Truths I Want My Special Needs (Well Any) Kid to Know- Part 5- Faith

CHAPTER 4: The 2^nd Identity Marker-  Faith

(photos from Ruthie's baptism in September because that was a pretty cool faith in action day for our family)

The next key marker from my survey on where kids find their identity is faith.  This influence was seen scattered throughout the groups but was overwhelmingly evident in the kids who attended a private Christian school.  While this may be my second chapter on identity markers, it is no way second in importance.  As a Christian, my greatest hope for my children is that they would find their identity in Christ first and then filter all of the other contributors through that reality.   

I have been thinking on this piece for months now as I personally evaluate how I am doing at applying these principles to my own parenting.  Our family is actively involved in the ministry of Pine Cove Christian Camps and we attend their family camp every summer.   One of our favorite things about Pine Cove is that they employee faith-filled college students as their counselors.  I had an interesting conversation with one of those students while sitting poolside at camp a few years ago.  She was telling me her story of her family leaving the church after her parents divorced and how she came back to the church on her own as a 17-year old.  I asked her what internally brought about the desire to own her faith, to make it hers, at that stage of life.  Her answer was as powerful as her testimony.  She said, “I realized that I was a stranger to the identity I had been portraying.”   Let me just write that one more time so it can possibly land on you like it landed on me.  This student, as a teenager, returned to the church on her own because she realized that she was a stranger to the Christian identity she had been taught to portray.  She claimed to be a Christian but she had no idea what that really meant. 

I would be willing to bet that her statement is true not only for a large percentage of other teens but probably a lot of adults as well.  How many people do we know who are strangers to the identity that they portray?  Unfortunately, helping our children authentically find their identity in Christ is not as simple as sending them to Sunday school or private Christian school.  The kids at the private school that I polled had all of the right language but what we have seen in the church is that the language of faith and identity can be learned but never truly personalized.  Like any other culture, speaking the language does not make us that nationality.   My son is learning Chinese and can speak it quite well but he is still the whitest kid in his class and a stranger to what it means to be Asian.   I am okay with that in his Chinese class, but I want something far more transformative for his identity as a Christian. 

 Did you know that 70% of kids drop out of church when they go off to college?  One might argue (and they have) that those kids did not truly personalize their faith but instead identified more with the activities surrounding it.  When the events and friend groups were no longer present, neither was their faith.  A 2017 study of Protestant churchgoers found that the single greatest predictor of if your child will stay in the church to adulthood is if they regularly read the Bible while growing up.  I believe we could take this information and apply it two different ways.  A potentially less rewarding way would be to require our children to read the Bible daily so that they would end up like the kids in this study – a cause and effect response.   A better, and I believe more fruitful way, to apply this finding is to see Bible reading not necessarily as much as a prescription for change but more as an indicator of authentic transformation that has already occurred and led to a genuine desire for spiritual growth.    So getting back to our kids, if I want to raise a Jack in a world of Johns, a kid who doesn’t walk away from his faith when he no longer has a weekly activity to practice it with, I have to have my own identity firmly rooted in a transformative relationship with Christ, instead of a performance-based relationship.  It is the only way I will be qualified to  help him do the same.   I can’t be on the bandwagon of those who claim Christianity but actually are a stranger to it.  That’s a lot to unpack but we have to start there because we cannot teach what we have not experienced.  I love lists so I made a short one for you on living a transformed life. 

5 CHARACTERISTICS OF PEOPLE WHO LIVE OUT TRANSFORMED LIVES:

1.  RELATING TO OTHERS:  They are more grace-filled then performance-measured when relating to others.   They are more concerned about their children’s growth than their children’s performance.  They will not be angry when their child messes up and embarrasses them but instead thank God for the teaching opportunity that they have been given while their child is still under their roof.  I have a good friend whose son said something insensitive to a girl at his school.  The school responded rather aggressively and took action against him that kept him from receiving some honors that he otherwise would have been eligible for.  His mother was momentarily embarrassed but then quickly changed her view to the one I am referencing here.  She settled with great relief that he made that mistake as a teenager at school and under her roof instead of as an adult in the workplace.  It was not her kid’s job to make her look good with a spotless high school performance.  It was her job to grant him grace as she helped him navigate the rough waters of high school and learn the lessons that he needed in order to be more successful in later in life.   She modeled this so well for me that I will never forget it. 

