Another crisis moment. The kind that makes your heart race as your veins course with adrenaline. So many of us experience this, and all too often. Maybe it’s a medical emergency, maybe it’s bad news from the day program or school, maybe it’s that the insurance didn’t approve a treatment or therapy that you just know your child needs. Whatever it is, it hits you sideways and sends you spinning until somehow you can regain your balance again. After the shock of the initial news wore off. I found myself asking God one question, “Where are you taking us?”.

I have asked God this question many times along this journey.  

Denial

At 2 1/2 years old I started to see the signs. I didn’t know what it was. I only knew that my daughter wasn’t learning some of the things her brother and cousins had learned at that same age. When I tried to read her a book she would get up from my lap or look away. She didn’t seem to respond consistently with eye contact when I called her name. And she had begun to have anxiety over things, that no amount of mommy cuddles could cure.

Only 6 months before at 2 years old, she had been diagnosed with a far sighted eye condition which caused a slight crossing of one eye. I will never forget the day she got her first pair of tiny pink framed glasses. We had picked them out and ordered them weeks before. So on the day that the glasses arrived at the store we quickly picked them up, put them on her, paid, and left to shop at the grocery store next door. Suddenly in the middle of the produce isle she looked up and said “Hi mommy!”. In that moment I felt a sharp pain in my heart, because I realized that she was seeing me clearly for the first time! It was an incredibly bitter sweet moment. At the same time there was both pain from the loss of the prior years that I felt for her as a mom, and great joy for the future I believed she could now have.

Once she was prescribed glasses, it allowed her to see clearly and fixed the crossing. However; as a result, at 2 1/2 when I started to see those gaps in her learning, I simply reasoned it away thinking that she was likely behind because she had not been able to see clearly for the first 2 years of her life. I was in denial. But I kept having a nagging feeling, and deep down I was terrified of what I didn’t know and I kept asking God, “Where are You taking us?”. 

Anger

After a long wait for answers, due to a delay in getting the doctor to refer and a 6 month waiting list to be evaluated at our Children’s Hospital Developmental Clinic, our daughter was diagnosed with Autism one week before her 4th birthday. I sat there holding her, completely numb all over. I was in shock. As the diagnosis was being explained to us, by the young psychologist sitting across the desk, every word floated past my ears without even registering. Every word except one, “Autism”. It was a diagnosis that I had heard about briefly in college while going through the program to become a licensed Physical Therapist Assistant. There had only been a few paragraphs about it in one of my books. At that time not as much was known about it. The only thing I remembered having learned was that kids with this diagnosis didn’t seem to engage at all with others. That wasn’t my daughter, so maybe they got it wrong I thought, still in denial. I remember getting into the car that day with my husband and immediately springing into action with my mental checklist of all the things I believed we needed to do. We would do everything that was needed to make our daughter better and perhaps even cure her and shed this diagnosis, I thought to myself. But in that moment something also broke inside of me, and I began to ask this now familiar question in anger. I continued to be angry for next several years. With fists held high in the air I would cry out to God for an answer, “Where are you taking us?!”. Though I had made the choice to follow Christ when I was a young girl and had seen Him walk with me through several hard things in life, I just could not see why He would allow this to happen to our little girl and to our family, and as a result I struggled with anger towards Him. I struggled to trust Him. “I thought you were a good God, so why would you allow this to happen to our little girl?”, “Where are you Lord?”, “Do you even see me?”, “Are you listening?”, “Have you abandoned us?”. The questions came hard and fast out of my mouth as hot tears rolled down my cheeks.

Bargaining

Many of the years after she was diagnosed were spent begging and bargaining with God for the answer to how we could fix this, or for the answer to the things that could atleast make it better. “Tell me what I should do to fix this?”, “God if I do this therapy or that medication will it make it better?”, “God if I just have more faith, say the right prayer, confess some unconfessed sin,  will you heal her?”, “Lord you know that I have followed you all my life so please give me this one request. Please heal my daughter.”, “God where are you taking us?”.

Depression

One year was so very difficult I found my self lower than I had ever been. We had lived a few years with our daughter’s diagnosis and all that it meant for our family: doctors appointments, therapies, biomedical treatments, government support program meetings, school IEPs, etc. Splitting our time as parents to meet the needs of both children, and fighting for services it seemed everywhere we went. And now we found that our daughter was going through a crisis. We did everything we could think of to help and still it continued. She was climbing the walls. By late spring we had to take her out of school and place her on home hospital status and force the school district to tutor her for the 1 hour minimum that was required of them. I stopped working to stay at home full time with her, making sure that she was safe with me until the night time hours when my husband could get home from work after teaching and coaching football all day and help. It wasn’t enough. She was so agitated that we had to send our 9 year old son to live at his grandparents so he wouldn’t be exposed to her frequent violent outbursts. She tore her room apart, so I took everything out. She lashed out, so I would sit and hold her so she didn’t harm herself or me until she stopped and calmed down. For days we did this: several minutes at a time about every 20 minutes. I was exhausted and barely surviving. I was completely depressed. I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel for her, for us, for me. I didn’t know what we were going to do. And I remember weeping out loud in utter desperation, “Where are You taking us?”

That was a hard road to walk on. One of the hardest I’ve ever had to journey. But in the midst of the hard God stepped in and showed me that He was there, and He showed me how very much He loved us. And I began to lean on Him like I’d never leaned on Him before. I learned to trust Him fully even with the things I couldn’t understand and with the things I feared the most. During that time God also surrounded us with family and friends who rushed in with their love and prayers and sweet tangible care. Words cannot describe how much this meant to us.

To this day we still do not know everything that occurred to trigger our daughter’s crisis, but that summer we gained insight into most of what had happened during the school year. As a result we made some necessary changes at the school she was at at the time, took her off a medication that wasn’t working, and adjusted the way in which we worked together as a care giving unit. My husband made the additional sacrifice of giving up his job and outreach as a high school football coach to be at home with us and help in the evening and weekend hours. And we went to counseling to help each of us and our family as whole to process the difficulty of our situation and the grief we all felt. By summer’s end we had made it through that crisis, and by God’s grace we were no longer facing the impossible and excruciatingly painful decisions we thought we would have to face at that time with our young daughter’s care.

Acceptance

After all these years I still find myself sometimes asking God the question, “Where are you taking us?”. But there is something different in the asking. Now there is a deep trust in my savior and an acceptance of His loving sovereignty over where He is taking us. So when the crisis happened this time and my heart started pounding, in the midst of that was a quiet surrendering “Ok Lord, Where are you taking us? Where ever it is I will follow; and I know that You will be with me in it and You will give me your peace and strength to go through it.”

I still go through these stages of grief at times: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. The journey through grief can be cyclical. That’s why it’s often referred to as The Grief Cycle. Just when I think that I’ve processed everything there is to process something comes along and can trigger the grieving response once again. Mostly it happens when we come to a new stage in life and I have to grapple with some level of loss. “She will never learn at grade level with her peers”, “She will never drive like her brother”, “She will never walk down the isle with her dad”. To say it’s hard is an understatement, but now I know that when I go through it, when I journey down that hard road, God is walking with me every step of the way. He knows where we are going and I can trust that He will get us there. 

“Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God”

Corrie Ten Boom

If you are struggling with grief and depression please don’t be afraid to get help. There are licensed therapists and counselors that can help you work through whatever it is you are experiencing. Please know that you are not alone. There is hope.