I Am in Here (18 page)

In his book
Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth
, Richard Foster astutely observed that “the reason we can hardly bear to remain silent is that it makes us feel helpless. We are so accustomed to relying upon words to manage and control others. If we are silent, who will take control? God will take control, but we will never let him take control until we trust him. Silence is intimately related to trust.”
[3]

Years later, and now that Elizabeth can write her thoughts, she has taught me that sitting in silence can be beautiful. In the stillness, we can feel the love that we have for each other and feel God's presence. We are not two strangers poking at each other in the dark but two souls overlapping in quiet communion. As German philosopher Eberhard Arnold wrote in his article, “Why We Choose Silence Over Dialogue,” “People who love one another can be silent together.”
[4]

My friend Cheryl and I are that way. We have been friends since we were eight years old, and we can talk for hours or just sit with each other in silence. In the course of our almost forty years of friendship, sometimes we haven't spoken for months. Then she senses that I need her, such as when my dad died and when the kids were first diagnosed with autism, and she calls
me. There is something that connects us beyond this world. She smiles when I call her my angel.

When we were young girls, we were fearless. Looking back at it now, it seems more like reckless. Roof badminton is a case in point. One sunny afternoon we were playing badminton in Cheryl's front yard when the birdie landed on the roof. Since it was our only one, we decided to go up and get it. Cheryl found a ladder and I climbed up. When I hit it down to her, she hit it back up to me, and roof badminton was born.

Whenever we had a chance, with decent weather and no parents in sight, one of us was on the roof serving that birdie. We would race back and forth practically diving for shots. Mind you, Cheryl lived in a modest, one-story ranch house, but at eleven years old, we thought it was the Empire State Building. It's a miracle that any of us survive childhood.

Our friendship over the years has been a roof badminton game over time and space. She has been there for me when I have been on the ground, and I have tried to be there for her when she was grounded. Like most childhood friends, we no longer live close to each other, so it has been a challenge to stay a meaningful part of each others' lives. Both of us juggled career and family obligations that had high levels of stress. Cheryl has two beautiful daughters, one also named Elizabeth. Until recently, she ran a nursing home where the patients adored her. She loved to listen to them and dance with them. Life-and-death stress was part of her work every day. She told me about how those with strong spiritual lives passed peacefully, holding her hands.

In the midst of the roof badminton game of life, where is the time for us to hold hands with our dear friends? At least today Cheryl and I have email and cell phones to help us hit the birdie back and forth. It's not quite the same as all-night talks
at our sleepover parties, but it gets us through the tough times. Recently she made me cry by sending a photo of the two of us in a frame that reads, “We will be an encouragement to each other. Romans 15:32.” It sits on my desk and always makes me smile.

As children, Cheryl and I were not in school together because she went to the Catholic school in the next town over. We met on the diving team at our local YMCA. Each week we practiced on the trampoline and in the pool for many hours. We were fearless fancy divers.

Fearless until we had our accidents. At about the same time, Cheryl hit her leg doing an inward somersault, and I hit my face on the board doing a backward somersault. Cheryl's injury was more serious, but mine was more dramatic as the blood from my nose made the pool look like the shower scene in
Psycho
. After that we were no longer fearless but perhaps a bit wiser.

When I think back to that time on the diving board, it makes me think of the many dives we take in life—marriage and children being cliff dives. We dive into these commitments without knowing whether they will be full of beauty and grace or crashes on the board. Most of our dives, in life or on the board, are neither perfect nor disaster but somewhere in between. We survive the belly flops, bumps, and bruises. We try to learn from them.

Shortly after our last visit together, Cheryl was in a car accident. She was driving safely down the road when a random event happened: a car in the next lane slid over and knocked her into the median. A few days later, she called to tell me that she was a little shaken up but didn't appear to have any serious injuries. Then the pain came.

Despite being a nurse, she had a hard time getting some of the doctors to believe that she had an injury and was in pain. It reminds me of the plight of so many women with chronic
fatigue syndrome whose symptoms are often dismissed as psychosomatic. She could not sit and could only stand for short periods of time. She spent most of each day in bed.

I asked her what she did all day long. Did she read books or watch television?

She responded, “No, I mostly just try to quiet my mind.” Then with a laugh she added, “I can kneel without much pain, so I guess that God wants me to do some praying as well.”

For more than a year, she traveled from doctor to doctor, much like we have done in our autism journey. No one could put a name to it. No one could relieve her pain.

And in all that time of lying in bed in pain, I never heard her complain once. Not once.

She told me that God was slowing her down. She needed this time to be silent. To listen for that still, small voice.

