I spent the evening with my brother-in-law and some of the guys from church at the PromiseKeeper’s rally. There was a lot of singing and shouting followed by a prayer call. Incidentally, it is an amazing sound to hear 10,000 men shouting to the Lord. We decided to head down to the stage to do some praying. I wasn’t ready for what actually happened. I was greeted by a LARGE gentleman wearing something like a biker vest displaying Harley-Davidson and other motorcycle club patches of all kinds. I’ve heard it said that religion is for people who don’t want to go to hell and Christianity is for people that have been there. This guy definately had the look of someone who’d been to hell and back. If I’d seen him on the street I probably would have crossed over to the opposite sidewalk rather than walk past a guy like this. He walked up next to me and put a big paw on my shoulder and asked, “Can I pray for you, brother?” I agreed because that’s what I had gone down there for and also he was huge, I didn’t want to offend him. What I heard proceed from his mouth floored me. It was perhaps the most genuine and heartfelt prayer I had ever heard from anyone. He prayed for God’s intervention on my behalf, he asked that God bless me, he asked that God renew my heart and make the man I was intended to be.

From that night on I felt a renewal inside my heart. I was determined to be a better husband to my wife and father to my children. I began to see how I had almost abandoned my responsibility as a father. I began to see just how close my marriage was to dissolving. However, the Holy Spirit began to move within me allowing me to care more for my wife and children. I took a basin of warm water and washed my wife’s feet and told her I was going to become the man she deserved to be married to. I even washed my children’s feet. They didn’t understand the full meaning of it, but they really enjoyed getting their feet washed and tickled by a newly interested dad. In God’s good time the Holy Spirit had renewed me.

I began to realize that God was trying to work through my son to restore my wife and I. In fact, I only came to the full realization of what my son has done for our family just the other night. My daughter made a comment to the effect that she wished her brother wasn’t autistic. I thought about what to say to her for a day and then the realization came to me that God had in fact redeemed our family through my son. Without my son, my wife and I may have divorced. Without my son, we would never have returned to church. Without my son, my wife would not have quit her job to stay home to take care of the children. Without my son, my wife would have never thought about home schooling. Without my son, we would not be the family that we are today.

I am not the father I should be. I don’t help my wife with the schooling of our children as much as I should. But I am much closer to what I should be because of God’s redemptive work in my life and I’m getting closer all the time. I don’t see my son as annoying or inconvenient any longer. I see him as the unique human God created him to be. My son is not mind-blind as the experts sometimes say. He loves, he laughs, he has a distinctive sense of humor, he even thinks I’m funny sometimes. He has a complete and childlike faith in God at the age of 14. He has no desire to be away from his family. He enjoys the companionship of his church family. He develops crushes from time to time. He loves his sister, his mother, and yes, even me. He is my son, and I love him.

God is sovereign. Who can deny this? From before all time He ordained that I, my wife, my son, and all things should exist in exactly the way we perceive them. I have finally learned that my son was made the way he is for God’s good pleasure and purpose. I believe the redemption of my family was only a slight diversion in my son’s purpose in life. I am certain that God created my son the way he is for a distinct purpose. I only hope that God allows me to witness His perfect work as made manifest through my son.

And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.
2 Corinthians 12:9

If you are a parent or relative of a child who is struggling with Autism, don’t despair! Stick it out, be patient, pray for your child. Do not pray for a cure, there is none, they are who they are. Pray that you will come to understand your child, to value your child, to help your child understand the world around them. Then, when you have learned to appreciate your child for what they are, to accept that child, you will see your child’s true beauty and strength and value. You have been blessed! Thank God for you will see His power perfected in weakness.

I was pretty much in denial in the weeks and months that followed my son’s diagnosis. My wife did what needed to be done while I escaped into work and flying. I was so out of it that I’m not even sure how most of what happened came about. My wife gave notice and quit her job, arranged for experimental in-home tutoring, got speech therapy, and began herself to become a pocket expert on the subject of Autism.

I actually got hopeful at this point. My wife was coordinating an in-home behavior modification and training program called Lovaas Therapy. At the time this seemed to be the best approach to training my son. Their position is that if you can get the autistic indiviual to “act” normal then for all intents and purposes they are normal. This was what we always referred to as the “R” word or recovered. What I know now is that it was basically operant conditioning which if you remember from your Psych intro classes is basically stimulus/response training. More or less it’s the same way you train a dog. Knowing what I know now I cannot honestly say I would have done anything differently.
There was a steady stream of college students coming and going in my home. These kids were telling me how to reinforce what they had been teaching my son. It was a major nuisance but I held on to the hope that they might actually succed and that my son would recover. As the years went on it seemed he would make some minor advances and then regress. It was such difficult work for my wife. She had to deal with his behaviors all day, her only respite was when my son was in his learning room with the tutors.

