Ruthie

I’m having a hard time focusing on much this morning. Physically I’m sitting here in my office in Cookeville Tennessee. But my mind and heart are a couple of hundred miles away in Cincinnati.

Our good friends and wonderful supporters of Rising Above, Jimmy and Kim Thorpe, are in a Cincinnati hospital expecting to give birth this week to their first child. Some you who follow this blog may have attended one of our By the Brook retreats this year and met the Thorpes. They are caring, giving, selfless supporters of our special needs community. They have a heart for all of us.

They have given so much to our ministry. Jimmy wrote the song, “Hope is Rising” as our ministry theme song and performed it live for us at several events including the By the Brooks this year. Kim was our production manager at the events. But that’s just a small fractional part of what they do and mean to us.

Today I’m asking for you to help my friends.

Their daughter Ruthie will be born in the next few days. Ruthie has a rare and very complicated mass crushing her lungs. The doctors will have to deliver Ruthie, and operate on her immediately to remove the mass while her umbilical cord is still attached.

In other word, Kim will be her own daughter’s life support system during the operation.

The procedure is so rare only a handful of hospitals even perform the surgery, and even those that do only see a few cases a year. More than likely, this will happen Tuesday.

After surgery Ruthie is looking at a long time in NICU, potentially several months.

Many of you who read this have been there. You remember the anxiety over life and death surgeries, rare diagnosis’s, and excruciatingly long hospital stays away from home.

You remember the dazed, tired, and wearily overwhelming feelings from such ordeals. You remember wanting to cry but being too tired to find the tears.

You remember putting on the brave confident face on for everyone else, and then lying in bed scared to death at night when the lights are off and no one can see.

I think that is why I hurt and ache so bad for my friends this morning. And why I can’t get them off my mind.

But I also know that the Thorpe’s have a faith that few people have. And I know they are clinging to our God with all their might right now. Because God is good, all the time.

It’s when we are in the very furthest heights of the storm that we often find ourselves the closest to the hand of God. And it is through the thickest, darkest storm clouds that we clearly see God’s presence.

And I know that Ruthie is wonderfully made, created for a plan and a purpose, and destined to glorify God somehow through all this.

This is God’s story, and this is Ruthie’s part in His story.

Would you stop for just a moment today when you read this, and say a prayer for little Ruthie and the Thorpes?

 

 

 

Raising My Voice

This week a well known “television evangelist” commented on his national TV show that in his opinion it is perfectly fine to divorce  a spouse who is afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease because, after all, “it’s kind of like a death has occurred.”

He went on to say that he is not an ethicist but that this is the way he understands and believes. He does however purport to be a man of God.

I am not an ethicist either so I can’t speak on the subject from that frame of reference myself. But I am a man of God and I can speak from that point of view.

He’s wrong.

He’s beyond wrong. He is, no pun intended, dead wrong.

Most of the other words I would wish to use to describe his thoughts are best to not even be uttered or written.

And I suspect that the overwhelming majority of spouses of those with Alzheimer’s would agree that he has missed the mark on this one. Their lives are unbelievable hard, emotionally draining and difficult beyond imagination. They deserve our honor, respect, and gratitude.

And if I could be as bold to speak for those of us who try to live our lives under the sovereignty of God, who teach and preach the truth of scripture, allow me to make this disclaimer for the rest of us.

“The views and opinions of this individual  do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of followers of Jesus Christ or scripture. Much less the view of those caring for a family member stricken with a terminal condition.”

Where would he have us draw the line? If divorcing a spouse who has Alzheimer’s is OK in his book, what about leaving a family because a child has a special need?

After all, isn’t the birth of a child with a special need or lifelong disability, “kind of like a death” to use his own words. Death to dreams. Death to self. Death to the expected life.

Whatever happened to “in sickness and health?” Whatever happened to the idea of making a covenant or taking a vow?

This morning I stared at the television mortified as this minister, this “spokesman” for God, made those statements. And I turned to my wife and said “some of the big name evangelists and  well-known ministers should speak out on this.” And I hope some will.

Because I’m afraid the unchurched world, those who don’t follow Christ, will think this man speaks for us. Or even worse, that he speaks for God.

Well I’m not well-known and I’m not a big name minister.

But I do have a voice and right now it’s full of righteous indignation. And I’m using it today to say those remarks were reprehensible, repulsive, and repugnant. And he needs to repent and recant what he said.

I wish he could meet my friend John. John’s wife battled multiple sclerosis most of her adult life and spent her last years bedridden in a nursing home. John was always there for her and by her side. He would make arrangements to bring her to church every Sunday.

At her funeral, I asked him how he did it.

He turned to me and gently said, “I took a vow.”

That’s what a real man of God would say. “I took a vow.”

We’ll Leave The Light On

It’s still hard to believe that in just a couple of months Jon Alex will turn 14.

With Jon Alex being non-verbal, haven never spoken, I joke that I have the only teen age son who has never talked back to his dad!

It is difficult though to watch him grow up physically while we know mentally and cognitively he remains such a young child. I have this young man in my house in so many ways, but yet I have an infant son too- all in the same child.

We are blessed to have Becky’s sister Susan, who loves Jon Alex like her own child, live near us to keep him overnight when necessary. We also have this one care giver Tina who has worked with Jon Alex for so many years now. She is our trusted babysitter on the rare occasions when we get a break for a couple of hours.

Those of you raising a child with special needs know how rare and treasured those moments are! Those of you who follow this blog, one of the biggest blessings you can give to a special needs family is the gift of a couple of hours respite.

When we do get a chance to go out to dinner together, or have a date night, we have noticed that Jon Alex typically will not go to sleep until we return. He might cat nap, play in his bed, or such- but he will fight to keep his eyes open until we get home.

