The Path of Least Resistance

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Three of us led the AWANA Cubbies down the church halls, into the multipurpose room for kids' choir (a high-energy, use-your-whole-body worship time). Two new students, twin brothers, bobbed along down the halls with us, much like the bobbin' preschooler peers in front of them. Watching young children trot in a line always makes me smile. They've got flare and style and bounce.

When we arrived at the multipurpose room,  "normal" no longer applied to our new friends. They wriggled away from our helping hands, yowled like banshees, cried and refused to sit or stand to be directed in music.

We gave chase, glancing alarm at one another, wondering how any class could take place that night.

Fifteen minutes in, the main teacher knew what she had to do. "I'll have to call her to pick them up. We can't do this for two hours."

As visitor's to their cousin's house, they were only there for the night, if not for which the teacher would have worked with them longer and harder, trying to get them to conform to the simplest of routines.

Twenty minutes later, back in the gym for the opening AWANA ceremony, I saw their aunt zipping up their coats as they cried and wriggled. Though I hadn't made the decision to "reject" them, I did agree with it. AWANA is not a babysitting service anymore than the public schools are, but having a special-needs child myself, I knew how badly the guardian probably needed a break.

I learned that their biological mother gave birth to them when she was just thirteen-years-old. Hearing it, my heart cried silently to the Lord, wondering at the depth of dysfunction the human spirit must endure.

It depressed me, this opening to the AWANA night. I tried to shake the sadness, noticing no one else felt sad, but hormones weren't working in my favor.

"Can you imagine that kind of stress on a daily basis?", I found myself saying later, trying to process the experience. I deal with a lot of stress from my own special-needs son, so I have some idea how life gets colored by impulse-control problems. Exhausting is the best descriptor and if you have a strong-willed child, you know something of this flavor of life.

These twin boys could have been born from incest, abuse, rape...I don't know, but they have serious challenges, far beyond that which lax parenting would cause. Their mother, now sixteen and no longer in the picture, obviously couldn't handle them. She unwittingly handed their precious lives and special-needs over to someone else, for whom life is permanently altered.

My husband used to work with Prader-Willi-syndrome children. This is a congenital disease affecting many parts of the body. People with this condition are obese, have reduced muscle tone and mental ability, and have sex glands that produce little or no hormones. They eat uncontrollably and steal food--just one of the problems which land them in institutions for life.

Husband worked with the mentally-challenged for twelve years, some Prader-Willi and some brain-injured, after which he prayed he'd never have a special-needs child himself. I prayed the same prayer, across the country in my first-grade classroom. Not only did we end up together--him from PA and me from CA--but our first child is special needs, with impulse-control problems no less.

This is the gospel life and we wanted no part of it. We wanted the path of least resistance, thank you very much. This gospel life is more challenging than fun, more worrisome than carefree, more exhausting than rejuvenating. This laying down your dreams, your life, your nerves, for another? Who would choose it? Certainly not my husband and me.

And yet we're here. The guardian of those twins, she's here...to a far greater extent than us.

How do you embrace it? How do you learn to smile instead of cry? And what of the people who don't understand? Impulse-control problems are commonly considered parenting issues. Plenty of people don't want to hear otherwise...until they've tried to "fix" someone with these issues themselves.

Quickly, they realize no fixes exist. There are only best-cases scenarios to help minimize the assault on everyone's psyche.

Do we want to blame the parents because this makes life seem more fair? Be a good parent and life with kids will just be an everyday variety of chaos. The kind that only comes when you underfeed them, overwork them, fail to allow enough sleep, or indulge them too much. 

We want life to be fair, and random or inherited brain disorders? They're not fair. Who get's the lottery ticket for Down Syndrome or autism or AD/HD? Who gets to live the gospel life?

Home in my bed that night, I tried to sleep but my mind's eye could still see those boys running all over that multipurpose-room like scared rats wondering if they should bite us or give us the slip. Instinctively, from my school-teaching years, I knew to close all the doors least they run out onto the street. Sometimes keeping a child safe from himself is the only goal.

The path of least resistance; I wanted that for the boys' caregiver, instead of moment-to-moment stress.

But my son has taught me this: The gospel life is achingly beautiful and when you try to take the ache out, you also take the beautiful out. God's grace doesn't shine.

I finally fell asleep, realizing that the path of least resistance only lets us shine. Which is better, for us to shine or for the Lord Jesus to shine? 

Therein lies the smile I want to wear...the smile I want the twin's guardian to wear. Embracing the gospel life is embracing the glory of God. What could be more smile-worthy?

Perhaps no one would agree more than the Apostle Paul:

2 Corinthians 4:17 ..momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison"

Colossians 3:2 Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth."

Romans 8:18 the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us".

2 Corinthians 1:9 "indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves in order that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God"

1 Peter 1:6-7 I know the thought of that is exciting, even if you must suffer through different kinds of troubles for a short time now. These troubles test your faith and prove that it is pure. And such faith is worth more than gold. Gold can be proved to be pure by fire, but gold will ruin. When your faith is proven to be pure, the result will be praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ comes.