Over the past 15 years, we have noticed a familiar pattern occurring when people initially meet our children. They usually respond with questions, perhaps some concerns, and a typically fair amount of awkwardness. It could be the way Mollie starts to immediately regale you with the last 20 meals she has enjoyed, all while only communicating by whispering and signing, or perhaps it is Samuel telling you with unsolicited detail about his many ailments, with the names and birthdays of each doctor who is working on ‘fixing’ him. Or it could be the way Maggie will unceremoniously drag you out of your chair promptly at the end of church so that she may put the chairs away and the world again can be restored to order and she can get on to lunch!
To be certain, for the faint of heart, their wonderful oddities can certainly be off-putting, however, for those who are willing to brave their gauntlet and learn the wonderful subtleties and sensitivities of each, they will inevitably find in them a treasure quite rare.
Sam genuinely believes every woman he has ever met is beautiful and will unbegrudgingly (and indeed unceasingly) declare it to them, until even those perhaps unaccustomed to such approbations will blush at the enjoyment of what must be the truth of it! Not surprisingly then, he has as of this moment four young women who each claim he is their betrothed, and one has been waiting since Sam was four years of age, and she still has four to go, since he is only 14!
A simple walk through the local mall with our girls will give you a glimpse of what it must be like to be in the entourage of rock stars, since every 10-15 feet some teenager is yelling, “It’s Maggie” , “It’s Mollie!” or the more frequent, “look, it’s The Twins!”. Like those accustomed to fame, the girls rarely take notice, however on occasion they will grant favor on their admirers by wishing them, “good game!”
But for those who are privileged and it is indeed a priviledge, to really get to know them, they count their relationship to Maggie, Mollie and Sam as one of the most important and satisfying in their lives. And not without reason, for in them they find no guile, no pretense, and each of them exhibits a decided lack of awareness of all those weaknesses that you and I find so painfully blatent in ourselves. To be with them is like getting to take a vacation from yourself! There’s a coloquialism that asserts, “No matter where you go, there you are”, well, not when you are with our children, apparently the normal rules of physics seemed to be suspended. Without hesitation or fear of my accustomed dramatic exxageration, I can freely declare that my happiest and the most gloriously un-self-absorbed times of my life have been while in relationship to a person with an intellectual disability.
But perhaps this should not surprise us. Perhaps this is part of the inscrutable gift our gracious God has intended by creating some of us with intellectual disabilities, it is the gift of self-forgetfulness. A gift Jesus speaks of when he declared to his disciples that there was “no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Self-forgetfulness. Jesus of course was speaking of himself, the one of whom we are told, “for the joy set before him he endured the cross” and “did not consider equality with God something to be held on to, but humbled himself, taking on the very nature of a servant…” Self-forgetfulness.
The problem, and too few seem to even realize it, is that you can not pursue your own agenda, and anothers, you can not choose your future and theirs, your life and their life. We all choose at some point whose life we will forget; ours or theirs.
So who are you forgetting?
Hello Special Hope blog readers! My name is Beth Bailey and I am an appointed missionary with SHN, and currently serving as Director of Operations Africa. I am so excited to share with you bits and pieces of my story (or should I say God’s story in and through me)! I’ll spare you a lot of the background details, and jump right into how I came to be a part of this ministry.
At the start of this fall, something began to stir in me. What I thought was a simple case of transitioning-out-of-college blues proved to be something deeper- a profound sense of restlessness. It wasn’t that I didn’t love all that I was doing, for I really did and still do. I simply started to feel like the life I was living wasn’t actually the one I was “meant” to live. And so I began asking the questions that people my age sometimes ask themselves- what am I doing with my life, what am I passionate about, how am I to accomplish my dreams, etc. I had no idea that as I began to ask these questions, I would come across an answer that would compel everything to change…
In order to answer these questions, I turned to the worn pages of my Bible. What I found in these pages was not what I was expecting. I suppose I expected to be advised to consider my gifts, my talents, and my passions in order to pursue what God had planned for my life. Surely God’s plan for me would be based on the specific gifts, talents, and passions He gave me, right? While I do think God gave me these things for a purpose, I came to realize that I was looking at this situation from the wrong vantage point. I was looking at my life and asking what I wanted to do, what I was passionate about , how I was to accomplish my dreams, when I found the Bible compelling me to consider what God wants, what He is passionate about, and how He would accomplish through me His plans of redemption on the earth.
I became deeply convicted that I had been living my life according to my own selfish desires and longings for comfort and ease, and therefore began to pray that God would change my heart and mind. I found myself coming again and again to the verse Galatians 2:20, and wondering what it really meant-
“For I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
Although I had identified myself as a follower of Jesus for several years, I came to find this verse very un-descriptive of my life. As a Christian, I am called to surrender and sacrifice everything so that Jesus Christ, Himself can live through me. And as I came to understand this, it brought up a whole new set of questions: what does it look like for me to surrender, what does it mean for Jesus to live through me, how would my life be transformed if this were so?
Again, I turned to those worn pages to seek answers, and was once again surprised by what I found. As I read, a specific theme was highlighted to me over and over again, and is summed up well in James 1:27-
“Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.”
In this verse, I believe that James explains the basic tenets of what it means to be a Christian: to love those who have no hope, and to seek holiness. The list of verses that agree and comply with this one is extensive and clear, and so the answer to all three of my questions seemed to come in one swiftly transformative blow: If Jesus is going to live through me, I must surrender my life to loving and caring for the hopeless.
And so, here I am- a newly appointed missionary on the brink of moving to Africa to care for orphans with intellectual disability. I can hear Sam Nelson saying, “That’s crazy, Miss Beff!” Sounds a little crazy to me too, and by that, I mean the good kind of crazy; the kind that necessitates Jesus Christ to be smack-dab in the center of it.