Take Heart

Surrendering to God's Plans

• Amy J Brown, Carrie Holt and Sara Clime • Season 1 • Episode 20

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Amy, Sara, and Carrie wrap up this month on hope discussing how Mary, the mother of Jesus, is an example of surrender. They will encourage you to allow others to help, focus on answered prayers, and hold onto hope by remembering who Jesus is.

December 22, 2020

Timestamps & Key Topics

  • 0:20:     Intro
  • 1:02:     How to Surrender
  • 7:53:     Holding on to Hope
  • 10:32:   Connection
  • 16:10:   Rest & Help
  • 17:40:   Answered Prayers
  • 23:00:   Asking for Help
  • 28:12:   Who Jesus Is
  • 29:58:   Outro

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(Carrie) Welcome to Take Heart, where our goal is to give you hope, insight and encouragement, so you can flourish in your journey as a Special Needs Mom. Each week Amy, Carrie, and Sara 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 so much for joining us today.

So today is December 22nd, and we have been talking about the topic of hope all month. Some of the things we’ve discussed in our individual podcasts have been about how hope is never futile. It's never a waste of time. This time of year, I think a lot about Mary and how we as special needs moms actually have a lot in common with her. She knew fear. She didn't always understand what the purpose was in her son’s mission here on earth. She had to trust. She received very startling news that she was going to have a baby before she was even married or knew a man. She also stood by and watched her son unjustly and cruelly suffer. Yet it always surprises me that after the angel came to her to tell her that she was going to be the one to bear the Messiah she says, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word.” My prayer is that we will find such surrender in our journeys. One of the questions I have for you, Amy and Sara, is how do we get to that place where we are able to surrender to God in our hard things? 

(Amy) I would say for me. To get to that place you have to let go, you have to be empty first. What I'm trying to say is if you think about Mary and all that was on her heart and even when she went into the temple and Simeon said the prophecy over her, that her heart would be pierced. Right there, I don't know how she handled that and how she worked through not being afraid. I think the way that we get to surrender is that we have to empty our own expectations. For me, I know in my life as a mom of a special needs kid, or when I have bad news about something, sometimes if I'm being really honest I only want one outcome. I'm not willing to look for any other outcome. That stubbornness in me doesn't allow me to surrender. I want the outcome that I want, and that’s that. Before I can even surrender, I have to empty myself of my own expectations, my own fears, and the outcome that I want. Obviously, I don't need to say this but God knows more than me, but for some reason I feel like, I know more than him. I guess I've noticed as I've had many opportunities to surrender to God how that is my first go to. I don't want this outcome. I'd like to tell you that I have mastered this, but I haven’t. I don't take as long to get there anymore, if that's an encouragement to somebody out there, hopefully. Just saying, “God you know the outcome, and I don't have to know it.” As we talked on another podcast, I can go down the trail of anticipatory fear, stress and ‘what ifs’ all day long. I’m learning to let go and emptying myself of that expectation so I can be filled with what he has for me. 

(Carrie) That’s really good, Amy. How about you, Sara?

(Sara) I like to remember that nothing is a surprise to God. Sometimes our circumstances are so shocking, we don't know how to handle it. I always fall back on: this is not a surprise to God. God is not surprised by what is happening in my life right now. Not only that, but he's proven time and time again that he has more trust and faith in my abilities than I do. How many times have I said, “God I cannot do this. I don't know how to parent a child with this disability, or this mental breakdown that happens. I don't know how to do this, I can't do this.” He continually says, “Yes you can, because I can.” I always fall back on, I can surrender because I know he's taking care of it. It's hard to surrender something when you think it's just going to fall through the cracks. I think that's how we as moms handle it. We have to handle it all because someone's going to have to do it. 

(Carrie) We’re caregivers.

