My Only Daughter

In the spring of Abbey’s first grade year, we were in the middle of the worst crisis of our lives. I wrote a bit about this in the previous blog, yet there is a part of this story that I haven’t shared before, which God recently brought to my mind with the approach of Easter and a new movie I had seen in theaters called, “His Only Son”, a beautiful retelling of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.

The Heartbreaking Crisis

First a little history on the circumstances surrounding our story. In 2010-2011, Abbey’s school year had been a complete mess, and Abbey was a mess because of it. The school district had hired a newly graduated teacher, who hadn’t been able to manage a classroom let alone a special ed classroom. They then fired her and hired; you guessed it… another new grad. After all who else could they find to hire in the middle of a school year, not to mention the cost it would save the district on salary to hire a new grad versus a seasoned instructor. Despite all the emergency IEP’s we called during the school year to try and “fix” the situation, things just kept getting worse. Something we hadn’t known at the time was that, because the teacher was a new graduate, the district had required them to attend new hire trainings, special ed trainings, and district trainings; to such an extent that the teacher was not even in the classroom but a few days out of every week throughout that fall. To make matters worse, with the hiring of the second new graduate nothing changed, because of course all the same trainings were required for her as well. So, Abbey had to experience this inconsistency all over again for many more months. In addition, each time these new teachers were out, they simply called the sub line for available substitute teachers, rather than a familiar handful of substitute teachers, resulting in at least 12 different teachers within a span of a couple months. A lot for any child to deal with, but for a child with special needs who especially needed consistency, it was devastating.

This extreme inconsistency caused Abbey so much anxiety, that for the first time we began to see her experience Autism Shutdowns. Abbey wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t void, wouldn’t talk, and wouldn’t even engage. It was heartbreaking. Then worse yet, because we trialed several medications meant to help her with her anxiety that instead backfired, she began to exhibit such extreme agitation that we could not control her. To keep her and the rest of our family safe meant that Eric and I had to perform safety holds almost every 20 minutes for several minutes at a time to contain her and to keep her from lashing out with self-injurious and aggressive behaviors towards others. We even had to send our son to stay with his grandparents for a time. He was only eight. My already broken heart began to break in ways I didn’t know it could break as a mom.

It would take an emergency during one of these medication trials to bring this crisis and all of us to the edge of the cliff. Abbey was in the middle of her home ABA therapy and was sitting on the playroom floor with her therapist, when suddenly her therapist, who was trying to get a response from her, became alarmed. I raced over to her, landing onto my knees on the carpet in front of Abbey in time to see my daughter look up at me with her eyes wide as could be and tongue large and protruding from her mouth. She made audible guttural gasping sounds that I can still recall, and which can trigger me with all kinds of PTSD to this day. I immediately thought that her tongue was swelling from an allergic reaction, and I quickly yelled for the therapist to call 911. Those moments holding my daughters head still in my hands, as she laid her back up against my chest and in a panic gasped and swung at me to hit out of shear fear, were torturous. At last, the paramedics came and quickly assessed that my daughter could indeed breath, but that she was having a medication reaction called a motor side effect. Essentially the medication had caused the nerves and muscles to thrust the tongue forward, but thankfully not obstructing her airway. We needed only to give her a prescribed dose of Benadryl to counteract the effects and it would go away in time. Praise God it worked, but not without first traumatizing both Abbey and me.

After this incident, Eric and I immediately decided to take her off of all new medications. I’d love to say that this was the end of the crisis and chaos, but it was not. Abbey needed to adjust and to rebound from the medication withdrawal. And in the interim she was still not only reeling from this medication adjustment, but also from all of the anxiety and frankly trauma that had been caused by the circumstances of the school year. This along with a legal battle with the school district caused us to pull her from school to be at home with us, on what was called a Home Hospital Stay. As we worked through all of this, and Abbey’s 24/7 agitated state which would last for many more weeks, I stopped working and Eric pulled out of his after-school job as a high school football coach to be at home full time with her, and our son continued to stay at his grandparent’s home. It was extremely stressful for all of us.

