Take Heart

Wrestling With Hope by Carrie M. Holt (Replay)

• Amy J Brown, Carrie Holt and Sara Clime

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Sometimes hope requires us to wrestle with grief over the way things currently are and the desire of what we want them to be. Listen in today as Carrie shares her thoughts about wrestling with hope. 

December 13, 2022

Key Topics/Timestamps:

[2:09] Facing the unknowns 
[6:38] Four things to remember about hope
[13:55] A reminder from Ann Voskamp

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[0:22] Welcome to Take Heart, where our goal is to give you hope and offer insight and encouragement so that you can flourish in your journey as a Special Needs Mom. Each week Sara, Amy, and Carrie will explore a theme, share an inspiring story, a practical tip, and an encouraging blessing using our combined experience of over 30 years of parenting special needs children. Thank you for being here today. 

[1:04] Hi, there. It’s Carrie today, and it’s Christmas time! Our topic for this month is hope. It is hard to believe that even in this year of uncertainty and crisis, we can still find reasons to hope. But we can! This time of year, we hear a lot about that word. It’s written on those cute wooden signs at craft stores to decorate your home. You hear it in Christmas music. So, true confession, how long have you been listening to Christmas music in your house? I feel like this year, music have been on even earlier than normal as I have needed the reassurance that it gives. But yet, I think sometimes hope is really hard to define.  In Adam Young’s podcast, the Place We Find Ourselves, in his episode entitled Why Your Story Makes It Hard to Hope, he defines hope as “groaning inwardly while waiting expectantly.” Hope holds those two things together: groaning for our desires and longings to be met and then waiting for that to happen. 

[2:09] This time of year always takes me back to what it may have felt like to have been Mary carrying baby Jesus.  You see, fourteen years ago at this time, I was also expecting a special baby, and he was to be born three days after Christmas.  Every year at this time, I am a little more emotional than usual and very cognizant of the feelings that Mary may have experienced. I imagine what it could have felt like to have been her when the angel came to tell her that even though she had never been with a man, she was going to have a baby. And it was the Messiah, the one they had been waiting for. We also received startling news during my pregnancy that held much fear about the birth of our son as he was prenatally diagnosed with his birth defect. I do want to put a small disclaimer in here and clearly state that I am respectfully making this analogy. In no way do I equate our son, Toby, with Jesus, but rather to shed light on the humanity of Mary and her feelings because, as special needs moms, I feel like we have a lot in common with her. I expect that maybe she felt fear, doubt, and anxiety, had wondered, and then asked questions about why God had chosen her to be the mother. Many times through the story of Jesus' birth, you read about angels reassuring different characters like Mary, Joseph, Zachariah, and the shepherds. Each time the phrase is repeated: “Do not fear.” “Do not be afraid.” So I know that those involved experienced fear. There were many things for Mary to fear - stoning because she was pregnant before she was married, and then there was the long journey that took them back to Bethlehem right around the time to deliver.  She faced so many unknowns, just as we do as special needs moms. I wonder if Mary also knew the reason for his birth, that he was born to grow up to suffer many things and to die. As a mom, did she have a hard time holding back her “mama bear” when the Pharisees tried to trick him when other men tried to entrap him? Then there was the plot to kill him for something he didn’t do. Did she feel righteous indignation? Did she want to protect her son? I wonder if she daily had to trust God for what he was giving her and what would be coming in her future. I know a lot of times, we see unjust and cruel things happen to our children. Others make fun of them, and we are misunderstood, or they are. We have to learn to trust Jesus daily for the outcome. The same God that chose Mary and Joseph to be Jesus' earthly parents also chose you to be your child’s mother. That's an awe-inspiring thought, isn't it?  If your child is your biological child or even adopted, God ordained that your child would be a part of your family, just as he chose his plan of redemption from the beginning of time. 

[5:35] So, how do we continue to wait expectantly for healing, peace, and for strength, knowing that each day is going to be difficult? Later in that same podcast, Adam Young goes on to ask this question, “Are we going to have all our longings met in this world? No, but we don’t know which ones. Hope forces us to wrestle with God about the barren places in our lives where our longings aren’t met” For us, I think it’s our children to be healed; maybe it’s for them to speak, to eat food by mouth, maybe not to need a special diet, to look you in the eye, to walk again, to hug you or have a relationship with you. You fill in the blank. What are you longing for? Where do you need healing? Hope requires us to wrestle with God about these longings and lament them when they are not met, and wait expectantly for God to do something. 

[6:38] Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way about wrestling, and so it’s easy to remember, it spells the acronym of HOPE. 

The letter “H” stands for honest. I believe we need to be honest with God about our feelings. Is he going to give you everything you want? No. Is life always going to go as we expect? No, but closeness in a relationship is built on honesty, which is his deepest desire for you. This does require lamenting our hard places. I know I might sound like a broken record here because I’ve mentioned it in other podcasts, but it’s true, and it’s been a big part of my journey. Crying out to Him when your strength is gone, when you are frustrated, angry. He already knows all your emotions anyway, and he wants you to take them to Him. So be honest with Him about the hard places of your life.