I believe this concept of grace-filled v. performance-driven living is even more complicated for our children to walk out personally because of the messages that they encounter through social media.  They exist in a day where value gets measured in number of likes, follows, and virtual friends.  In order to achieve those, our children feel as though they have to portray a digital reality that is based more on perfection than authenticity.  When they stop writing their own script long enough to relate to someone else’s, it is near impossible to walk in biblical principles like grace and mercy.  It is our charge as their parents to help our children learn to see beyond the stories that people tell on social media and into the reality of their messed up lives.   This way our children can stand among the few who will be equipped to meet people where they truly are.  People who live transformed lives relate to people through authenticity and grace. 

2.     RELATING TO GOD:  Kids who are on the path to not being a stranger to the faith identity that they portray genuinely desire to have a personal relationship with God.   I remember the day when Jesus went from being a historical figure we paid homage to every Sunday to a person that I wanted to know.  My ninth grade Algebra teacher told me, “Our parents and our friends are only with us for a season but Jesus is the only one who will never leave you.”   It clicked for me in that moment.  I wanted to know that Guy who knew everything about me and would never leave.   I am not suggesting that we all sit down and try to craft the right sentence to reach that place in our child’s heart that convinces them to pursue God personally.  That’s not our job.  Our job is to model that relationship for them and help them understand that Jesus is not just a historical figure worth studying but personal being worth knowing.  

3.     RELATING TO THEMSELVES:  People who have a healthy identity in Christ, are self-aware enough to know their limitations and the priority of restful peace with God over exhausted service for him.  It’s the story from Luke 10 where Martha is slaving away to serve Jesus and Mary just wants to sit at his feet.   Service is good and needs to be done but knowing Jesus is better.  We need to help our kids appreciate that balance by modeling it for them.   Can I confess for a moment that this is where I struggle the most.   I’m not any more of a master at these than you are.  It’s a journey but one worth pursuing. 

4.     RELATING TO THEIR RESOURCES:  Perhaps the greatest test of if we are truly linked to the identity we portray is if we are willing to commit our resources to it.   People who find their identity in Christ prayerfully and sacrificially give of their resources to ministry because they truly see God as their provider.   We are training our children to hold their stuff with an open hand.  I don’t know about you, but I tend to find that generous adults raise generous kids and entitled adults raise entitled kids.  In my house, we have a saying:  “We are entitled to nothing.”  I think we need to raise our kids to be both generous and intentional.  Generosity flows from the heart and intentionality flows from good stewardship.   We do a lot of shopping from ministry fundraisers and fair-trade organizations.  It’s generous but even more, its intentional.   Intentionality is not just dropping $ toward the next envelope but determining which opportunities would yield the greatest benefit to the kingdom.   Several years ago, Trent and I started a giving fund (an idea we stole from another friend) that we could allocate from when we saw places were support was needed.  We then involve our kids in that opportunity and explain how we decide what to participate in and what not to.  I want to raise my kids to be both generous and intentional in their generosity.   

5.     RELATING TO ETERNITY:  People who have their identity in Christ and are not strangers to that identity and they live for an eternal impact over momentary satisfaction.  They truly get it – life on earth is not about life on earth.  Eternity begins for us the moment we decide to follow Jesus.   I want my kids to walk in light of eternity today and the reflection of that to be seen in how they sacrifice momentary security and comfort for eternal impact.  I want them to see their struggles as just a speck of time in light of the expanse of eternity.  I want them to desire to finish well and hear, “Well done my good and faithful servant.”

So to wrap this up, our children are growing up in an age where they are being taught how to superficially portray their identity through the help of organized religion and social media.  Our goal is to parent in a way that our kids see genuine faith in action, are equipped to understand it, and are challenged to live up to it.  Then maybe, they won’t find themselves a stranger to the identity that they portray. 

Truths I Want My Special Needs Kid to Know- Part 4

Taking Hold of That Which We Cannot Control.

I call the first identity marker or identity-shaping category, “that which we cannot control,” because our disabilities or life experiences are truly completely out of our hands and we have no power to go back and change them or rewrite that part of our story.    As a parent of a special needs child, I often wonder what I could have done differently to change the outcome for my child.   Before I knew Jack’s condition was genetic, I wondered if it was because I worried too much in my first trimester or was it because I painted my husbands office while I was pregnant.   When my youngest suffered 2 strokes that were caused by a strep infection, I would have given anything to go back in time and not have placed her in the YMCA childcare class where she most likely caught strep.  I couldn’t (and still can’t) wrap my brain around what that one workout class cost that child, but we can’t quarantine ourselves in our homes to protect ourselves from the unknown and we certainly can’t turn back time and keep “that which we cannot control” from ever happening.  

