“I just might have a problem that you’d understand, we all need somebody to lean on….” Sitting in the stands watching my 10-year-old son sing the lyrics to this song took me back to every youth event I was a part of in the 80s. It made me smile.

Jackson loves music. Performing before a crowd is something he takes seriously and enjoys. Knowing every word, he was singing intently, his eyes focused on his choir director. As the children sang, they also incorporated motions that reflected their words – holding up four fingers as they sang, “For!” and pointing to their knees as the word “need” rolled off of their tongues. You get the idea.

Continue reading Guest Blogger, Christy Edwards: As the mother of a child with autism, I see how preaching and practicing the Gospel are fractured →

My passage into motherhood was not at all what I expected when I was expecting. Sometime in my son’s early years, I don’t remember exactly when, I had a fleeting thought that took hold: “If you don’t play, you can’t lose.”

The truth is, after Isaac was born, I was terrified I was going to fail at this entire phase of life. I didn’t know what to do with this little child I’d helped God bring into the world. He was tiny and precious, and I held him, and I loved him. But I truly didn’t know what to do with him. He was inexplicably small, didn’t eat as well as the doctors wanted, and slept a little too much. He wasn’t diagnosed with failure to thrive, but he wasn’t thriving either. The milestones were delayed, or worse, ambiguous. From his first breath, Isaac followed his own timeline, his own script.