Amy Julia Becker's Blog, page 30

When Love Shows Up

On Christmas we celebrate because love has shown up in our world. Not in some vague, abstract way. But love, in the flesh, in the person of Jesus. 

And when love shows up, there are a few things that can happen:

Our identity shiftsInjustice is exposedWe receive healing and freedomWe participate in love

I have learned these truths most poignantly through our daughter Penny. Before she was born, I worked to earn love and prove I was worthy of it. (I still do that more often than I wish.) Once I held her in my arms, I realized that she was beloved not because of her achievements, not because she was going to meet milestones on time, not because of her performance, but because she was our beautiful baby girl. She was beloved. And, I started to realize, so was I.

At that point, my identity shifted from achievement to belovedness. And then, the grief began. This recognition of her belovedness brought up in me an awareness of the ways I had lived with a hierarchy of human value and worth that cut some people off and welcomed others in. It exposed my own participation in injustice. It exposed ugly parts of my soul I didn’t want to see. It exposed sin.

And yet, the beauty of love is that it does not want to shame or harm me. It only wants to heal and free me. And so that same love that brought me to a place of ugly grief began a work of healing and freedom.

From there, and even in the midst of that process of recognition and transformation, I was invited to participate in love again and again and again. 

Jesus’ birth is the moment that love showed up, definitively, so that all humans could know we are invited to belovedness, freedom, and participation in love.

December 2008

More with Amy Julia:

Holy DisruptionSeason of Waiting and ImpossibilityS7 E7 | How Advent Resists the Culture Wars with Tish Harrison WarrenAdvent Devotional

Subscribe  to my newsletter to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest , and  YouTube , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

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Holy Disruption

When Mary hears the message that she has been chosen by God to be the mother of Jesus, Luke tells us she was “troubled.”

When King Herod hears from the three magi that Jesus has been born, Matthew tells us he was “troubled.” 

The news that Jesus is coming disrupts both of their lives and their plans and their conceptions of themselves and their expectations.

Herod responds with denial and violence and sends his soldiers to kill the baby boys in Bethlehem.

Mary responds with surrender and acceptance and receptivity.

The news of God’s love entering our world disrupts our expectations. It challenges us. It proclaims our belovedness apart from our achievements or worth. It exposes injustice. It invites us to healing and freedom. It threatens us with radical acceptance and grace. God’s love is a holy disruption that might trouble us deeply. 

How will we respond?

More with Amy Julia:

Season of Waiting and ImpossibilityS7 E7 | How Advent Resists the Culture Wars with Tish Harrison WarrenAdvent Devotional

Subscribe  to my newsletter to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest , and  YouTube , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

 

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My Favorite Movies and Shows in 2023

8 of my favorite movies and shows that I watched in 2023:

HEROIN(E) (documentary)

Heroin(e) follows three women who are responding with so much competence and compassion to the heroin epidemic in West Virginia. This film gave me one more glimpse of what happens when people choose to believe that everyone is broken and beautiful, worthy of healing, worthy of love.

Netflix’s DOWN FOR LOVE (reality show)

Penny and I loved watching this reality show about people with Down syndrome dating.

SHRINKING (tv show)

Peter and I loved the characters and the story. We laughed out loud and also cringed with the awkward and messy humanity of this show.

THE BEAR (tv series)

This show’s truth-telling about human dysfunction is deeply uncomfortable and real. I love how chaos juxtaposes with the equally real and true moments of beauty and love. (It took me until Episode 6 to understand what the hype was all about.)

A SMALL LIGHT (tv show)

This story of Miep Gies, the young woman who helped hide Anne Frank and her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. It’s a beautiful and heart wrenching story of the small steps we take towards or away from goodness, light, and love.

MADAM SECRETARY (tv series)

I need a show that I can watch all by myself when Peter is away. So I am proudly on season 3 and even feel like I have contrived a bit better understanding of the inner workings of the state department.

CHAMPIONS (movie)

It’s a feel-good (though often crass) film based on a true story. People with intellectual disabilities are well represented, the acting is terrific, and they tackle the everyday issues of bigotry and bias and hardship and friendship and family life.

BARBIE (movie)

Our whole family loved the new Barbie movie and it’s irreverent, fun, and ultimately thought-provoking questions about what it means to be human.