What we can do (and help our kids do) is take that life experience or circumstance and look at it through a different lens.  Instead of finding our identity in the existence of that circumstance, we can be defined by how we receive, interpret, and respond to it.  You can probably see by now that my favorite stories are of those people who allow “that which they cannot control” to push them to a greater purpose. 

When Steven Curtis Chapman lost his 5-year old daughter in a tragic accident, he and his family were understandably devastated.  I have never lost a child and so I am completely unqualified to even try to put into words the pain they must have felt.  Instead, I want to focus on what they did next because it was pretty incredible. In the midst of their grief, they opened an orphanage in China that has now served over 2000 special needs children while offering them quality medical care.  Maria’s Big House of Hope has also seen over 150 children placed into forever homes.  In the description on their website, it says, “That big blue house in Luoyang is proof of God’s redemption and of his ability to bring beauty from the ashes.”

Oh my goodness I could tell 100 stories like those but this is not about other people’s stories.  It is about helping your child, take their own circumstance, and write their own story.   So what are some practical ways to help them do that?   I have 4 categories to help us navigate those waters. 

1. Personal Strengths – We need to look for places where they can shine either through their challenge or in spite of it. 

My daughter Ruthie, who has arthrogryposis of her arms and hands, spent the first 2 ½ years of her life in an orphanage doing everything with her feet.   Her feet were basically her hands and so what was meant to limit her actually gave her crazy foot skills.  So when she was 4, we enrolled her in soccer.  From the first game, Ruthie was that kid kicking the ball down the field while everyone else was picking flowers.  Today, I love watching her in a one-on-one scenario where she gets to move the ball with her feet in ways that others might only be able to do with their hands.  She loves soccer and it has given me the opportunity to point out to her that arthrogryposis just might have helped her in soccer as much as someone would have expected it to limit her.  

In the spring of 2016, I attended a conference for parents of children with Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia.  One of the speakers at the conference was Rebecca Hart, a Paralympic athlete with HSP.  Rebecca is an equestrian.  She reports that horses allowed her to turn her anger into passion.  She says that, “Horses were her equalizer.”  Rebecca found her passion through her condition and then found success in spite of it.   I don’t know Rebecca’s parents, but I rejoice with them in my heart because I know the joy they must feel to see their special needs daughter, whose trajectory was at one point concerning, to now be living her passion. 

We will talk more about discovering your child’s individual strengths in another chapter.  Here I hope to open your eyes to the possibility that your child’s experience or special need may set them up for success in an area that you never anticipated and it is worth your time and energy to explore that. 

2. Positive Action – It is an awesome moment when you can help your child to see the world apart from their personal struggle and then step outside of their pain to serve someone else in theirs.   

A friend of mine went through a divorce just a few months before Hurricane Harvey hit our city.  She had just moved her children out of their family home and into a much smaller rental to settle into their new reality when the floodwaters came.  Here is her testimony from those days and her parenting win:  “When we flooded in Harvey, I made sure that the kids thanked each person who helped us, donated stuff, etc. so they could see where their new ‘stuff’ came from.  We also have been going to a homeless shelter once a month for the last several years to throw birthday parties for homeless kids, so after Harvey when we went and they realized that the kids there lived like we had after Harvey, but they did it EVERY day; it had a huge impact on their frame of mind.  They all were much more appreciative of the kids circumstances then than they had ever been before.  It was very eye-opening, and has stuck with them.  Now when we go each month they insist on taking toys, books, clothes, etc. to the kids there so they can be blessed like we were.”  Her kids came out of a terrible year of tragedy heaped upon disappointment with a lesson on gratitude and perspective.   I think it is important to note that she was taking her children to the homeless shelter before her divorce and Hurricane Harvey.  She made an intentional effort of instilling a heart of service and gratitude into her children before it became critically necessary.  

Service for your child may initially look and feel to them like forced labor.   That is perfectly okay.  They can’t feel compassion for what they have not seen or experienced.  Your goal, however, is for them to transition (like my friends whose house flooded in Harvey) from kids who participate out of duty or personal entertainment to kids who participate out of compassion and a deeply rooted desire to serve. 

One final note, when looking for a place for your child to serve, consider your child’s passions, giftings, and own life experience.   Signing my 17-year old up to serve in an inner city football league would be a total failure.  The kid hates sports.  However, he found his passion through serving in a different inner-city ministry.   Seeing how God was shaping his heart for service, I recently pulled him out of school to take him to China for a week to work with special needs orphans there.   Most adults would not have been as useful and servant-hearted on that trip as he was.   If you guys grabbed coffee next week, I am fairly certain that he would tell you that his opportunities to give back have not only shaped how he views his own struggles but have been the vehicle through which God has captured his heart for service after he finishes high school.   