Some of the behaviors he exhibted were head-banging, scratching himself or others, hitting, throwing whatever he could get hold of, screaming, crying. It is still heart-wrenching for me to watch some of the video tapes we made of the learning excercises when he was younger. The tutors spoke to him in emotionless monotones, asking him to perform a task or say a word. If he succeeded, the tutors would praise him or reward him with candy or a favorite toy. If he didn’t succeed all he got was an emotionless, monotone “No.” If he did cry or bang his head there was no effort to find out why, they would just place him back in his seat over and over until he finally gave up. Part of this was bending his will, part of it was just lack of emotion. The tutors genuinely cared for him, at least one is still involved in his life, and several of them still inquire as to how he is doing. However, I wish we could have found a more loving approach for teaching him.

Finally we were able to start him in school. First in some special day classes but soon he was advanced enough to attend a learning handicaped class with a tutor. This went on for a year but he never seemed to learn much from the class. However, he learned quite a bit from the other children. He learned some fairly foul curse words. He didn’t understand what the words meant, he only knew he got a reaction from others when he used them. He learned certain foul hand gestures. The longer he was in school, the more aggressive his behavior became. I talked to him, punished him, even threatened him with living in a group home. For a while the behaviors would subside but then they would always come back.

My wife became fearful of my son during this time. She dreaded his summer vacations because he would be home all day with her. She needed respite and wasn’t receiving any. My commute generally took me about two and a half hours to get home and by the time I got there I didn’t want to deal with anything. My wife sought out help from a pastor at a church she had been attending but he couldn’t offer any suggestions. Neither could the psychiatrist she saw once or twice. She began attending church during this time. She was a lost soul in the crowd crying from beginning to end of the service. But no one ever said a word to her. I was certainly doing nothing to help. Also, our daughter was born around this time. Our baby girl was a delight and was generally no trouble but this put my wife under even more strain.

Somewhere along the line she talked me into attending church with her. I wasn’t really against church, we met in church. It was just easier not to put my son in Sunday School. But he had finally reached a point where he could attend Sunday School and my wife and I started going to church again. Still I was obstinate and unchanged. Then one day my sister called and said her husband would be going to a Promise Keepers event in a near by town and asked if I would go with him. I’d never been and there were some guys from my church that were going. I thought it would be a good way to make some friends at church. Besides, it would get me out of the house for a while. We went to there on a Friday evening and an event occurred that changed my life.

As a new father, I had so many hopes, dreams, misconceptions, and illusions of what fatherhood was all about. It all seemed very easy for the fathers I had seen on television when I was younger. All problems were solved within half an hour, and everyone was happy at the end. The mother deferred to the father in the ideal world of the sitcom in the late 60’s and early 70’s. I knew it wouldn’t be exactly like that for me but I hoped my experiences would at least be no more difficult. I had no idea what God was about to unfold in my life.

From the point my son made his appearance in the world, I was so proud of him, and my beautiful wife who bore him. I remember the glow in her face as vividly as if it happened yesterday. I loved my new baby boy. His mother and father truly loved and enjoyed him. Unfortunately, like so many young parents we put work and money first and therefore sent our new young son off to daycare.

My wife was eager to get back to work and I actively encouraged her to return. Like most young couples we were strapped with bills and house payments. Plus at the time I was just starting in aviation so there was no shortage of bills. I was practically an absentee father at the time. My job was 80 miles away so I had to get up early in the morning, about 3:30am or so just to get there by 6:00am. I worked until 4pm and then didn’t get home until 6:30 pm at the earliest. I was off Friday through Sunday much of that time was spent either at the airport or in front of the television.

When I was “there” at home I did enjoy playing with my new son. He seemed to be developing pretty normally; he liked to run and jump on me, he liked his mother to read to him, he LOVED chasing the cat around. When he was almost 2 years old I caught my dad snapping his fingers behind my son’s head, sometimes clapping his hands. When I asked my parents what this was about my mother replied that there was just something wrong with my son. Rather than try to tap into the collective wisdom of my parents I immediately became defensive telling them he was just a late bloomer. That’s what the doctors had been saying. Sure he had some odd behaviors, but this was our first child, all his behaviors were odd. Sure he cried a lot, he was just collicky.

