…Choose life so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God. Listen to his voice…hold fast to him. Deuteronomy 30:19-20
As parents of a disabled child one of the most critical choices we make – for us and for our child – is whether we will be pitiful or powerful. We choose, whether we do it intentionally or in some haphazard fashion, whether we will live in a place of pity or a place of power.
If we choose pity, we choose to be less.
When we choose pity, we choose to diminish ourselves, our hope, our spirit. What’s worse, we choose to make our faith small, our dreams meaningless, to make our child’s world narrow and dark. With pity, we teach our child that it’s OK to be less. Forget potential, we are saying, be small. Forget possibility, be enveloped by misery. Forget freedom, become a slave to this trial.
When we choose pity, we diminish the very power and plan of God.
But when we choose to be powerful, we live expecting God to empower us in ways we cannot always understand. (Jeremiah 33:3). We say, I cannot, I will not, I choose not to let this tough stuff defeat me. We tell the world, my God is bigger, stronger, smarter, and more powerful than this affliction.
When we choose to be powerful, we refuse to surrender. We acknowledge the tough place in which we live and the tough times that will surely come but we refuse to let them diminish the spirit and the possibility that God breathes into every human life.
When we choose power, we live expecting God to provide us with what we need not to just to endure but to overcome. We choose to live in light rather than darkness, to celebrate rather than lament, to dream rather than surrender.
And, in making such choice, we become witness to all who know us, including our child. He learns by watching how we choose to live.
