Why Is My Child Disabled?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:04.000 | We get a lot of hard emails, hard emails to read because they articulate very hard
00:00:11.000 | struggles in the darkest places of life. Today's email is such one from Josh in
00:00:16.000 | Ohio. "Pastor John, my wife and I have been praying for a child for over two and
00:00:20.000 | a half years. A year ago we got pregnant for the first time but it ended with a
00:00:24.000 | miscarriage. We continued to pray and we got pregnant again 17 weeks ago. Now the
00:00:29.000 | doctors are saying our son probably has a chromosomal abnormality like Down
00:00:34.000 | Syndrome. We are not high risk for this. My wife is 28, I'm 31. There are so many
00:00:40.000 | terrifying scenarios ahead for us. I struggle to see God's goodness in this.
00:00:45.000 | We prayed for years for God to give us a child that is healthy and will grow to
00:00:49.000 | love him. Feels like he is stealing our joy and peace. I know that he works good
00:00:54.000 | for all those who love him and that good is to be more like his son but it seems
00:00:59.000 | cruel to afflict my son with a disease just to teach me a lesson. Please help us
00:01:07.000 | make sense of this." One of the things that makes all sorrows even more sorrowful
00:01:16.000 | is that they are often such jolting opposites of what we hoped for, prayed
00:01:24.000 | for, and expected. That's certainly true for Josh and his wife. It isn't only the
00:01:32.000 | painful fact that their whole life is now changed by the prospect of parenting a
00:01:37.000 | disabled child but that this comes as a crowning response to their prayers for
00:01:45.000 | the opposite. But we have to be very careful. What looks like the opposite of
00:01:52.000 | what we asked for may not in fact be the opposite. So let's think about the three
00:02:01.000 | things that Josh says. I'll take them very seriously, very literally. One is, he
00:02:07.000 | said, he struggles to see God's goodness. Two, he says that God seems to be
00:02:15.000 | stealing their joy and peace. Three, he says it seems cruel that God would
00:02:22.000 | afflict their son in order to teach them a lesson. So let me say a word about each
00:02:28.000 | of those three things. First, Josh says we're struggling to see God's goodness
00:02:34.000 | in all of this. That's exactly the right way to describe the difficulty. Namely,
00:02:40.000 | it's a problem to see. The problem is with us, not with God. And that's exactly
00:02:48.000 | right. The struggle is with our seeing goodness, not with God's being good. There
00:02:55.000 | is some measure of seeing the ways of God in this world. Oh, taste and see that
00:03:02.000 | the Lord is good. Taste and see, see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who
00:03:08.000 | takes refuge in him. But on the other hand, Paul says we walk by faith and not
00:03:15.000 | by sight. Now we see in a mirror dimly, then face to face. Now I know in part,
00:03:21.000 | then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. Many times we have to
00:03:28.000 | say with the psalmist, I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord
00:03:35.000 | in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord. Be strong. Let your heart take
00:03:40.000 | courage. Wait for the Lord, Psalm 27, 13. In other words, we believe, but we have
00:03:49.000 | to wait to see. There's a kind of seeing in believing. Yes, there is. There is a
00:03:55.000 | kind of seeing in believing, but we long for the fuller revelation of how it's
00:04:02.000 | all going to work for good. And in the meantime, we hear Jesus say, "Blessed are
00:04:07.000 | the pure in heart, for they shall see." God, if we can only see him, this will get
00:04:13.000 | us through many seasons when we can't see the goodness in our circumstances.
