Beauty From Ashes

Sometimes I’m not sure why God picked us. And to be honest, sometimes I’m not sure if He even did. Sometimes I think it just happened. The luck of the draw. Fate.

That we would long for a baby for 5 years. That we would dream and scheme and prepare for that child. And then wait. Sometimes I think it it’s almost worse that way. The waiting only makes the dreams more real.

And then one day, when we had all but given up we would receive the blessing and in his face we would see the love of the Father.

And we would begin to check off the dream list, one milestone as a time . Until one day it became clear that the plan we had wasn’t going to work out.

And not like it needed to be tweaked. It had to be scrapped. Thrown out. Shredded and burned and forgotten.

Except it’s easier to throw something away than it is to forget it.

Because after all, how can that much hurt come from God? How can He give and take away at the same time?

When you have more questions than you have answers, you aren’t quick to move on.

But after days and weeks and months it becomes a little easier to craft another plan.

The new becomes your own kind of normal and you begin to allow yourself to dream again and in his face you are once again are reminded of the love of the Father. You trust again. You believe again.

And just like you once believed to be true so long ago, hurts are redeemed and tears are exchanged for laughs and beauty really does come from ashes.

And then one day in the middle of the summer you read these words. The words of your second son who was born into the midst of what is often times chaos and you begin to wonder again.

“Having a brother with Autism is hard. It’s hard to play with him. Even when he is bad to me I just kinda have to deal with it because I know it’s just Autism. I just have to live with it when he does those bad things in the house and try to remind him to do better and to keep trying.”

~ Luke, 8 years old

And all those once quieted fears come racing back. The doubts and the questions come with new words.

Words like burden. Like normal. Like fair.

Words that you begin to measure his life against and you wonder all over again if it’s God who gives the blessings and us who earns the hurts.

And how do you reconcile this hurt that you must have earned with the pain that it brings to the ones you love most?

And then one night you listen to that same little boy pray. And he prays from a place that you once kneeled. A place where he trusts not because he has tested fate and God prevailed. But a place where he knows nothing different than to trust that the God that made the universe, made him and loves him and has set him apart for amazing things.

He prays for his brother that night, not questioning if God could, but knowing that He does.

And once again, the fears and the doubts and the questions fade away and in the eyes of a sweet, brown hair, blue eyed little boy, your are reminded once again of the love of the Father.