When I was two I used to toddle around our home looking for the dregs of creamed coffee and settled sugar to slurp with glee left in the bottom of china cups on saucers adorning table tops within my reach.  But one morning, my father had doused his filterless Camel cigarette butt in the liquid goodness, and the remains lurked undetectable under the surface. As a 54 year old woman, I remember the "swig-gag-overwhelm of betrayal" moment I downed the contents of that cup. Innocence lost.

​From that incident forward, even the smell of coffee nauseated me. Starbucks? Cream based Frappicino please. 

​We tend to accept the way we are as gospel truth, claiming it's just the way we are wired, whether born that way or got that way through life experiences.  "I'm afraid of heights" or "I don't multi-task" or "I'm not a very patient person". The truth is, our Creator reserves the right to re-wire our brains. After all, He made us. 

Recently I did a ropes course, an obstacle course suspended high above the ground, and discovered I wasn't afraid. Heights terrify me. Or at least they used to.

I was amazed.

So amazed that when I visited the Royal Gorge last week, I offered my guest to join me in a bungee sling out over the canyon. Now that's a REAL test of my new found "no fear" I mused. I was not awash in nauseating adrenaline. It was actually FUN, and even more fun with world traveling Pastor Wendi screaming by my side creating a life memory for both of us. 

What are you facing that you are not wired for? I wasn't wired for raising children with disabilities. But LOVE and tapping into the resources of my all sustaining God rewired me for that.

 And now, with this heights thing, I think God is just showing off.

I am a lover of beauty.

For those of you on my private Facebook feed, you know this from the kind of photos I post. I cherish visual beauty. I cherish experiential beauty. I cherish relational beauty. Even the activities I engage in are in pursuit of beauty...hiking deep within the forest, skiing mountains to gaze over the Continental Divide, scuba diving. It’s all so glorious! 

I’ve created art myself, and my favorite pieces feel sacred because they are in expression of the unseen me. God as the infinite Creator invites me into deeper experience of Him through His weave of Self expression into finite materialization, experienceable wonder.

I look for beauty, watch for beauty, convinced it’s there, waiting to be noticed. Our retired Air Force colonial friend who took up photography understands this about our world. A scene worth enlarging onto canvas and immortalizing upon the wall, he commented once about how he can zoom in, frame and capture stilt legged fowl standing majestically among water logged reeds. On the side of the road. By a drainage ditch. Three feet away from a soggy discarded shirt, faded red coke can and a Dasani bottle.

​Beauty. It’s there. Can you see it? 

Likewise it’s there in people. Created by God, in His image, crafted by His hand. Breathtakingly beautiful.

​Look past the brokenness, the carnage left on the scene by self and by others, and “frame” on the Creator’s intent. Breathe it in. Speak it out. Show it to others. Celebrate it. Fearfully and wonderfully made. Precious in His sight.

Our children. His children. Mankind. Humanity. Beauty.

There was a time in my life when rope courses petrified me. They are HIGH, and although harnessed in, the illusion was that I could fall. I’m not really all that athletic, and trying to maintain balance while leaping across boards suspended on guide wires was, well, terrifying.

So 15 years ago when I finally dared for the first time, I lied to myself in mental gymnastics pretending that the ground was only two feet down. I completed the course with great difficulty, but perhaps more importantly, I had a eureka. 

There were areas in my life where I lied to myself to get through, thinking it was necessary in order to survive the most challenging aspects of my life at the time.

One lie I told myself was that I couldn’t have a voice in the lives of other Moms until all my children were grown and all had chosen to love and serve God. This kept me less involved in transparent relationships, which was easier.

Another lie parents raising children with disabilities may tell themselves is that this season of child raising is so difficult that treating their spouses with loving deference and having a quality marriage is beyond their bandwidth and unachievable due to their circumstances. Maybe later. 

The truth was that the ground was indeed well over twenty five feet down, but fall, I could not. 

The truth was that God called me to good stewardship, and outcome was not in my hands. Vulnerability in honest conversations with other parents could have strengthened me and my friends who also struggled. 

The truth is that marriages can become more beautiful as parents offer grace to one another, look for ways to out serve the other, and capitalize on each other’s strengths rather than demanding perfection in each other’s areas of weakness because of our own perceived needs. Just like we accommodate our children to foster success, we can accommodate our spouses, focusing on strengths and capabilities. 

I stopped lying to myself and excusing my misalignment with the truth of God’s word. I began to spot the illusions in my life and renounce them. I’m harnessed. I’m not going to fall. 

God’s word is truth, and He says: 

The LORD directs the steps of the godly.
He delights in every detail of their lives.
Though they stumble, they will never fall,
for the LORD holds them by the hand.

(Psalm 37: 23-24 NLT)

I learned today that I am no longer afraid on a ropes course. I know that I am high off the ground, and that if I slip, I will dangle safely by my harness. I not only didn’t slip, but I went for a second round.

I got this.

My husband and I were discussing the recent tragic shootings in Oregon. This led us into a conversation of our own story that we captured in this podcast. As parents and caregivers, every day we deal with the implications of how our child's hidden disabilities are perceived and dealt with in the classroom. Our hope in sharing our story is to help highlight the differing perspectives on actions that are taken when challenges emerge in the classroom.

We invite you into the conversation and look forward to your comments.

P.S. Melanie mentioned this article by Dr. Steve Grcevich on the website Church4EveryChild during the conversation.

My husband sent me this hilarious skit by John Cleese because it reminds him of how he feels in the doctor's office.

I know exactly where he's coming from because we've been visiting doctors together for years. It's frustrating and confusing to him because the consulting doctor works in a highly technical world described in terms not used by mere mortals. On more than one occasion, my husband has offered a string of computer jargon in jest from his own field of study to the harried doc which typically sounds something like this: 

"I suggest that we implement an asynchronous binary ripple counter using a shift-right register, zero-add pack algorithm using a set of four parallel 8-bit processors with enabled sign bit registers employing J K flip flops.'

His intention is to highlight the absurdity of the vocabulary being offered him by a health care practitioner who talks too fast or assumes a base knowledge of eight college-level courses in anatomy beyond my husband's training in the biological sciences.

When my husband is lucky, the doc slows down and chooses more easily decipherable words. However, more often than not, I get to be the secret-decoder ring for my husband after our consultation with the doctor concludes. The five years I spent studying medical technology in college does not contribute to our household income today, but it certainly gives me invaluable insight into medical literature and comprehension during medical consultations.

​Being immersed in medical jargon during a consultation with a specialist is like diving into deep waters. It can be scary, disorienting, intimidating and unnerving. It helps to have someone or something serve as your secret-decoder ring, to translate what the doctor is saying to you.

You need a diving buddy. Most of us have a smart phone these days and you can use it creatively to help you figure out what the doctor is saying.

If you are intimidated because of your non-medical background, it may prove helpful to:

• Tap a friend who serves in the medical field to accompany you to a few key appointments with specialists.
• If the friend is unavailable at the time of the consultation, or even if you have no such friend, take pictures of the medical documentation (e.g., test results) and record the consultation with the specialist using a smartphone application like Evernote so that you can refer to it afterwards. This can help replay the consultation later with your medically-minded friend or provide a basis for your own research using the Internet or other resources.
• If the specialist is not agreeable to being recorded, you can also use your cell phone to make a conference call to your medically-minded friend to have them hear what you are being told. 

​
An objective and trained ear may think to ask questions that you are unable to formulate as you are having a deer-in-headlights experience. If you experience brain-lock while trying emotionally and intellectually to process the implications of diagnosis and future interventions, your medically-minded escort is also far more likely to remember the details shared.