Finally Cheryl found a doctor who gave her suffering a name: pudendal neuralgia. Basically, a nerve in her backside was being pinched by a fibrous mass. People are often misdiagnosed for years and don't like to speak about it because they are embarrassed by its symptoms. Pudendal neuralgia is rare, and it resigns most to a lifetime of pain.

But Cheryl will not be discouraged. Her life is filled with a strict therapy schedule and lots of prayer. She says she knows God is healing her. In the midst of her days of quieting her mind, she prays for Elizabeth. I know because she sends text messages to tell me.

That is a How Person: someone who reaches beyond her own suffering to care about someone else's.

  
God
  

Two by two

It seemed so few.

God knew

What he had to do

To assure the fate

Of the human race.

We are so loved to have someone all knowing

To help keep the world going.

I am so glad that there is a spiritual being that loves us so. If we trust in him we will always be assured of unconditional support and guidance throughout our lives. God is good
.

In her quiet time with God, Elizabeth offers her own prayers for those who are suffering: “
I am concerned about the war. Innocent people are dying. People should not have to suffer. I want peace. I try to show that when I write. If people are exposed to good and peaceful things, maybe they will be that way themselves. This is what I pray for at night
.”

It's amazing to me that at her young age, Elizabeth has already grasped that silence isn't merely the absence of words. It's the positive act of overcoming the distracting din of the world's constant babble.

Elizabeth reminds me that learning God is complex and simple at the same time. Consider this exchange:

So the question of how we know God comes full circle. Elizabeth has helped me realize that what began for me as an inwardly focused mystery is to an equal degree an outwardly focused calling. I know God most deeply when I am striving against my own limitations to bring God's love into the lives of others. I know God most fully when, in my darkest moments of doubt and despair, I am lifted up by the simple faith and kindness of those dearest to me.

I believe the burden of Elizabeth's autism has helped us both understand one of life's great mysteries: the most tangible way we experience the invisible God is through the presence of the people God has placed in our lives. If there is mystery in our spiritual journeys, there are also signposts along the way. For me, simple acts of kindness are moments in the presence of the divine.

One of the most profound statements I've ever heard about God is the most simple: God is love. It means that love isn't merely something God does, love is who God
is
. It is easy to sentimentalize these words, but to do so robs them of their power. The hard truth of love is that it doesn't consist primarily of long, hand-holding walks along a sunset beach. It consists of the small
acts of ever-deepening self-sacrifice that we undertake for the good of those we love.

This is especially true for autism parents. Our love for our children has called us to give of ourselves in ways we never could have imagined. There is nothing glamorous or sentimental about it. The seemingly endless stream of sleepless nights, tear-filled days, tantrums, doctors' appointments, and school meetings stretches us well beyond our breaking point. It is often lonely, thankless work, and we sometimes find ourselves feeling that it's all futile, as though we're pouring ourselves drop by drop into a bottomless hole, unnoticed by anyone.

But it is precisely in these unheralded acts of mercy that God is the closest to us. I believe God sees these hidden mercies, gathering them up and returning them to us in the form of the love and support of our friends and family. God returns them to us in the prayers others offer up to sustain us in our darkest hours. God returns them to us in the peace that passes all understanding.

A Wing and a Prayer

In Seattle to see Pastor Bill

  
Mind
  

Inside my mind

I often find

An empty space

That needs a trace

Of something I can't

Quite put in words.

It's like a hole,

Dark and deep,

Waiting for the light

To seep

Within.

(age 9)

I struggle daily trying to make my mouth work like everyone else around me. It's as if there is a missing link that I cannot call on to make it happen. I am trying more and more to get the words in my head to come out of my mouth
.

H
alfway across the country, it occurred to me: What am I doing flying to Seattle with Elizabeth and Charles for healing prayer with a Lutheran minister I've never met?

It was September 11, six years after my frantic conversation with the nursery school director while planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the world was forever changed. And once again, I was living between two worlds—the physical and the spiritual, the brokenness and the healing, the already and the not yet.

It all started with a conversation with an old friend, Sean, whom I've known since high school, when we shared a rebel gene and a deep-seated aversion to authority. Sean was the one who introduced me to the concept of “Why People” and “How People.” He developed it during his years working with homeless people, when he helped many people get back onto their feet and into the mainstream of society. He said the people who were obsessed with finding out
why
the injustices that resulted in their homelessness occurred had much greater difficulty moving forward. The people who were focused on
how
to move on, regardless of
why
they were homeless, were much more likely to regain their lives. Sean said he decided to make this attitude part of his own approach to life.