son. Where had all that patience come from? It became obvious that even though I had cut God out, He hadn’t cut me out. I’d been so busy running around trying to fix everything myself that I hadn’t noticed He’d been busy too. While I’d ignored Him and then spent months bombarding Him with angry outbursts and demands for an explanation, He’d quietly been filling me up with patience.
I understood in that moment that God had always been right there with me. I’d just been too angry and scared to realize it.
I wish I could say that was the last time I ever let anger and fear separate me from God, but that’s not the case. It’s something I struggle with all the time. When the sick get better, when anger gives way to forgiveness, when help finds those who need it – it’s easy for me to see God at work in our lives.
But sometimes there isn’t a happy ending; things don’t always get tied up with a neat little bow. Sometimes diseases aren’t cured and relationships fall apart and help doesn’t come. Life can be messy and complicated and hard. It’s easy to lose sight of God during the messy, complicated, hard stuff. It’s easy to get stuck on the “whys”. At least for me it is.
Here’s the thing though: God never promises us life is going to be easy or fair. He doesn’t promise that we are always going to understand it. What He does promise, is that if we put our trust in Him, He will never abandon us. He promises “When you go through deep waters, I will be with you.”
So when fear and doubt creep into my life and start to pull me away from God, I try to focus less on asking “Why?” and more on asking “Where are You, God?”
Because the answer to that question is always, “I am here.”
Whenever I feel defeated, whenever I feel like I can’t make it through, I remind myself I don’t have to try to do it on my own. As long as I turn to God and put my faith in Him, I will never walk alone.
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