(Sara)It needs to get done. God’s not waiting for us to give him permission to take care of it. We don't have to say, “Okay, God, I'm done.” Sometimes we do. Sometimes I really think he's waiting for me just to say, “Okay, I concede. I'm done.” He’s waiting patiently for me to do whatever it is that I think that I'm doing. It’s knowing that it's not a surprise to him, and that he also has more faith in my capabilities than I do.

(Carrie) He has given you the Holy Spirit and the strength, given us that to handle it. When you were saying that, I was thinking about how we do take on so much on ourselves. For me that big load and burden has been every time Toby goes into the hospital, I feel like it's my responsibility to bring him home again whole and healthy. I have my list of outcomes, Amy, that I have in my head that I want to happen. It doesn't always happen that way and that can be a struggle. Surrender means remembering that this child and all of my children, and if you're out there and you have one child or you have many; they don't belong to us. They're God's children. He gave them to us. He's lent them to us just like Hannah teaches us. Ultimately, he is in control just. Sara, you said that all of our difficulties that our children go through are not a surprise to God. He's not looking the other way. In actuality there probably have been ways that he's been preparing our hearts or preparing our kids for those situations, and we just don't realize it yet. 

This leads me to another question: how do we hold onto hope when we are unsure and afraid? I think about Mary and all of a sudden, now she is pregnant, very pregnant, and she has to travel all that way. I can't remember what the miles are, I would have to look it up, but they have to go back to Bethlehem. She doesn't have even the familiarity of maybe her friends around her, the women who would have been her midwives to help her. She has to be terrified. I think about that as special needs moms and those crisis situations when we are afraid and how do we hold on to the hope of Jesus? 

(Sara) I think this goes back to surrendering like with the first question. When we talk about when Mary and she first found out she was pregnant, and she's a virgin, the Bible doesn't have that inner dialogue that she has in her head. Those are always the conversations that I like to put into the scripture. At some point, she had to have said, “I can't do this. This is going to happen. What is going on? Joseph's going to leave me. I'm going to be shunned, and all of the things that would come along with that.” She was told she would be the mother to the Savior, but at some point she had to have thought, ‘Really? Is that really what's going to happen?  She wouldn’t have had that forethought. Ultimately I think that that would go back to surrendering. Ultimately Mary had to have said, “Okay, God, I'm scared, I'm confused, I have no idea what's going to go on or how I can handle it, but I trust you.” That is the main part of surrendering. Whenever I'm unsure, I like to acknowledge it. If I acknowledge it, I, at least, know how to handle it or at least it's not a dirty little secret that I have to keep. It’s acknowledging it and asking for God to help me. Sometimes it's as simple as, “God, I don't think I can handle this, but I know that you can so you need to guide me.” 

(Carrie) I think too, I’ve noticed how just three months later, she goes to her cousin and chooses to connect with someone in a similar situation. I think about our listeners out there and maybe you don't have someone to connect with. That's why we're here to help you with that, so you have a feeling of connection. But also to pray. God cares about you, he doesn't want you to be in this special needs moms journey alone, and to pray for a friend to come in and to connect with you in that. Amy, how about your thoughts?

(Amy) Let me just add to what you just said, Carrie, I think part of that is we don't want to admit as special needs moms that we need help. We have talked about this before, we have this kind of “halo” around us and sometimes you get tired of being the person that has all the issues at the table. 

(Carrie) You feel needy.

(Amy) You feel needy. We’ve been on the meal train so many times from church. 

(Sara/Carrie) Yes, it’s like I don’t want food. 

