Well my friends, here’s a story that when I read it, I knew I should share it here for you to be encouraged and blessed. It’s written by one of my online friends, Susan Norman. This testimony speaks of God’s love and faithfulness in the midst of Susan’s personal chaos! Thank you, Susan, for sharing a little bit of your life…
I remember the moment clearly.
I was in high school in Decatur, Ga., and had just left the principal’s office after winning another award. I don’t remember which award it was. There were many.
But I do remember thinking as I walked back to my classroom, “How do C-students live?”
Flash forward 10 years to when I was a young woman living in Athens, Ga. Almost every time that someone with a visible handicap, typically mental retardation, came into a restaurant where I was dining, I would fold my napkin, leave a tip next to my plate of uneaten food, scoot out my chair, pay my bill at the register, and leave.
I did this over and over and over again, never telling another living soul about what amounted to an innate aversion to the disabled.
But God saw this shadow over my soul, and He already had designed the perfect cure for it.
In my late twenties, I became the stepmother of a developmentally disabled boy named Michael. He was 7 when I married his father. I saw him once while Jack and I were dating and had not been particularly enamored with him during that visit. However, as a Christian, I felt that once we were married, we should participate fully in Michael’s life.
So, like his mother did, we started bringing him home from his residential treatment center every other weekend. I took on Michael’s training with a vengeance, envisioning myself as a modern-day Anne Sullivan… Ego aside, I did rightly see that any gains in Michael’s development while he was young would leverage his growth over his lifetime.
What I couldn’t see, of course, was that this boy with an IQ of 30 would become the instrument through which God one day would minister to me during the very worst period of my life. For someone so naturally gifted, I had so much to learn.
THE BOY BEHIND THE HANDICAP
The first thing I learned in working with Michael was that I could actually love the boy behind the handicap. And, my goodness, did I grow to love that child!
Michael grew so much those first two years that when our son Mark was just 8 months old, I insisted we bring him home to live with us. I had quit my job at the paper in Norfolk in order to stay home with my baby, and I saw no reason not to give Michael the same level of care.
But working with Michael full time, month after month and year after year, was very difficult. Not on purpose, of course, he literally took my brain hostage.
Here was our typical conversation in those days:
Michael: “Susi?”
Me: “Yes, Michael.”
Michael: “Washing machine.”
Me: “Michael, when you want to talk to Susi, say something new.”
Imagine having this conversation at least once an hour every day for almost four years!
It was another version of Chinese water torture that I’m sure would break the strongest prisoner of war.
Things got even more intense after I not only had another much-desired baby 10 months later but also brought into our home Jack’s mother, who had Alzheimer’s Disease.
Having two babies and two mentally disabled family members really was more than I could handle.
At one point, when I was particularly exasperated by Michael, I fired off this thought to God: “Why did you let him live?”
I’m not proud of having asked that question. In fact, I’m ashamed of it.
But not too many years later, God would dramatically, lovingly, reveal to me His answer.
TWO SONS, TWO WORLDS
Our son Mark was very difficult, even as a child. By his early teens, he had become completely unmanageable.
I fought for him. I fought him. But nothing worked.
That’s when God stepped in — not to heal Mark (yet) but to embrace me.
And he did it through Michael.
Shortly before his 21st birthday, I asked a consultant in the field of autism to come evaluate Michael. While he had continued to progress, I wanted to see if there was anything else we could do to address the autism that would help him further develop.
I don’t remember the consultant providing any new suggestions for helping Michael, but she did say that the most damaged part of his brain was the area controlling speech, his “expressive language.”
She said he was on the speaking level of a 3-year-old.
Just after the evaluation his mother suggested that she and I take Michael and his training center work crew out to lunch to celebrate his 21st birthday the last week of December.
Before leaving the house on the day of the luncheon, I decided to try to find a Bible verse to honor his becoming a man. Michael had spent four years during his teens at a residential school run by some Mennonites and had shown an aptitude for remembering Bible verses.
Seated at the dining room table, I thumbed through the pages of my late mother’s Bible and stopped on Psalm 45:2.
“You are the most excellent of men, and your lips have been anointed with grace, since God has blessed you forever.”
I sat back with a start and thought, “Well, if God started speaking through Michael, you would know it, because we just had him evaluated, and he is on the speaking level of a 3-year-old.”
I know it may seem a little crazy, but that verse stuck in my spirit and I got pretty excited.
That was the end of 1994. The miracle would begin unfolding six months later.
ON THE GRATE OF HELL
The night before Fathers Day 1995, our son slipped out of the house during the night. When he came back the next morning, he and I had a huge, screaming fight.
Honestly, I was terrified at what might be ahead for Mark. I knew we needed to get control of him, but nothing we had ever done to discipline him had worked.
Tension was extremely high in our house that afternoon, but minutes after Michael walked in the door for a visit, his silliness made things better. I remember the entire family’s laughter when he suddenly started walking like a duck and the other children followed him from room to room, mimicking him.
No one mentioned to him anything about the fight I had had with his brother. But that evening, while he and I were seated alone at the kitchen table, he took my hand and said, “Susi, let’s pray.”
Now to my knowledge, Michael to that point had never uttered a thought originating in his own mind. He had merely echoed back to us what we had said to him. It’s called echolalia and is a classic trait of autism.
So I was stunned by what he said in his prayer.