I continued along happily in denial until my wife informed me that some of the tests she had taken my son to had shown that he’d had some hearing loss. We began researching some hearing impared schools and whether or not he should learn American Sign Language, Signing Exact English, we were also hopeful that hearing aids would allow him to hear well enough to speak normally. I became hopeful at that point that once his hearing was corrected he would develop normally.

By this time my son was in preschool. We had him in some special classes for hearing impaired children. He was also receiving speech therapy at the time. The teachers began to tell my wife that he still wasn’t developing normally. I was so out of touch I had no idea what was going on. I had relegated the education of my son to my wife and I really had no interest in it. Somewhere along the line my wife was referred to Bryna Siegel, a specialist in autism diagnosis. An appointment was made with her and we drove to UCSF for the day. We spent several hours being questioned about family histories, and my son’s development while they observed, tested, and played with him. At the end of the day, Dr. Siegel’s assistant broke the news to us that his behavior was consistent with austistic spectrum disorder. Dr. Siegel later met with us and informed us that our son was autistic in the same way most people would say “the sky is blue.”

My wife and I were shell shocked. We made the drive back home in almost complete silence.

My wife is going to be writing in her blog about her journey through life with our autistic son.  She is a better writer than I in the sense that she is able to dredge up some very deep feelings and pen them.  I, on the other hand, have to pull those emotions up kicking and screaming, not want to face them, go into denial, confront everything BUT those emotions, and then finally when I’ve run out of excuses, face them.  

I thought, however, that this would be an excellent opportunity to pen my journey through autism with my son.   For a few weeks I’m going to put aside the aviator, stop hiding behind humor and confront some issues I’ve left buried deep within me.  Though I would not normally do something like this in a public forum my hope is that our stories reach those who may have to confront the very issues we did.  Hopefully the readers will come to understand that God works all things to the good of those who love Him.

A few months ago I authored a post on this site about the Flying Dutchman’s father whom I lovingly refer to as the man of sorrow. When I refer to him as the man of sorrow it is not meant to relate to Jesus being called a Man of Sorrows. I call him the man of sorrow because I can’t think of what else he could be called. What would you call a man who has studied and knows scripture yet doesn’t believe in God? What would you call a man who believes firmly in there being no life beyond this one nor indeed in any supreme deity at all?

I spoke to the man of sorrow today on the phone. He indicated that his wife’s great-grandchildren would be coming to live with them so that they would have a more moral environment to live in. They would be taking them to church and encouraging Bible study. There was a brief pause while the incredulous Dutchman pondered the gravity of this statement. I then asked him in as straight a voice as I could muster, “Uh… you’re not going to be leading that Bible study are you?”

For the first time in a while I heard genuine laughter from the man of sorrow. He then informed me with mock indignation in his voice that he remembered many subjects and facts from the Bible. “Name me one thing you remember from the Bible” the Dutchman countered.

The man of sorrow parried, “The sins of the father shall be visited upon the children…” Well, he got that one right. We had only one believing parent in our family, my beloved mother. In my family half believe, the other half just want to feel spiritual, whatever that means. The sins of the father have been visited on half the family, and at times on the other half in some fashion.

I took this opportunity to assure him that I would not attempt to convert him as my brother and sister-in-law had tried on their recent visit. He was very relieved. At this point the Dutchman decided to go for broke. I explained to him that he had helped me come to a realization about God’s plan for salvation of mankind. I proceeded to explain that God had elected certain people for belief in His Word and others for unbelief, that it was the only reasonable explanation that completely agreed with scripture that two intelligent men would have such opposite views on the belief in a supreme deity.

I would like to say I was shocked when he agreed with me. Unfortunately, I was not. He can’t fully comprehend the doctrine of election. Anyone who truly came to understand the doctrine of election and realize he was not in the elect would be the most sorrowful person on the planet. God in His mercy does not allow that to happen, at least I’ve never met the person. I explained to the man whom I will now call the agnostic Calivinist that this view was discussed at length by John Calvin and…

“Oh yeah, Calvin, he’s Methodist.” interrupted the agnostic Calvinist.

“Huh??” My thoughtful rejoinder.

“You know… John Calvin, he started the Methodist church.”

He may or may not know scripture but we’re definately going to have to work on church history.