Last week we visited the neurologist with my youngest son. He is four years old, vivacious, smart and generally healthy, but he does not really talk. He mostly babbles and communicates with gestures. he has a history of nocturnal seizures, which had been under control but which recurred over the holidays. There is (thankfully) no apparent physical cause (such as a brain abnormality) for these problems.<\/p>\n
It was an extraordinarily frustrating visit with the neurologist because she told us nothing new. The school where my son gets speech therapy had been “holding off” on a broader treatment plan until the neurological visit. The neurologist, however, seemed surprised by this, and bounced us back to the school. I know these people are trying to do their jobs as best they can, but meanwhile my precious little boy is not learning how to overcome his speech disability, and we are not being trained how to help him. Days, months and seasons go by with no firm diagnosis and nothing for us to hook into.<\/p>\n
We need patience and support. There’s nothing more I would want than for my little boy to be healed. If that’s not God’s will, I want to do everything I can to help him become the person God wants him to be. If he is disabled his whole life, he is no less precious as a person. The hardest thing isn’t the shock that everything isn’t “perfect.” It’s the waiting for some concrete understanding of the “imperfection.”<\/p>\n
Before I start to sound like I’m crying in my milk, let me say that I’m deeply thankful for my little boy and for all the other blessings I’ve received. Even when I despair that he’ll never learn to speak, or when I give in to the “big black dog” worries about deeper undiagnosed problems with his health, I’m grateful that God entrusted him to my wife and I, just as he is. There is so much pain in this world and so many people I know who have dealt with more immediate and severe losses, such as cancers and tragic fatal accidents. God is good; all His purposes are good; all His ways are good; and everything in this short life of mine is His, until we rejoice together in that better country He is preparing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week we visited the neurologist with my youngest son. He is four years old, vivacious, smart and generally healthy, but he does not really talk. He mostly babbles and communicates with gestures. he has a history of nocturnal seizures, which had been under control but which recurred over the holidays. There is (thankfully) no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-51","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}