wide spaces

finding grace in the overwhelm

I drove home from an appointment with Reagan’s team at our homeschool, leaves skipping across the road while the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band sang about fishing in the dark. Just me, no distractions, no kids arguing in the back – a good time to think some deep thoughts.

It was our annual special ed meeting, a newish development for us but also one I dreaded last year. But this year I feel like a grown up about it, which means I’ve reached a new level of maturity that borders on reckless indifference. Reagan is almost eighteen and that means nothing to her development, care, or education, but it changes a lot of things legally, initiating a whole new level of well-meaning bureaucracy in our lives.

In the meeting we discussed goals for math, reading, and writing. Math, for instance: The team suggested getting Reagan a watch to help her practice telling time, and we talked about what that would accomplish.

“Nothing,” I told them, “other than a broken watch, because she will get it in the water, pick at its mechanisms, and destroy it in within two weeks. We might as well find a twenty dollar bill and have the fun of lighting it on fire.” (I know, fun at parties, remember?) She doesn’t understand the concepts of seconds, minutes, and hours, anyway. She does understand days (usually), months (sometimes), and parts of the day, like evening and morning, with variable accuracy. Even on the days when she remembers how to tell time, it means nothing to her, and it was bought at the cost of weeks of frustration and often disobedience.

Money? Same thing. She knows what coins are worth, but that information is meaningless because she doesn’t understand buying, selling, earning, or spending. There are no hooks to hang that knowledge on. Yes, we take her to the store and go through the motions with her, but that’s all it is – going through motions. Her mind doesn’t understand the concepts of what is really occurring.

I flipped the blinker and turned right, wondering how many years you can teach first grade math to the same child. One reason we homeschool is to keep our kids from wasting time with busywork, but for eleven years that’s all it seems like most of her math assignments have been for her. But we’ve persisted, hoping something would finally click, or she would be healed, or we would see some bigger progress.

So how do we get more basic than the basics? Are we just pushing these things to make ourselves feel better? These are the questions I’m pondering lately. Have we wasted all this time, trying to teach her useless things? I know, I hear you; it hasn’t really been wasted. God never wastes anything. But just give me a minute so I can overthink this.

I don’t want to give up hope for her healing. I want to live in the green light and yet at the same time work with her where she’s at – where she’s still at, where she might always be at. I don’t want our days to be long, frustrating exercises in futility, checking off boxes when those boxes don’t apply to her.

I want to find the right boxes, where she clicks perfectly and thrives. And yes, we are an out-of-the-box family, I don’t have a problem with coloring outside the lines. But I’m tired of fishing in the dark, firing blind. We need structure and outlines and achievable goalposts to reach for, because things have been so “too much” and yet often also “not enough.”

There were four of us in the meeting and everyone was on our side; there was no combativeness or judgment, praise God. But there are always stark reminders that these other women, kind as they are, don’t fully grasp Reagan’s challenges. One mentioned vocational rehab as an option, and I reminded her that Reagan is cognitively anywhere from two to six years old, and you would not send a preschooler to vocational rehab.

“Right,” she nodded. I appreciate her agreement and understanding, but I’m so tired of being the only one that keeps these things in mind as we live with her limitations. I don’t want to be the naysayer all the time. I don’t want to naysay at all. But here we are: The freedom to do anything, but limits everywhere.

I read this about limits recently:

…What nuns, hermits, and students do is facilitated rather than hindered by the confines of the formal structures they inhabit; because those structures constrain freedom…they enable movements in a defined space. If the moves you can perform are prescribed and limited – if, for example, every line of your poem must have ten syllables and rhyme according to a predetermined pattern – each move can carry a precise significance.

– Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence

…and this makes sense to me. I need the focus provided by parameters and limits within the overwhelm.

So eleven years into this, we are reevaluating how we structure her days, and praying again about how to make them the most fruitful. And this, at least, is normal for every kid I’ve homeschooled: Tweaking and adjusting is normal, frequent, and to be expected.

We don’t want to push things for the sake of pushing them, or because they’re what’s “supposed” to happen, or because it’s what she ought to be able to do in a perfect world without FAS and other traumas. I’m all done with the exercise in futility, and yet I’m also not ready to admit she can’t be healed.

