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A review by kefletcher
The Life We Never Expected: Hopeful Reflections on the Challenges of Parenting Children with Special Needs by Andrew Wilson, Rachel Wilson
5.0
I am the mom of a son who caught a nasty virus when he was 7 weeks old and which left 6 holes in his brain. But I am also the mom of 7 kids with developmentally "healthy" brains, so dealing with all of the grief, issues, altered parenting paradigms, paperwork, and the uncertain future of a child with special needs has been like the wave that takes you under after an afternoon of calm seas.
Reading The Life We Never Expected did several important things for me:
- Reading and pondering each section slowly, I grasped that my concerns and experiences were neither isolated nor unique. There's a great big world of special needs warriors out there.
- In light of that knowledge, my resolve to see our churches fully embrace our brothers and sisters raising or living with special needs has heightened. The church in America, in general, does this poorly. We cast a blind eye and marginalize families fighting the hardest fight. In fact, I recently spoke at a conference and a group of moms parenting kids with special needs approached me, one by one, to tell me that they no longer go to church. The attempt and effort is too costly and the church, by way of a myriad of responses (from a lack of resources to shunning a noisy special needs teen from worship) has made it a feat not worth attempting.
The Wilsons don't really camp on this aspect of raising kids with special needs, but I couldn't shake that reality from my head the entire time I was reading. They talk about the importance of living in community and the humility it takes to accept help, but what if you have an unwilling community with no access to a better one? Pray. God is faithful to give us what we need, which they communicate well and leads me to...
- God has this. He was not surprised when our son slipped into a coma and weathered all that He did. He knows the future, and there is grace there, too.
Reading The Life We Never Expected did several important things for me:
- Reading and pondering each section slowly, I grasped that my concerns and experiences were neither isolated nor unique. There's a great big world of special needs warriors out there.
- In light of that knowledge, my resolve to see our churches fully embrace our brothers and sisters raising or living with special needs has heightened. The church in America, in general, does this poorly. We cast a blind eye and marginalize families fighting the hardest fight. In fact, I recently spoke at a conference and a group of moms parenting kids with special needs approached me, one by one, to tell me that they no longer go to church. The attempt and effort is too costly and the church, by way of a myriad of responses (from a lack of resources to shunning a noisy special needs teen from worship) has made it a feat not worth attempting.
The Wilsons don't really camp on this aspect of raising kids with special needs, but I couldn't shake that reality from my head the entire time I was reading. They talk about the importance of living in community and the humility it takes to accept help, but what if you have an unwilling community with no access to a better one? Pray. God is faithful to give us what we need, which they communicate well and leads me to...
- God has this. He was not surprised when our son slipped into a coma and weathered all that He did. He knows the future, and there is grace there, too.