{If you’re going to read this post, especially comment on it, please don’t skim or read between the lines. I have very carefully poured over each and every word}
Lots of people have been very encouraging and sharing their feelings that they believe Grace can and will be healed of Rett’s. In the natural, this is what we know: Rett’s Syndrome is incurable.
We know very well the healing power of God. We have seen the deaf hear, the crippled walk and I myself was healed completely of asthma in the middle of an attack in the middle of the woods at the age of 3. I can distinctly remember my parents (newly Christian) on their knees in the pitch black praying a very simple prayer and my lungs relaxed and I fell asleep. I never had another attack and I had asthma so bad I was constantly in the hospital.
That said, we believe that faith is a gift as it says in the Bible and before we are believing God for a healing, we are believing Him for the gift of faith that she can be healed. I have come to realise that so much of Christianity as I have known it up until this point is mere superstition: “name it and claim it” and “fake it till you make it” won’t heal my daughter. Until such a time as God decides to either heal her or give us faith and a vision of her healed, we are preparing ourselves to live our lives with Grace, our beautiful daughter who we have come to find is disabled.
I know people mean well, but when they claim that God is going to ‘use this’ or ‘save people through her’ is to say that she is nothing more than a vessel to be used and God does not ‘use’ us. She is a person, a human being. When people say that, are they not saying that there is something wrong with her? When I look at her, even in all her inabilities, I see a complete, whole girl, not a damaged one to be fixed. I am preaching to myself, here. It is only through our new experience with Grace that we have come to see our own inability to ‘handle’ disability and even our own feelings that they are damaged people. If God is using Grace or working through her, it is only to teach us to be better people, more able to love that which He created, whether they are ‘normal’ or not.
As a child growing up in the church in America, I knew a man named Kenny. Kenny went blind in adulthood and – poor guy – people were constantly giving him predictions that he would be healed in 3 days or 6 days or on the 26th of March. It never happened.
We held off telling everyone about Grace until we knew there was truly something amis that would be a long term condition for her. We weren’t yet ready to begin being on the receiving end of those careless predictions which seem merely to be a outlet for the zealous to practice their ability to hear the voice of God. If I believe that God said that someone would be healed in 6 days, I would say, ‘thank you, God, that’s great!’ but I probably wouldn’t tell the person. If I did, I would be saying that I think my ability to hear God’s voice is so infallable that I cannot be wrong and if that person wasn’t healed, then it must be a problem with them, not me. Which brings me to an interesting thought. As Christians, many of us know the power of God to raise people from the dead. It happens in Africa every day. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. How much faith to you think a dead man has? None. He is dead. If God is going to raise him, it depends not on the man’s faith, but on God’s plan.
Why is disability a problem for society? Why do they view it as a problem to be fixed? I’d venture to say that it has something to do with the amount of usefulness a person exhibits. In America, the death penalty is in full swing. Why? Because people on death row cost money to keep alive and the courts have deemed that those people’s lives no longer have value to anyone. Hitler believed the same thing.
I look forward to our lives with Grace, no matter the challenges and only ask that everyone support us and pray whatever God is praying. Pray with him. Ask Him his will, His plan and pray for that. It isn’t always necessary to tell the person what you believe God said, just pray it through. Believe it or not, it is not always His plan that someone be freed from disability. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps as humans, we place too much emphasis on ‘wholeness’. Not that our health doesn’t matter to God, but perhaps being disabled isn’t a problem for Him, only for us.
Grace isn’t in pain. She isn’t going to die. She’s going to be loved and cared for her whole life. What kind of quality of life will she have? Whatever quality of life we give her.
Grace makes us laugh. Grace makes us smile. Grace makes us cry. No matter what happens in my life or in our family, we will always have someone there to remind us what really matters, who will keep us connected to the parts of our heart which might otherwise grow cold. Grace is a miracle.
