What to Remember When You’re Devastated and Without Hope

Sometime last month a newly expecting mother contacted me, scared out of her mind because the baby growing in her womb was diagnosed with Down syndrome.

This is not a rare occurrence for me.

Photo Credit: Darren Johnson, Creative Commons

You see, I’ve adopted two kids with Down syndrome, and for various reasons, people have decided that qualifies me to offer hope and to speak reason into the lives of mothers and fathers who, like most people, feel complete devastation at the Down syndrome diagnosis of their new or unborn child.

It’s a very strange feeling for me.

On one hand, the person trusts me and my desire to parent children with Down syndrome enough to look to me for a thread of hope to grab onto.

On the other hand, the person I am offering hope to is essentially looking at my children, the ones I would jump in front of a moving train for, and communicating to me that they are traumatized at the reality that their future child will be like mine.

Such a strange conversation to have.

And while I’d like to shake them and tell them to stop feeling so sad about something so great, I am always careful to begin with grace. Always so much grace.

Because I was that person, before I knew any better.

I was dead set on doing everything within my ability to make my life one of comfort and ease, every detail planned out. Believe me when I say adopting two children with Down syndrome never fit under the “comfortable” or “easy” categories.

It simply was never in the plans.

Until one day it was.

One day I found God had pushed me off of the path I had set out for myself, straight into a pile of dirt. For awhile I sat there broken by infertility, adoption, Down syndrome. But it didn’t take long for me to notice that there, among the uncomfortable messiness of it all, was beauty to be discovered.

There is beauty in the broken pieces.

I worry too many of us are going about life looking to travel down a path brightly lit with adorable, solar-powered lights, covered in fresh rose petals. Yet, somewhere down the road, we have forgotten that those very roses would never have bloomed if not for the pile of dirt they grew from.

We wake up everyday wanting the roses without the dirt.

As my life has unfolded, by God’s goodness and grace, I’ve found myself farther and farther from the rose petal path I had been trying so fervently to travel down. God has been teaching me that true beauty can only be found in the dirt.

To understand and appreciate the beauty of a flower, we have to know the dirt from which it bloomed.