3. Ongoing Purpose – The third suggestion for helping your child have a healthy perspective of their own circumstance is to enable them see that they have an ongoing purpose even in midst of their suffering.

I have a friend who lost her husband to cancer 10+ years ago.  Her daughter was in elementary school at the time and wrote this regarding her experience:  “Even though my brother and I lost my dad at a young age, our mom never let us use that as an excuse.  She would continually push us to give 110% in everything we did because that’s how our father raised us.  We weren’t allowed to become bratty-kids (although I definitely had my moments/phases) because she would always remind us that she and dad had raised us better than that.  Basically, she did a really phenomenal job of instilling in us the fact that just because Dad was gone doesn’t mean everything he ever taught us was gone with him, and that we should always try to honor his memory and make him proud. I feel like this really pushed me to get to where I am today, and I know I’m not done with school and in the real world yet, but I’m almost there.”  My friend did an awesome job at teaching her children that the hope and purpose for their lives was bigger than their loss.

This is where we teach our children that God created them for a purpose and that He was not taken off guard or surprised when they came against this challenge they now face.  Instead, God is likely using this experience to help shape them into the person they need to be so they can better walk in their created purpose.   

4. Lasting Perspective – Finally when it comes to helping our children have a right relationship with their circumstance, we need to give them lasting perspective.  When Corrie Ten Boom, who wrote The Hiding Place, was placed in the back room of a Nazi prison camp that was so infested with fleas that the guards would not even enter, she started a Bible study.  That flea-infested location, which felt like torture placed upon torture, turned out to be the safest place to teach others about Jesus because the guards wanted nothing to do with it.   When she realized the blessing of her location instead of the curse of it, she was granted perspective. 

This next idea is so important to me that it was originally slated to be it’s own chapter.  One way we can give our children lasting perspective is to help them see that everyone has something that they are dealing with.  My brother has a great statement that really brought this home for me.  He says, “If we all took our ‘something’ and threw it into a pile to be redistributed randomly, we would jump into that pile and fight like hell to get our own ‘something’ back.”  I think it’s true but we can’t appreciate that until we stop looking at our own circumstance long enough to appreciate the significance of someone else’s.  When we truly appreciate another’s struggle, our own becomes less burdensome and we are suddenly not alone.   

One day, while driving in the car, Jack and I had the pile redistributing conversation.  I would have him name someone who he thought had no issues and then I trusted him with the insight of what they were actually battling.  Boy A, who seems to have it all together, he is dyslexic and struggles every day to get through school.  Boy B, who was mean to you in class, has a parent battling cancer.  Boy C, who you see playing outside physically uninhibited, his parents are going through a divorce and his father is moving out.   Everybody has something and the sooner we can help our kids appreciate that, the sooner they can move from a state of feeling cheated by life to feeling compassion for others who are also struggling through it. 

 This last example is raw but honest.  I only share it because there are some of you who I am confident want to shoot me the middle finger when I suggest something like perspective in your unimaginable circumstance.  I get it. Maybe I even deserve it.  When my mom died, the wife of her first cousin stepped in to play a significant role in my life.  I affectionately called her “Aunt Mary” even though she really wasn’t my aunt at all.   You might remember that I mentioned her in the introduction.  She is significant here because she invited me to church, bought me a Bible, and told me about Jesus in a personal way that my previous church upbringing full of rituals had not.  My life was shaped by my Aunt Mary’s influence and I have my faith because of her investment in me after the loss of my mother.  If my mother had not passed away, the God fearing wife of her first cousin would not have stepped in and introduced me to the Author of my faith.  I miss my mother dearly and not a day goes by when I don’t wish that she were in my life and the life of my children.  I also have the raw and eternal perspective that her passing put into motion a chain of events that led me to Jesus.   Perspective is both hard and beautiful sometimes.

So to wrap up this chapter and attempt to pull it all together, let’s travel back for a moment to where we started.   Our children have the potential to find their identity in “that which they cannot control” like a disability, divorce, death of parent, or another life-changing event that they did not get a vote on.  What we can conclude from those who have walked this road ahead of us is that we as parents have the ability to speak into how they interpret and incorporate those realities into their story.   A few of the tools at our disposal include the opportunity to focus on their personal strengths, help them take practical steps toward service and positive action, enable them to see their ongoing purpose, and give them the gift of lasting perspective. 

Thanks to those of you who are following along as I post these chapters.  My sincere prayer is that you feel both encouraged and equipped.