" And Father said, “Christopher, do you understand that I love you?”
And I said “Yes,” because loving someone is helping them when they get into trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth, and Father looks after me when I get into trouble, like coming to the police station, and he looks after me by cooking meals for me, and he always tells me the truth, which means that he loves me.
And then he held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan, and I held up my left and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other. "
maybe the hardest thing about pouring your life and time into the life of an autistic child is that they may never love you back in a way that matches what you know as love. they may never love you back in a self-conscious or recognizable way. They may never love you back, period.
loving them teaches us something by experience that we could maybe never learn just by word-age:
It must hurt Jesus when He pours His love on me.
the autistic and "borderline autistic" boys I get to spend time with each day are different from fictional-Christopher in many ways. but they help me understand some of the manifestations of Christopher's mind and heart--and he helps me understand some of their inner logic.
And logic it is. Every child and every person with disabilities (which is every human being) has an inner world that makes sense; everyone takes part of what they see in the world and magnifies it to be the guiding principle of their world. We just all take different parts. And some people's piece is less commonly chosen than others. Like the "Facts" piece that autistic people choose to the exclusion of most other pieces.
Some days i want to take a radio and hold the white noise up to my ear and rock back and forth for hours and hours and hours.
Noises everywhere, the magic of movement and patterns and the madness of people, the number of things to explore and understand, the myriad of different perspectives and the wordswordswords swirling...Every day the world is so overwhelming that if I didn't know I had a YHWH who loves me and understand it all, I think my head and heart would explode.
this is one way I know that I have stopped looking at YHWH Jesus--I get very overwhelmed and frightened. The world is huge and hollow and I am completely useless within it. This is how I felt last night during the second half of a symphony concert because my mind began asking what I'm doing because I'm getting old...and I looked around at so many heads, so many minds facing Beethoven's 2nd, so many lives, so many people scraping their niche into the world, and I am alone...
and then I realized that that is a lie; I am not alone. I know I have been drifting from a deep connection to my Abba Father lately. So my thoughts were beginning to grow in a climate of coldness, aloneness.
And this made me remember that it is the love of Jesus that gives me the hope to exist and the courage to continue and it is the only thing that gives me any joy about living or the future at all. And the difference it makes is not small. The joy I have about living when I remember I live in that cocoon of Love...is HUGE.
my love compared to His is almost no love at all, certainly barely recognizable as Love.
He holds me in a safewarmcocoon of perfect Love
I rarely see it.
And what I do see is just a strand, just the Face, just the Facts, and the depth is so much more, something I don't even have a language for.
I barely see it.
I am overwhelmed by what fills my limited field of vision
I groan
I rock.
He sees the whole, mindblowing, magnificent, infinite Picture
He sings over me.
This is how we know what Love is. . .
do read mark haddon's book.
and do listen to copland's appalachian spring today. it's a magical moment, that moment of total silence in the performance hall just after the last strains have slipped away...
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