The Life We Never Expected: Hopeful Reflections on the Challenges of Parenting Children with Special Needs

by Andrew Wilson

Jesus, my Shepherd, doesn’t seem to appraise value in the same way as I do. His spreadsheet is completely different from mine. He is interested in the wasteful expenditure of love and energy, just because it’s in keeping with the sort of crazy love and sacrifice he showed in his life and death.

I love my kids most not by loving them the most but by first loving God. As soon as I take my eyes off him and my attitude falters and I begin to believe that I alone must push for them and control their destinies, the unbearable weight of playing God soon becomes apparent. When I put my eyes back on the One who always deserves my attention, then whatever fake battles are being lost around me, the true one is being won. It makes all the difference.

Up until I was about thirty, I couldn’t fathom why so many of the psalms were about pain. Now I’m thirty-five, and I can’t fathom why so many of them are about something else.

John Stott was once asked what the secret of his Christian life was, and he replied, “Knowing how much sleep I need, and getting it.”

So it’s no coincidence that the Scriptures talk about fasting from various physical joys at times—food, drink, sex—but never from sleep. Soldiering on in exhaustion, proudly wearing the badge of tiredness, can feel heroic and strangely rewarding. But it’s extremely foolish.

And simply by being autistic, they draw mercy and compassion from those around them, which increases the currency of God’s qualities in general circulation today.

If what you think you have is greater than what you think you deserve, then that’s where thankfulness comes from. If what you think you deserve is greater than what you think you have, then that’s where bitterness comes from. Ouch.

So I have to remember: the story is not mine to save. The pressure to write a story that makes sense of what has happened to us, as acute as it can feel, must be resisted; God is the great storyteller, the divine happy-ending maker, and I’m not. I am a character in God’s story, not the author of my own, and it is God’s responsibility to redeem all things, to make all things work together for good, and, as Sam Gamgee puts it in The Lord of the Rings, to make everything that is sad come untrue.20

Cholera and cancer are consigned to the cosmic dumpster for all eternity.

The reason why humanity is held accountable and judged, according to Romans 1:18–32, is that we knew the truth about God and suppressed it. But those things aren’t true of a lot of people with learning disabilities, because they cannot sufficiently understand the world. So I suspect people who cannot understand the gospel, because of their disabilities, are going to receive grace from God anyway. (This is also what John Piper argues in Let the Nations Be Glad. And he’s not that fluffy.) Having said all that, we try to find ways to communicate the gospel to them anyway!

All these graces may fade, and every earthly gift will finally perish. But the Giver stands forever, and he will always keep on giving.

As time goes on, some of his gifts will come to an end, but they will be replaced by new ones, more suited to our new circumstances and providing more opportunity to trust in future grace.