The best of therapies

She has a seizure about once a month, while she's falling asleep. Many days she loses control of her bowel or bladder, still, at almost five. She has her raspy Bostonian lisp that reminds everyone of Fran Drescher, but through speech therapy, is relearning how to use her tongue to swallow and speak more clearly.

She's a quirky one, with hilarious postures, faces, and ways of pairing words that often has our whole family in giggles. She's stick straight stiff-limbed and melts only after a half hour of rhythmic rocking and sucking at bedtime. Even then, she sleeps stiff, and I have to use force to bend her joints when I carry her back to her bed from ours in the dark of the night.

Her eyes don't always track together, and she is a klutzy one, running into things frequently and forever bonking her head and nose on things, with a torrent of tears to follow.

But the best of therapies for my child-forever-changed are the simple things in life. Riding horseback with the York girls. Jumping on her trampoline. Going swimming. Conversing over books with Mama.

I wonder if it is different for any other child? We all have our quirks, our weaknesses and strengths. I am in therapy myself, and there I learn about fear and anxiety and how it steals from the moment you're in and borrows trouble from tomorrow.

So I try to let her do what she can, try to protect her, but allow her freedom. I try not to imagine a 20-year-old who sleeps in a diaper and poops in her pants. I try to believe that she will be fully functional as an adult, and just focus on the moment. Watching her navigate the barn stairs in her own fashion. Smiling huge over the horses, and giving her deep, tenor belly laugh so many hundreds of times each day.

Please, Lord, keep healing. And keep us all focused on the ABILITY in disability. The CAN in can't. The many prayers answered instead of the prayers still being prayed.

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work. Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he distributes them to each one, just as he determines. (from I Corinthians 12)

Tasting the water of affliction

The clouds chase each other across the cadet blue of the afternoon sky, and kids bend to pick up rocks and toss them back into Superior's frigid waves.

I hold Amy's hand as she tries, unsteadily, to place a rock on the tower her siblings are building.

I set her down and she sits stiffly between her two little guardians, the older sisters who flank her always and tenderly watch out for the myriad dangers and hurts that linger in the wings of every ordinary day.

Her kalamata olive eyes dance tawny in the gold of the afternoon sun.  I am thinking of orphans, and sick babies in hospitals...all the mission fields abandoned for the one of hearth and home.  She teaches me, in new ways daily, whatever I do for this little one, I do for Christ. (Matthew 25:40) There is no abandoning of mission when I am solidly on the path He has laid before me.  More and more, we are faced with the gut-wrenching decisions, what to hold her back from, what to let her try (and so often fail, fall, and hurt for).  Where to let her stretch her wings and when to hold her close.  So many times, too, when there is no decision even to be made, as she lays like a plank in our arms, spilling over the bounds of our laps and stretching the muscles in our back taut with her 33 pounds of seizing body.  So many times that she is choking, gagging, stumbling, stuck saying one word over and over, cannot play, laugh, run, walk, smile, soothe.  This path, like the other mission paths He's called me to, is the kind that breaks your heart open and spills it out...spills out all the love you've hedged in there, and all the pain, too.

And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide Himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, "This is the way, walk in it," when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left. You shall have a song as in the night when a holy feast is kept, and gladness of heart, as when one sets out to the sound of the flute to go to the mountain of the LORD, to the Rock of Israel. (from Isaiah 30)