Often his babysitter will say upon our return “‘he keeps sitting up, I can’t get him to close his eyes and fall asleep.”

And yet when we do return and go into his room everything changes. Once we say good night and hug him, he will usually turn over right away and go to sleep.

It’s like he was just waiting to make sure we get home before he could rest himself and call it complete.

It strikes me ironically how this is the reverse of the typical arrangement between parents and teenagers. Usually it’s the parents who stay up restlessly waiting to make sure the teenager returns home safe.

I remember as a teenager always seeing a lamp on in my parents bedroom until I returned home at night. Now in my house it is the other way around.

The whole thing reminds me that my God is the same way. He isn’t going to rest or call it complete until all His children find their way home as well. That’s why He is always watching, always hoping, always doing whatever He can to get all of us home safely too.

Scripture speaks of a  God who does not sleep nor slumber.

We have a God waiting to hug us when we return home as well.  Go ahead. He will leave the lamp on in heaven for you.

Father’s Day

I spent most of this Father’s Day weekend in a funk. I should have seen it coming because it tends to affect me like this every year.

Friday morning on the way to work I was listening to my favorite sports radio talk station. They were having callers call in to talk about their favorite sports memories involving their own dads. It was kind of a Father’s Day tribute show to dads.

I actually grew up with an awesome dad. Some of my favorite childhood memories involve sports and my dad.

He coached my little league baseball team.

He put a basketball hoop on a telephone pole and managed to find time to play with me every day.

He was a high school basketball coach and from the age of two and up I followed him around the gym all the time.

He coached my high school basketball teams. I got to play on the team that won his 500th game as a coach. We have conflicting memories of that night. I remember having the game-winning assist. He remembers a controversial referee’s call on me that almost cost us the game. (I like my memory better and it is my blog after all.)

Some of my favorite times involved the two of us going to University of Tennessee football games together. We have our standard things we do on every trip and I have a boatload of great memories. It’s a tradition we’ve continued until last year when I had to stop because of my foot injury.

So why the funk every year?

Every year at this time I replay those memories in my head and I get a little melancholy and a little sad.

With my son’s developmental disabilities and special needs, he and I won’t be able to continue those traditions.

We won’t go to UT football games together. We won’t play basketball in the driveway together. Those opportunities, like so many others I once dreamed of, aren’t going to happen. We really can’t even watch a game together.

So I can’t seem to help but get a little sad at the thought.

With so many limits on what he can actually do, one of my son’s favorite activities is swinging on his therapy platform swing.

We have a therapy platform swing mounted from the ceiling in Jon Alex’s room, and he loves swinging in it a couple of times a day.

Saturday morning, in the middle of my little pity party that no one but me attended, I went into his room and swung him for the longest time. I made race car sounds and plane noises and whatever sound effects I could make to get him to giggle and smile.

Jon Alex can’t talk. Never has. So I did most of the talking. I just talked to him interspersing my sound effects and goofy noises.

He never spoke but he communicated back to me his own way. He loved our time together and showed me at the end by hugging my neck and flashing me his big toothy grin.

And then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

I’m pausing here to wipe the tears off my keyboard because I cry every time I think about it. It wasn’t what we did, or couldn’t do together.

We just spent time together.

That’s when God spoke to me, reminding me that it’s not what I do for him either. He just wants me to spend some time with him, Father to son.

And that’s what I should do when I let my emotions affect me like that.

I should spend some time with His Son. I’ll do the talking just like with Jon Alex, but He will find a way to communicate with me in His unique ways.

And I’ll leave knowing He loves me and that our time together was significant.

 

 

Noise

Here in Middle Tennessee we are awash with cicadas right now. For those of you who don’t know what cicadas are let me explain. The word “cicada” comes from a latin origin meaning, “disgusting insect that emits excruciatingly loud, incessant noise.”

These insects burrow out every 13 years for just a few weeks. But boy do they make an impact in just those few weeks! They line the trees, cover the sidewalks, smack into your windshield, and make the seemingly loudest noise non-stop.

Last week we visited my in-laws who live in Nashville. When we got out of the car at their house, the noise was literally deafening. We were practically shouting at each from just a few feet away in order to be heard over the cicadas in the trees.

My father-in-law has suffered some partial hearing loss in recent years. For whatever reason, frequency or pitch, he can not hear the cicadas at all. Even though he is standing beside me having a conversation, all he hears is me. But I can barely hear him over the din of the cicadas.

The experience made me think about hearing from God. I’m always desiring to hear more from God, to recognize when he is speaking to me and discern what he is trying to tell me. But the background “noise” in my life is too much of a distraction.

By noise, I mean the influence of popular culture and norms today. There is so much competing for my attention that it blocks my ability to hear his voice sometimes. Things that shook us to our core, shocked our sensibilities, offended us as followers of Christ– now so many of those things are cultural norms that we don’t “hear” them anymore.

Deep down it’s not that we accept them so much, it’s that we have just grown complacent. We are letting influences into our minds that are so far from God and his ways and thoughts. And we don’t even realize it. Or like my father-in-law and the cicadas, we just don’t hear it anymore.

But you can’t ignore it anymore than you can ignore the noise from the cicadas.

If we are going to be tuned to what God is speaking into our lives, we have to learn how to tune out the noise from our culture today.  We have so many voices competing for our attention. Which one will we listen to and which ones will we tune out?

Take this challenge with me. Try a one-day “noise fast.” For one day, no computer time, no Facebook, no social media, no email, no cell phone (set on vibrate for emergencies,) no phone calls, no texting, no television or radio, and no ipad, ipod, iphones! At our house we call it a technology fast. I typically will do it on a Saturday.

Throughout the day just whisper to God to speak to you, reveal things to you, demonstrate his presence, just to be with you as you go though your day.

See what happens when you can’t hear the noise anymore,