I’ve always been a sucker for a beautiful sunset. I’ve been known to pull off to the side of the road just to take a picture of one. I think my first purchased piece of art was of a sunset, my phone is filled with sunset pictures and, of course, my favorite color is orange! I find sunsets to be … well, magical. I think the reason I am so taken by sunsets is that it is clear evidence of something only God can do. Man can and has made [...]
Happy New Year! Can you believe that it is the year 2020? With a year named 2020, perhaps our New Year’s resolutions should be something like, “to have a clear vision, improved insight or balance in my life”. While these are all great goals or resolutions, we encourage you this year to have an additional resolve --- to make your marriage a priority. Making your marriage a priority is one of those ideas that most people agree on, but unfortunately place it on the back burner to concentrate on more [...]
One of our favorite Christmas traditions is hearing and singing Christmas carols. There is something comforting about the familiarity of the carols and how we are still singing the same songs that we sang as children. My absolute favorite Christmas carol is “O Holy Night.” I’m not sure why, but I love to sing it—especially on Christmas Eve. One line in the song says, “a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.” As I listen to the news this evening with its political polarization, mass shootings and unrest in the [...]
I remember the day my husband and I sat in the doctor’s office in Washington DC’s Children’s Hospital and received the news that the concerns we had over Mary’s lack of development were indeed due to brain damage. Trying to absorb the full implication of the doctor’s words was overwhelming. So, we took in what we could process and started on a lifelong journey to absorb the rest (Brian and I absorbing things at different rates). When we heard the news, I thought of the shattered dreams I had for [...]
I was introduced to the notion of thin places several years ago by a dear Christian friend of mine from Ireland. The concept of thin places has its origins in Celtic spiritualism and later in the Christian movement in Ireland. Thin places are points in time where the distance between the heavenly and earthly realms grows thin and you encounter the sacred. Thin places can occur in the midst of everyday conversation and happenings or in experiencing God’s beautiful creation in the outdoors – a sunset, a mountain vista, an [...]
Often our blogs are about the unique challenges we face as parents of children with special needs. Although we acknowledge that there are indeed multiple challenges in raising our children, we also know that our lives have been forever changed, in a good way, - because of Mary. We know of many individuals who have chosen a profession as a special education teacher, director of therapeutic horseback riding or in the medical field – because of Mary. A Day Program serving over 30 individuals with special needs was birthed in [...]
We haven’t written our blog in the last few weeks as we were in China. We toured the country and visited our daughter, Emily, who lives and works in China. No matter how often we have said the words “our daughter lives and works in China” (and she has been there 3 years!), it is still hard to believe. She lives in a working-class city in inland China … and from what we can tell, where almost no one speaks English! We are very proud of her and the work [...]
Perhaps one of the greatest casualties that result from a difficult life situation is the loss of HOPE. Hope is a powerful force. According to the book of Psalms, strength and courage come from hope. Hope keeps us going, growing, dreaming and loving. A loss of hope is a great loss. We remember back when Mary was little and her prognosis was overwhelming, we were very short on hope. At that time, someone gave us the verse, Jeremiah 29:11, “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. [...]
Over the past several weeks, we talked about the unique and varied challenges that face a marriage when couples are parenting a child with special needs. We mentioned last week that couples often feel isolated, finding it hard to physically get out the door and hard to “fit in” once you get there. We’ve talked about the hurts individuals have felt because sometimes people that are close to us, who should understand our situation, often don’t. These things are true and representative, at times, of what our lives are like; [...]
Very often, someone has come up to us and said, “God gave you Mary because He must have known that you would be able to handle parenting a child with a disability,” or some variation of that statement. While we know that people mean well and are trying to be encouraging to us, it sometimes is hard to hear. Mostly, it is hard to hear because we respectfully disagree. We disagree in two ways. First, and of less importance, we disagree with the statement because it seems to imply that [...]