What movies and shows did you love in 2023?

More with Amy Julia:

Favorites and AJB RecommendsMy Favorite Books of 2023

December Favorites

Subscribe  to my newsletter to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest , and  YouTube , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

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Life in the Woods

There was a day when I realized that no doctor would ever emerge to say about Penny having Down syndrome, “It was touch and go for a while there, but now you’re out of the woods.” No, the woods were home. And we began to explore them, and make pathways through the tall trees, and find the open meadows, and revel in the richness of life under those branches.

Now, to stretch the analogy to its breaking point—as Penny turns 18 and finishes high school and looks toward the future—this little cottage tucked in between two giant oaks has become too small for us. It’s time to move, and no one knows exactly how to direct us or what kind of home we need next. We need to learn procedures and ask questions and read books. I’m taking a class to try to learn how to navigate this transition process. I’ve attended webinars about college placement. I’ve met with a lawyer and a financial planner.

It all feels overwhelming and big and easy to screw up and hard. Like it did nearly eighteen years ago, when she was born.

Except it is nothing like eighteen years ago. 

Because now we want to live in the woods. This is home, and it is beautiful and more expansive and real and true than anywhere else I have ever lived. That love that used to only be palpable in Penny’s presence has become far more steady, like the ground beneath our feet.

More with Amy Julia

Our Visit to the Mass General Down Syndrome ClinicNBC News Now | Teaching Kids About Disability and FriendshipUsing Our Spiritual Imaginations to Envision a Good and Possible FutureChristianity Today: God Teaches Me Through My Daughter with Down Syndrome

Subscribe  to my newsletter to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest , and  YouTube , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

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December Favorites

Here are some of my recent favorite books, a podcast, and an essay, as well as a beautiful song:

1. Novel: Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

What would it be like to have a replica of a human living with you? Where do emotions come from? What does it mean to be human? This book asks all these questions and more in a novel about the nature of morality, humanity, and love.

2. Non-Fiction: The Revolt against Humanity by Adam Kirsch

A VERY short but meaty primer that explains trans-humanism and anti-humanism and what they have in common and why we need humanism in order to flourish.

3. Memoir: Necessary Trouble by Drew Gilpin Faust

This memoir of Faust’s childhood and early adulthood doubles as a reminder of the turmoil of the ‘60s. Faust is an historian by trade, and she masterfully weaves together the history of the Civil Rights Movement and her own participation as a young white liberal southerner longing for the Beloved community to come into being.

4. Song: Hope Will Heal

At Hope Heals Camp last summer, I had the great honor of hearing Lily Hooten share this original song on the day she wrote it. It captures the sorrow so many of us experience on this earth, as well as the hope that can carry us through.

5. Cognoscenti Essay

I love this essay describing how much our worlds can change for the better, unexpectedly, when we receive our kids (with and without Down syndrome) for who they are.

6. On Being Podcast: Sara Hendren — Our Bodies, Aliveness, and the Built World

So many things I want to share about this conversation between Sara Hendren and Krista Tippett, but I was particularly grateful for her comments about her son Graham, who has Down syndrome, and how she sees him as “vulnerable in time.” She makes me think about what ways our society (and I) could change our attitudes towards time and become more welcoming and open.

More with Amy Julia:

Favorites and AJB RecommendsMy Favorite Books of 2023

Subscribe  to my newsletter to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest , and  YouTube , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

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Season of Waiting and Impossibility

As many of you know, my husband took a new job as the Head of School at Taft, a boarding school in Watertown, CT. His position was announced a year ago. He started the job in July.

He moved into the house that comes with the job last week, on the heels of an extensive renovation. For now, the girls and I are staying put in a rental house in Washington, CT, 25 minutes away, so that Penny can finish her senior year of high school.

We know it is the right decision for our kids. We still see each other a lot (we go there on the weekends. He comes to us two nights a week).

Season of Waiting and Impossibility

And it still feels like a season of interminable waiting. It also feels like a season of impossibility.

There are the little impossible things: It is impossible to remember which house has groceries in them and where I left my slippers.