Which means I’m here in the middle, realizing for the brazillionth time that I can’t force healing, growth, or learning to happen. We need His grace; it has to be His work here. And we need to find other ways to engage and grow her that won’t be a constant source of aggravation and strife for all of us.

I heave a long sigh, and the Lord corrects me. Hey Love, you do not carry the weight of the world. I do. Agree with Me. So I do, mostly…I think 99.5 percent, at least…and I remind myself He’s doing great things. Working on our behalf. Making our efforts mean something. Giving us wisdom and discernment.

Every step forward for each of us is pure grace.

But still, I haven’t had a real vacation (the kind without kids, appointments, or interviews) in 22 years and there’s this 3-inch binder for Reagan’s paperwork and future planning that I need to look through this evening. Or at least, one of these evenings. Or at least by late November.

And I want nothing to do with it; I want to fling it out the window. I want to be Knightley, napping in the rocking chair.

So, maturity…yeah, I dunno if I’m getting anywhere with that in my own heart, either. The further we get it in this, the more I come up against my own selfishness, my own disappointments, my own imperfections and limits. My own need for grace.

I have been overwhelmed with overwhelm, and am longing for some…I don’t even know. Peace. Space. Victory. Rest.

And then a few weeks ago I read this, about the Lord leading the Israelites out of slavery and into a good land:

Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.”

– Exodus 3:7-8

Did you see that? Three big things are happening here. One: The Lord sees their struggle. That’s super great, we need to be seen and heard and known.

And then B: He comes to deliver them to a good place, which is filled with hope and relief and promise. I can just see that good and broad land, with rolling fields, gardens, and a little stream cutting across a cluster of woods.

But then, C: In the same breath, before He even finishes the sentence, He says the place is absolutely teeming with horrible, idolatrous enemies they have to conquer.

Record scratch. Wait a second.

But I think this is where I’ve been living. I mean, maybe there’s a pattern here: We get to a new breakthrough, we start to see light ahead, and boom – new challenge, new overwhelm, new enemies to conquer. In fact, I’m almost positive I’ve written about this before, a little over a year ago. So why are we here again?

Because it’s the next level. The Lord delivers from overwhelm, but He also delivers us into overwhelm. Because He’s doing something in the midst of it.

I will rejoice and be glad in your steadfast love,
    because you have seen my affliction;
    you have known the distress of my soul,
and you have not delivered me into the hand of the enemy;
   you have set my feet in a broad place.

– Psalm 31:7-8

We can keep pushing Reagan through math workbooks, and enjoy the predictability of knowing what we’re getting into because it’s what we’ve always gotten. Or we can toss them aside and look at a wide, new land of almost limitless, overwhelming other options. Really, it’s not that different from the deliberations public schooling parents face when they first switch to homeschool.

My friend said this the other day about her daughter:

“We never had to do more than say ‘yes’ and just be there for her and love her. As long as we were faithful to do that, He did all the rest. We could’ve just rested in that instead of all the tears and worry.”

And I know this in my head but I have had to learn it over and over – which really, does that mean I’ve ever learned it? – because I have also spent many days in long, frustrating futility with tears and worry. I’ve wasted a lot of time with that useless busywork. But I’m hoping that this time the concept of grace will stick, that it will click, because I need healing and progress, too.

Learning that I can trust Him in all of it makes all the difference. Right, I’ve said that a million times here, and I think I’ve believed it 99.5 percent of the time, even. But probably because it’s taken this long to have hooks to hang that knowledge on, I’m finally learning about grace and trusting Him in new ways – like, I’m finally feeling it in my bones, and understanding that we are bound by love, and therefore, free.

If the Lord delights in us, he will bring us into this land and give it to us, a land that flows with milk and honey. Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not fear the people of the land, for they are bread for us. Their protection is removed from them, and the Lord is with us; do not fear them.

– Numbers 14:8-9

I can almost grasp it right here – this shift that has been so slippery, so hard to hang on to, but it’s starting to make sense and feel real: Because if I can trust Him, then the future brings more joy and rest. Because if every step forward is His grace and not dependent on my perfection or ability, then the obstacles ahead are bread for us. Instead of the expectation of more limits and more confusion and more lack or dread or any other thing not of Him, there’s something that looks a little like reckless indifference – but what it really is, is freedom. It’s the next level.

It looks like rolling fields, and cultivated gardens, and a stream running free in all the directions He sends it.

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