[7:31] The “o” in hope is for offer, and this is to offer your burden and your requests to God. I know there's another part in scripture that says, “You have not because you ask not.” I think sometimes we want to dismiss the little things that we need, or we just expect God to know our minds which he does. Just like with your own children, you want them to come and ask you; God wants us to do the same thing. I can remember being a really young mom, and I was pregnant with my first child, who does not have special needs. We were a young couple with very little money, and I would go to Babies R Us and admire all that beautiful matching furniture with the crib, the changing table, and the rocking chair, and I wanted something just like that. But we didn't have the money for it, so I prayed. You know what? God didn't exactly answer my prayer in the way that I expected. I didn't get a shiny new set from Babies R Us, but I did get a really nice used one. Do you know what that taught me? God cares even about the little things. Do you believe that He cares about how much sleep you get if you get your coffee in the morning and the big things like surgeries and behavior problems, and IEPs? He does, and he wants to hold your burdens and have you cast them on Him. Just as Amy so graciously reminded us in episode nine about Changing Your Mindset, Philippians 4:6-7 tells us not to be anxious about anything but to give our request to God. The verse right before that says, “the Lord is near.” In other versions that I've read, it says, “THE LORD IS AT HAND,” so offer your burdens and requests to Him.

[9:20] The “P” in Hope is peace, and trust comes with that. It can be very hard to hope when our minds and hearts are filled with chaos when we cannot think or process our emotions or even our thoughts.  Isaiah says, “You (God) keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you.” I want you to notice in that verse that our minds can be at peace when we think about him and focus on scripture and trust Him. It’s about not allowing our circumstances and chaos to rule our hearts. I learned this very clearly in the space of about fifteen months. So, our son was between five and six years of age, and he had ten surgeries in those fifteen months. Four of those were within six weeks of one another, and they were things that weren’t expected; issues kept coming up over and over again. We were having four of those surgeries during the holiday season. It was very difficult to trust during that time, but God taught me how to find peace in the chaos, whether it was little moments with our kids, like creating a gingerbread house or watching a Christmas movie while my husband took a turn at the hospital. I took my requests to him, and I felt his peace. My mind wasn't anxious, and it wasn't scattered, at least not always. Sometimes it still was. In the chapel at the small Christian college I attended, there was a song that we sang often, and it says something like this. “I woke up this morning with my mind, with my mind stayed on Jesus.” So, wake up in the morning talking to him, asking him to help you today. One of the things that I try to do to enact the prayer about “praying without ceasing” is I wake up in the morning, and the first thing I do is start my prayer with “Dear Lord”, with some praise and thankfulness. Then I continue to have that conversation with him throughout the day. There are certainly times we need peaceful times for quiet prayer and also to hear his voice. I think God also knows that we have to continue our days. We have to take care of our children. Open your day with prayer. Don't say amen yet. Continue that conversation until you go to bed, and I trust that your mind will be more at peace.

[11:45] The letter “E” of hope is for expectant. This is about waiting and waiting, expecting God to do something. Many times as we wrestle with him, we have to wait on him for an answer. Sometimes the answer is no; sometimes, it’s yes, and sometimes it’s not yet. It’s hard for us to be patient. I think as special needs parents, we know a lot about waiting because we spend a lot of time doing it. Sometimes the end results are not that great. But, sometimes they are, and that doesn’t mean that we can’t ask God to answer our prayers and expectantly wait for them knowing that sometimes if we don’t see healing on this side of heaven, we will see it someday because Jesus is our living hope. But you can expect that God will always be near you and be with you through it all. After all, one of his names is “Immanuel, which is God with us.” Sarah and Abraham knew a lot about waiting. They had been given a promise that Abraham’s descendants would outnumber the stars, and they waited years for Sarah to have a child. Finally, at the age of 90, she did. We look at that time, and there were times when Abraham would get tired of waiting and take matters into his own hands. He had a son by Sarah’s handmaiden. Finally, the blessing came. In that waiting, God was still working. God’s promises were fulfilled. Abraham’s descendants have outnumbered the stars in more ways than just the practical number of people and generations that have come after him because 2,000 years ago, a baby was born, one to give us hope - to redeem our hurts, and pain, sin, and satisfy every longing of our hearts. Abraham not only has physical children, but through his lineage, Jesus came. We are his spiritual children. We have been blessed by Abraham because our Savior came through his generations. So as we close and continue to wrestle with this idea of hope, I want you to remember this key thing from Ann Voskamp’s book Unwrapping the Greatest Gift 

[13:55] “He is the God who is so for you that He can’t stay away from you! The God who so loves you and likes you and isn’t merely a little bit for you or halfway for you or kind of for you but is always, fully, completely, totally, entirely, 100 percent for you - this is the God who chooses to be right with you. So God threw open the door of this world and entered as a Baby. He came as a Baby because He was done with the barriers. He disarmed Himself so that you could take Him in your arms. God came as a Baby because He wants to be unimaginably close to you. “ May you experience His unending, unfathomable hope this season. Merry Christmas.

[14:54] Thank you for joining us this week on Take Heart. Our prayer each week is for your heart to be encouraged. We are so grateful that you are walking on this journey with us. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can follow us on Instagram @Takeheartspecialmoms, and be sure to check out our new website takeheartspecialmoms.com where you can subscribe to our newsletter. If you have any questions or comments or want us to hear your story, follow the links in our show notes, we would love to hear from you. Listen in next Tuesday as Sara shares her thoughts on hope.