The False Narrative

It was during this time that I began to break. I couldn’t see why a loving God would allow such suffering. I couldn’t see why for my whole life; I had done everything right and yet now it appeared that the God I had trusted was somehow cruelly punishing me. Or so I thought. “I thought” … So much is wrapped up in these two words. A whole perspective on life is wrapped up in these two words. So much begins and ends with our thought life and this could not have been truer for me. You see I had allowed myself to think a false story of God – of who He is and how He works. A false narrative really. I had begun to believe a kind of A+B=C story about God. If I do everything right, then my life should turn out right, I thought. And the problem was that this wasn’t the familiar circumstantial equation staring me in the face. No, my A+B was adding up to something completely other than C, and I was in despair over it, because this false narrative was now leading me to a belief that God must somehow be unfeeling or cruel. He was either not listening to or caring about my heart’s cries, or he was somehow just completely detached and even punishing me for some unconfessed sin I didn’t even know I had committed. My mind went in a thousand different directions and none of my conclusions were any good.

The True Story

Then one night in desperation and with Eric’s prompting, I left to stay at my parent’s home to take a break and get some sleep and more importantly to see my son. I had dear friends who came over and prayed over me that night, beautiful intercessions, which I will remember for the rest of my life and probably for all eternity. And later as I lay there in bed alone, I began to read through my bible. Stories I’d forgotten began to leap off the pages. Stories of people who had lived long ago, and the ways in which God had intervened in their lives and shown his great love for them. I read through the night and, when I finally feel asleep, I remember clinging to my bible tucked under my pillow, because I simply wanted to feel close to that personal and loving God. When I woke the next morning, I sensed God whispering to me, “Do you trust me?”. I began reading my bible and again, “Do you trust me?” I knew He was pressing into my worst fear of losing my daughter and asking if I would trust Him no matter what. You see, in all the chaos that we had been experiencing we had been forced to face the very real thought of, “What if we couldn’t provide the safest place for our daughter”. She was only six years old at the time! I was terrified. I had no idea of what was going to happen, but I knew we couldn’t go on like this.

I found myself reading about Abraham and his son Isaac. The story of God’s request to make a sacrifice of Isaac, I had always found hard to stomach, but I read on. It began, “When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, ‘Abraham! Abraham!’

‘Here I am’, he replied.

‘Do not lay a hand on the boy,’ he said. ‘Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.’

In that moment as I read those words, “… you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” I heard God saying over the words, “You have not withheld from me your daughter, your only daughter.” And there was a weight of fear that was literally taken off of me. I knew that I could trust Him completely even if I couldn’t see how, it all would go, or how our story would end. It was truly a miracle. A gift from God. God had taken me to the edge of my worst fears over my daughter, and He had lovingly pulled me back from that edge and brought me to a place of knowing truth and life, of trusting Him once again, and of experiencing his great love for me.

The Loving Sacrifice

And in that moment the thought came to me that this same God that had lovingly called out to Abraham and had called out to me pulling us both back from the edge of our worst fears, was the same God who did not pull back, but instead had given his son, his only son, as a sacrifice for all. He had given his only son. When I think about how I had agonized over the possibility of losing my own daughter, I can only imagine what it must have taken God to allow the sacrifice of his only son. But He did allow it. He gave his only son for us. Why would He do this? The answer is beautifully told to us in the following verse:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” – John 3:16

He allowed this sacrifice, because He loves us. Easter is a celebration of God’s love for us, and the salvation gift given to us through the death and resurrection of his son, his only son. As we celebrate Easter this year, I feel incredibly grateful as I recall the time when God once reached out to me to remind me of the love he has given through his only son and of the love he has for me and for my only daughter. May we all remember God’s neverending love for us and for our children this Easter.