Who Are You Forgetting?

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?