00:04:20.000 | Second, Josh says that it feels like God is stealing our joy and peace. It's not
00:04:27.000 | wrong to rejoice in the gift of a healthy child, but it is wrong not to
00:04:37.000 | rejoice in the gift of a child with a disability. Both of these acts of joy are
00:04:45.000 | miracles. They are produced by the Spirit of God. When the joy is really in God and
00:04:53.000 | thanks are really being offered to God. But here's the rub. The transition from
00:04:59.000 | the hoped-for joy in a healthy child to the painful joy in the disabled child is
00:05:07.000 | a huge transition. The first joy dies, and it's a real death, and that death is
00:05:16.000 | painful. And that wonderful joy disappears. It's gone. And all that is
00:05:24.000 | happening while the new joy is struggling like a little seed to push its way up
00:05:30.000 | through the rocks of disappointment and fear and sorrow. So there are days and
00:05:37.000 | weeks and maybe months of transition from the death of one joy to the full
00:05:44.000 | flower of another joy, and those are not easy days, and they require enormous
00:05:51.000 | patience as we wait for the Lord. The Lord has to do a miracle of creating that
00:05:58.000 | other joy in a gift we did not pray for and which we didn't want. That's a
00:06:04.000 | miracle. It does come, and it is right, and it is beautiful. But the transition
00:06:10.000 | from the death of one joy to the full flowering of the other is a painful
00:06:15.000 | season. Josh, God is not stealing your joy. He is replacing one joy with another,
00:06:26.000 | one you did not ask for, and perhaps one you just now are not able to embrace
00:06:33.000 | with joy. But it will come. It will come. I say that both on the testimony of
00:06:41.000 | Scripture that every trial is a cause for joy, James 1, 2, and Romans 5, 3, and I
00:06:49.000 | say it also on the basis of the testimony for 33 years of watching many
00:06:54.000 | parents who would not trade their disabled child for any other. That's the
00:07:01.000 | second thing. Here's the third and last thing. Finally, Josh, I would say, when you
00:07:07.000 | say it seems cruel to afflict our son to teach us a lesson, namely conformity to
00:07:16.000 | Christ, according to Romans 8, 29, as you quoted, please consider these three
00:07:25.000 | things as you ponder that thought. One, the connection between your child's
00:07:31.000 | disability and your sanctification is only one of the 10,000 connections that
00:07:41.000 | God is making between your child's life in this world and your life in the world.
00:07:48.000 | That you and he are entering for decades countless connections that you can't now
00:07:56.000 | see. Life is never simply one thing causes another thing. There are always
00:08:03.000 | thousands and thousands of things God is doing that we cannot see like in the
00:08:11.000 | birth of a child with Down syndrome. So beware of reducing the reality of your
00:08:19.000 | child's disability to a simple instrument of your own transformation,
00:08:25.000 | even though that itself is not a simple thing but a gloriously deep and complex
00:08:31.000 | thing. Second, always take into account when considering the brokenness in the
00:08:39.000 | world and in your family and in your bodies that Romans 8, 18 to 25 teaches
00:08:45.000 | there are sufferings and brokenness in this world that are part of the vast
00:08:52.000 | fallenness of creation and not explainable only in the immediate terms
00:08:58.000 | of how we experience them. There is a groaning of the whole creation which we
00:09:05.000 | are to understand as labor pains ready to give birth to a new world. Here's what
00:09:13.000 | he says, "We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains
00:09:21.000 | of childbirth until now." Sometimes we need to just step back and put our hands
00:09:29.000 | over our mouths and believe that all the miseries of this fallen world are
00:09:35.000 | leading to something glorious like the pregnancy of a new age, the freedom, Paul
00:09:42.000 | calls it, the freedom of the children of God. And the last thing, the third thing
00:09:47.000 | to keep in mind is this, consider that Jesus Christ was afflicted precisely so
00:09:54.000 | that we might be made whole. You don't want to find yourself among the number
00:10:00.000 | who call this cosmic child abuse. You don't want to call God cruel for
00:10:10.000 | afflicting Jesus that you might be saved. The Bible says this was the greatest act
00:10:19.000 | of love ever performed even though it cost Jesus his life and was done for the
00:10:28.000 | good of others. There are mysteries in why some suffer and others don't but even
00:10:38.000 | benefit from the suffering of others. This is in fact how the gospel spreads.
00:10:43.000 | Christians willing to suffer in order to take the gospel to others. This is how
00:10:49.000 | God does all his saving works. One suffers and serves, another lives. So, Josh,
00:10:57.000 | be very slow to see the afflictions of your child as cruel. They may in fact be
00:11:05.000 | more Christ-like than anything you can imagine.
00:11:10.000 | Very sobering. Thank you, Pastor John, for walking us through this scenario. And
00:11:15.000 | Josh, thanks for being willing to share your story and ask these very hard and
00:11:18.000 | honest questions. They're appreciated by me and no doubt are shared by many other
00:11:23.000 | listeners, either in the past, in the present, or even at some point in the
00:11:28.000 | future. And your openness here is going to bless them in a great way in the
00:11:33.000 | future, so thank you. Well, for us, next comes the weekend and then on Monday
00:11:39.000 | we're going to look at the phenomenon of Jordan Peterson, a Canadian clinical
00:11:44.000 | psychologist now with a best-selling book and a fast-growing following. So, who
00:11:49.000 | is he? Where did he come from? And what can we Christians learn from this Jordan
00:11:53.000 | Peterson phenomenon? For those questions, we'll be talking with Anglican
00:11:57.000 | theologian, Dr. Alastair Roberts, making his APJ debut on Monday from Durham,
00:12:02.000 | England. I'm looking forward to it. That's next time on Monday. We'll see you then.
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