Jeremiah 10:23 “LORD, I know that people's lives are not their own; it is not for them to direct their steps.”
Letting go feels so unnatural. I have worked my entire life and have made plans for myself and when something came along to change the course of my plan, I had no choice but to go with it. I have always wanted children and when the Lord presented me with a disabled child, it took me a very long time to accept his disability. It wasn’t something I had planned; it wasn’t something I had wanted, and at first, I was very angry at God; I truly thought He had abandoned me, that He was punishing me for my past sins and honestly, my relationship with Him was rocked to the core for the first year of Elisha’s life. Rather than opening myself up to the plan the Lord had for me, I fought it, tooth and nail. I had to give up my dreams and hopes for a normal child; I had to give up my expectations that one day my son would go college, get married, and I would have grandchildren. Little by little, I began to practice acceptance of what the Lord had planned for me, and it was only then I began to truly see the gift that had been set before me.
Proverbs 16:9 “In their hearts humans plan their course, but the LORD establishes their steps.” Sometimes losing our hopes and dreams and plans for our future is so painful people cannot come to terms with it; they never come to the place of acceptance and they become bitter and resentful, and trust me, I’ve met people like this who have disabled children and it is the most tragic thing that will ever occur. A lot of these people will never see the beauty and experience the joy of their God-given gift; they miss the wonder of their child growing up and all the Lord had established for them.
I love the story of Helen Keller who at 19 months of age, an illness caused her to go completely deaf and blind. Her parents sought help for her in Boston at the Perkins School for the Blind. In that era, children like this were considered hopeless and were segregated and not allowed to be integrated into normal schools. But a tutor, Anne Sullivan, believed in her and persisted in her efforts to teach Helen to read Braille, to write and even to speak. With Sullivan’s help, Helen graduated with honors four years later from Radcliffe College, associated with Harvard, having mastered several languages. And because someone believed in her, Helen went on to receive many awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Hebrews 11:40 says “God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.” I think about those people who give up when they find out they are having a disabled child, they have an abortion or when they are born, they give those children up either for adoption, or institutionalize them into a home and they never see the beauty and they never see the perfect gift that they have been given. They will never experience the incredible joy, the absolute closest thing to perfection on earth; God’s perfect and beautiful gift was just tossed away, never to be opened, never to be held, never to be allowed in to radically change their lives forever, but instead, they run away from the blessing and the challenge instead of embracing the gift, eager to gain all the blessings God has hidden in this package because it looks too difficult and we don’t like the package that this beautiful gift has been wrapped in. And so it is like everything, if we truly believe God is sovereign and if we truly are able to trust Him in every aspect of our life and in every situation, if we would just be thankful for what He has given us, we open the door to complete and total tranquility and peace within our soul, no matter what the circumstance.
– Melody