But there are also the scary impossible things: Penny turns 18 at the end of December. She graduates from high school in June. She has an intellectual disability. Should we petition for guardianship? Should we navigate the somewhat uncharted waters of supported decision making? Navigating the choices ahead, supporting her, protecting her, and honoring her as the capable and competent young woman she is becoming all feels impossible. (I was on NBC News last week talking about how our family navigates disability.)

And then there are all the hopes and dreams I have for writing and speaking and teaching. I’m working on a new book idea, but finding a “big enough” audience for a publisher to want to publish those ideas—after over a decade of trying to build a platform, impossible.

How Advent Helps Me Find Hope

I suspect I am not alone in this season of waiting, or in this season of impossibility. Which is why Advent comes as a particular gift this year.

I’ve been heartened to think about Mary, pregnant, waiting for months on end to see whether the impossible birth would become real. She’s given me two reasons to hope.

First of all, that season of waiting was not a season of stagnation. Every single day of her pregnancy, new life was growing within Mary. What if there is both purpose and protection inherent within the waiting? What if our seasons of waiting are also seasons of incredibly important and necessary growth, seasons of preparation for something new to come forth?

Secondly, God was doing an impossible thing in the birth of this child. Madeleine L’Engle called Christmas the season of the “glorious impossible,” when God came to earth in the form of a baby. Advent is exactly the season for me to come to the end of myself, to come before God with my desperate need for God to do the impossible things. I will be faithful in what I’ve been given—the small tasks like getting milk in the fridge, the larger decisions about Penny’s future. I will be faithful to the work of writing and speaking. But I will also ask God to take care of the impossible, as Tish Harrison Warren said on my podcast last week, the “actual things in our actual world that we cannot solve on our own.”

What gloriously impossible things do you need to ask God to do in your life and in our world right now?

(And if you are also in a place where you need to pray for the impossible, here’s a recent post I wrote about how to use the spiritual imagination to do exactly that.)

Waiting with purpose. Praying for the impossible. It has all helped to turn my heart from fear and despair to hope and—at least some of the time—peace.

May the same be true for you.

More with Amy Julia:

S7 E7 | How Advent Resists the Culture Wars with Tish HarrisonUsing Our Spiritual Imaginations to Envision a Good and Possible FutureAdvent Devotional: Prepare Him RoomAdvent, Hope, and Canceled Parties

Subscribe  to my newsletter to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest , and  YouTube , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

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Our Visit to the Mass General Down Syndrome Clinic

Penny and I had a great visit to the Mass General Down Syndrome Clinic on Friday. Even though I so appreciated all the specialists and their respect and care for Penny, the best part was having some time together one-on-one. I got to introduce Penny to Google Maps (she navigated!) for the first time, and she convinced me that it was a good day for McDonald’s!

(Also, Dr. Brian Skotko noted that their clinic is no longer receiving new patients, but they have created an extensive video library that also includes their intake form so patients from far and wide can access their knowledge for free at dsc2u.org.)

Go with us behind the scenes…

More with Amy Julia:

Down Syndrome Clinic to YouWhy Our Down Syndrome Clinic Appointment Is Worth ItNBC News Now | Teaching Kids About Disability and FriendshipChristianity Today: God Teaches Me Through My Daughter with Down Syndrome

Subscribe  to my newsletter to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest , and  YouTube , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

The post Our Visit to the Mass General Down Syndrome Clinic appeared first on Amy Julia Becker.

My Favorite Books of 2023

10 books I loved in 2023:

NON-FICTIONEmotional Lives of Teenagers by Lisa D’Amour

I’ve referred to this book again and again to remember that teens who can express & acknowledge emotion of all sorts are healthy, even if they’re feeling sad or stressed out. {More…}

The Spiritual Child and The Awakened Brain by Lisa Miller

Dr. Lisa Miller shares research that suggests spirituality protects against depression, anxiety, & substance abuse at far higher rates than any other medication or intervention. {More…}

Never Enough by Jennifer Breheny Wallace

A book not just for me as a parent, but also as a human who is unlearning all the lies I’ve believed about what makes us valuable. {More…}

Life Worth Living by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, & Ryan McAnnally-Linz

A book about life’s big questions, how to pursue answers to them, and how to learn to disagree with respect, friendship, & kindness in the midst of those questions. {Podcast episode}

The Revolt against Humanity by Adam Kirsch

A VERY short but meaty primer that explains trans-humanism & anti-humanism and what they have in common & why we need humanism in order to flourish.