“Lord, help Mark to do the right thing, and help Susi not to be afraid.”
My eyes popped open. What had he just said? How did he know that I was afraid, when I hadn’t even consciously realized it? I had just felt anger. I wanted to throttle Mark.
The next day, Michael and I were taking a drive to visit some of the ladies who had cared for him at a Portsmouth facility when he was a young boy.
We were alone in the car and holding hands in the front seat, when he pulled my hand up over his heart and, turning toward me, said, “Susi, Jesus says be anxious for nothing.”
Wow. Wow. Wow.
Shortly after that, we moved to Northern Virginia, where Mark’s downward spiral continued. We had physical confrontations in which I was badly bruised. He called me every horrible name satan created for rebellious teens to call their mothers.
At the same time, Michael gave me a new nickname.
He called me “Good Mama.”
I told him, “Michael, I have tried to be a good mama, but…”
He interrupted me, saying, “No, Susi. You ARE a good mama. You are a VERY good mama.”
My sweet angel.
The pressure in our home, meanwhile, ratcheted up even more.
I thought, “If I ever write a book about my life, this chapter will be entitled, ‘On the Grate of Hell.'”
I could almost feel the flames of hell coming up through the floor of our so-called family room.
My family was being destroyed right before my eyes, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
I tried taking Mark to a psychiatrist. The first one said he had Attention Deficit Disorder and prescribed Ritalin — the very worst thing you could give someone with a mood disorder.
I took him to another psychiatrist. He said his brain was “overactive” and gave him better medications. But Mark was using street drugs and alcohol, which ruined any therapeutic value of the prescribed medications.
I went to my church. The music minister had had experience with troubled teens. He prayed with me, and Mark did calm down for a few days, but then the violence resumed.
THE MIRACLE UNFOLDS
Not long before Christmas, I went to a video store and noticed a tape called “Life After Life.” It featured five near-death experiences documented by Raymond Moody, who wrote a book with that title.
I brought it home and drank in the words of the people who had seen heaven. One of the stories hit home.
A nurse had attempted to commit suicide by shooting herself in the heart. She was met in heaven by someone exuding unconditional love who understood exactly what had brought her to the point of giving up — but told her that it did no good to take one’s own life, because “whatever pain you are supposed to have, you will have in the body or out of the body.”
Just before she was to return to her body, this being took all of her pain onto itself. She did not recognize this being as Jesus Christ, but when she described that moment, I knew it was Him.
The next day, with everyone else out of the house for work or school, I stood in our family room and stretched out my arms like someone on a cross and said to God, looking up at the ceiling with my eyes open:
“Here is all this pain.”
I went through the timeline of lifelong trauma, which started at the age of 4. I went through everything, up to the current nightmare with my own son.
Then I said, “Do I have to die first?”
In other words, would Jesus only take my pain after I died, or would He take it from me now?
My prayer was met with silence. And things got even worse over the next 10 days.
We had Mark arrested on his 15th birthday for beating his way through a deadbolted interior door. He hit Jack right in the chest. He knocked me so hard that I went up in the air and landed head first on the floor. He ran away and slept in a place where the county dumped dead deer carcasses.
By Christmas Day 1995, we were completely fractured. All I could do was lie on the couch and let the Christmas songs of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir try to keep me breathing.
But then, after dark, Michael came. And he brought Jesus with him.
I greeted him in the foyer. People with autism aren’t known for the ability to show empathy. In fact, before that night, Michael typically giggled when someone got hurt or died.
But this night, this memorable and holy night, Michael — whose name means “who is like God” — walked in, put his arms around me and held me.
“I have compassion for you,” he said.
Standing still and soaking in the love in his embrace, I said, “Oh, Michael, I need compassion.”
A little later, he and I sat down on the floor so that he could open his presents.
He typically just acted silly, ripping apart the paper and bows and barely looking inside the boxes. But this time, he stopped and looked at me and said:
“Susi, Jesus knows all our ways, and He’s not worried at all.”
What immediately came to my mind was a picture of flames. And I thought, “When we are in the fire, all we see is the flames. But God is above the flames, and He sees the ending from the beginning.”
I looked at Michael and said, “You’re right, Michael. God isn’t worried at all.”
During dinner, he looked across the table at his brother and said, “Don’t be a bastard, Mark.”
I was shocked, never having heard Michael use such language, but inside I was thinking, “Go, Michael!”
Then, when it was just the two of us at the table, he turned his attention to me, saying: “Susi, put your hand on the table.”
I had no idea what he meant. It made no sense.
He got up slowly from his chair and walked around the table and stood directly behind me.
He took my right hand and placed it palm down on the table, covering it with his right hand.
Then he put his left arm around me and leaned over my head and prayed.
The first words out of his mouth: “Lord, take the hate out of Susi’s heart, and put the love back in.”
The sword of the Spirit pierced — zapped — my heart.
Then Michael continued praying, almost as if he were giving me spiritual CPR, and ended with these words still frozen in time:
“Susi, I take all your pain on me.”
Dear God, thank you for letting that impossibly tiny baby boy live and be a part of my life.
Thank you for teaching me that you are not a respecter of persons — that you love each of us exactly the same, and that regardless of what our human eyes may see, there exists in each of us a distinct spiritual being, an inner man, that is whole and complete in you.
Thank you for taking my pain, in the midst of the fire, and making me whole like Michael.