The only one who said yes
When I was at Union College, Dr. Friedline asked me to speak in chapel about my brother.
He was a kind man with a disability himself, and had lived and done well with his challenges. He wanted to put people with disabilities in front of the student body in some way. I learned later he had asked a couple of other students I was friends with if they would speak about their brothers too.
I was the only one who said yes. The others were not willing to talk about it publicly.
I did not think much of that at the time. I have thought about it a great deal since.
What I was going to say
Then I had to decide what I would actually say, and I discovered I did not know.
I had been telling the protective version my whole life. We were blessed. He was really just like everybody else. God had been so good to our family. I could deliver that version in my sleep, and every word of it was defensible, and all of it left out the part where I lived.
But I was twenty years old, and I had just begun to understand how abnormal my childhood had been. I was starting to become a person with her own account of things. At the same moment I was being handed a microphone and a huge sanctuary full of students and staff.
I grew more and more uncomfortable as the day got closer, and did not understand.
I know now. What I was planning to say was true. But it was not the whole truth. I knew no one would expect the “truth” I could say. It would be “too true.”
Dr. Friedline never told me what to say. He never hinted, never steered, never suggested a theme. Nobody had to. The expectation was simply in the air, the way it always is.
Many years later
More than a decade later, a friend asked me to speak at a Saturday evening vespers — this time alongside Rick. I would be translating for him as he told his story and also telling mine. By that point, he had lived in my home with my family for a time and finally moved into an apartment of his own.
I thought about it for a long time before I said yes. And I promised myself this time I would tell some of the truth.
So I did. I gave the good parts and some of the hard parts. I said plainly how much I love him, because I do. And I put in a few pieces of what it actually costs the family of a person with a disability.
A great many people in that sanctuary knew me. Afterward, two or three came up to me and said they had not realized it had been so hard. I had barely scratched the surface. Walking out of that building, what I felt was guilt — that I might have said too much.
Why we do not talk about this
I think our society wants adversity to look like a movie. Difficulties arise, difficulties are overcome, the family is strengthened, the ending is happy, and the whole thing is uplifting. I think the church wants this version even more than the world does.
Real life is not like that. Sometimes it is simply hard.
There were blessings and miracles. God plainly worked things out for our family so many times. But blessings do not cancel hardship. Both of them were true, the entire time, in the same house.
That is why this has been such a difficult topic for me to write about. In the 9 years I have been blogging for Outlook Magazine, I have sat down repeatedly to write about my experiences. But I could not. Not because the story is shameful. Because it is not all positive and happy.
Not sent, but not wasted
I do not believe God gives us hard times so that we can help other people. Satan is the cause of the evil in this world.
However, scripture does tell us what we have been through can be used afterward. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. (2 Corinthians 1:3-4, NKJV)
There is a concept in my field that does not get discussed nearly enough: Post-traumatic Growth. Researchers have found after some difficult life events, people often begin to see life differently, develop new ways of meeting hard things, and experience real psychological growth.
Paul got there first. We also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope. (Romans 5:3-4, NKJV)
So God does not send the hard thing. He has built us to grow through it, and He does not waste what we learned there.
Which means telling the honest version is not disloyalty and it is not ingratitude. It is the comfort being passed along. My hope is that someone who has never felt seen, will read this and know they are not the only one.
That is not me breaking a rule. That is the instruction.
Lord, You have never needed us to make it sound better than it was. Give us the nerve to tell the truth about our lives, and give the people who hear it the grace to stay in the room. Amen.
Next time: the feeling I could not explain, and the plan I gave up because of it.
See the FIRST in the series HERE