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRKing: A Life

Jonathan Eig’s masterful storytelling helps us wrestle with the complexities of King’s moral compromises & failures alongside his commitment to the gospel & to justice & his depth of conviction that goodness can win out. {More…}

Necessary Trouble by Drew Gilpin Faust

This memoir of Faust’s childhood and early adulthood weaves together the history of the Civil Rights Movement & her own participation as a young white liberal southerner longing for the Beloved community to come into being.

How Far to the Promised Land

Esau McCaulley’s beautiful memoir about the hurt & hope of being Black in America was a book I couldn’t put down. {Podcast episode}

NOVELThe Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

This novel is full of McBride’s characteristically quirky, fascinating, compelling prose. Dodo in particular represents all the people who are marginalized & vulnerable as a result of the power structures of this nation, and who can nevertheless forge friendships, community, & networks of courageous care that can bring light out of darkness. {More…}

More with Amy Julia:

Favorites and AJB RecommendsFavorite Books I Read in 2022Favorite Books for Kids and Adults That We Read in 20219 Non-Fiction Books I Loved in 2021

Subscribe  to my newsletter to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest , and  YouTube , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

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My Stressful, Fun Day at NBC

Before I headed into Rockefeller Center with my friend Niro to talk with NBC News about disability and friendship, we had to prepare. The brainstorming was the easy part. I had tons of thoughts about what we might say about mutuality and belonging and empathy and the challenges and gifts that all kids with disabilities (and their siblings and peers) have to offer. 

But I also realized that one of the reasons I became a writer is so that I can wear leggings or jeans all day every day and consider that being dressed up. So when Niro invited me to join her on NBC News, I had a problem on my hands. Again, I was not worried about the words. I spent hours perseverating about what I would wear. 

Thankfully, our 12-year-old daughter Marilee has a LOT more fashion sense than her mother. She helped me settle on an outfit, and then she agreed to do my hair before she went to school. And it felt fun to be dressed up and wear a little makeup (for me, a lot of makeup) and get mic’d up and see the inside of a studio and sit on a high chair at a glass table and talk for 4 minutes (twice) about family and friendship and disability. 

I should add that I spent many hours thinking about how it wouldn’t be worth it. The time and effort and stress of trying this for the first time and the risk of floundering on camera. My heart was pounding so hard that I thought the hosts might hear it. But then we got out there and Vicky and Morgan were warm and personable. And Niro is an old pro at this stuff and generously shared her position with me. And I got to talk about things that really matter to me. 

It was stressful. It was so fun. 

What things do you find are both stressful and fun at the same time? Are they worth it?

Watch Segment 1

Watch Segment 2

More with Amy Julia:

Why Our Down Syndrome Clinic Appointment Is Worth ItChristianity Today: God Teaches Me Through My Daughter with Down SyndromeUsing Our Spiritual Imaginations to Envision a Good and Possible Future

Subscribe  to my newsletter to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest , and  YouTube , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

The post My Stressful, Fun Day at NBC appeared first on Amy Julia Becker.

NBC News Now | Teaching Kids About Disability and Friendship

Watch Segment 1

Watch Segment 2

I loved being able to talk yesterday about friendship and disability with my friend Niro Feliciano on NBC News Now. One thing I talked about was neutralizing the language around disability. With all of our kids, instead of talking about weaknesses or problems, we talk about the challenges they face and the gifts they can offer, which are different for each child. We’re not saying there are no differences or that disability isn’t real. But we are saying that we can appreciate each other and build relationships of mutuality.

We also talked about stressors kids with disabilities can face when trying to make friends, friendship tips, how to talk to kids about their sibling’s disability, and ways to educated kids about other children’s disabilities.

Watch Segment 1

Watch Segment 2

Grateful for this opportunity!

More with Amy Julia:

The GoodHard Story podcast: Ask Amy JuliaChristianity Today: God Teaches Me Through My Daughter with Down SyndromeNPR Cognoscenti: The future I imagine for my daughter

Subscribe  to my newsletter to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , Twitter ,  Pinterest , and  YouTube , and you can subscribe to my  Love Is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platform. 

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