(Amy) My kids can tell you how many times they’ve had turkey tetrazzini in their life and whose they liked; they can rate it. My point is, we don't want to be vulnerable and tell people that we need help. Your point about Mary is so true that she went to her cousin and it was somebody in a similar situation. It wasn't the exact same situation, but it was enough similar that they could connect through that. The other thing I was going to say about Mary, and we're going to go back to me wanting my own outcomes. If you think about it, it was not just the angel coming, and then maybe getting divorced, and then all the scorn. It was the travel, and then they went to Egypt, and she didn't have her support system. Every situation she was in was probably not the outcome she would have picked. I think as Christians we think, “Well, yeah, but Jesus was her kid, so it probably wasn’t that bad.” She still had postpartum stuff, she still had to feed a baby all those things. I guess I was thinking about that a little bit and just once again it comes back to that surrendering. For me, I like small little practices, and I like physical, very tactile kinds of ideas to help me understand. I think about when I want a certain outcome, I am just clutching as hard as I can to a piece of armor. I don't want to let it down because I'm afraid of what the outcome is going to be. Those small everyday moments of laying down what we want and giving it to God. It doesn't mean you're giving up. It doesn’t mean when you surrender that you're giving up, it just means that you're handing it to somebody who can hold it honestly because we can’t. For any mom out there who feels that overwhelming feeling, you're going to hand it to God, and yes you still are going to have to come and deal with whatever special needs issue your child has, but it's so much more peaceful and easier when you hand it to him first. For me, it's small daily practices. Take my special needs kid out of the picture, sometimes I just need to hand over my own way. Sometimes it's small things in my everyday life that help me. When I give up that control it kind of helps me with the bigger stuff. 

(Carrie) I just came across this a little and experienced this recently. My son had surgery last week and when the doctor came out towards the end of the surgery to give me the update he said, “We got to talk about the plan at his next appointment of what we're going to do moving forward.” Toby has scoliosis, and he has all these rod lengthening surgeries. Of course fear just struck in me. You feel like you're a little kid again with that, “We're going to talk about this when we get home,” that feeling of dread.  I had this sense of I've got to fix this. I've got to know the outcome right now. The Lord just stilled me, and said, “No you don’t, let today be sufficient. Let tomorrow take care of itself. Your appointment is in a couple weeks, you can find out then.” I would like to think that maybe I've grown a little bit because the old Carrie would have been on the phone the very next day calling the nurse wanting to ask the doctor all these questions and wanting to know what the plan was. As the Lord teaches me to continue to surrender the outcomes and to hope in him, maybe, just maybe we can take those small steps of surrender with him.

(Amy) I think too that as special needs moms we have to be on top of everything. To even let go of that, and I'll say to myself a lot of times, “This is not mine to carry right now. I'm not going to carry this right now. I have to carry it maybe in 10 minutes, or maybe tomorrow, or maybe not even for a year.”  It's wanting to get all our boxes checked because we don't know when the next crisis is going to happen. That’s something I say to myself a lot, “This is not mine to carry.”  

(Carrie) So good. That is a good quote to take away from today. Sara, do you have any thoughts to add to that?

(Sara) Well when Amy said, “You're just always preparing for the next crisis,” That really struck me because it's so true. So often that I am so busy preparing for the next crisis, I don't rest in the time between when I should be resting. I'm so busy preparing for whatever might come down the road that I don't take the time that God has provided me to rest. That was my take away from that.

(Amy) I would add to that, I have a little example of that. Our kids that have reactive attachment disorder, our daughter, she would come home from school, and it would just be crazy out-of-control behavior. I never knew when she came home, I knew that I couldn't do anything. I had to do everything early in the day, and I was homeschooling, so I always made dinner at 9:00 in the morning. I would get it done right then because I never knew what was facing me in the afternoon. After we sent her to residential, I was still doing that. Then one day, I went wait a minute, I don't have to do this anymore. Sometimes I wonder if we can just look. It was just wonderful to think I can make dinner at five or six or seven. I don't have to make it at 9:00 in the morning. It was just a little tiny thing. I wonder sometimes if we just get in this habit of that kind of high alert, if we can't stop and look and go okay well here’s something I do that maybe I don't need to be doing right now. 

(Carrie) Yeah. I think that's really good and that leads us into the next question I have. One of the definitions I used in my podcast about hope was that our longings are met. We know on this earth not all of our longings are going to be met, but what are some of those prayer requests or longings that have been met in your life as a special needs mom? To relate that to our listener, what has that taught you about God and the hope that he continues to pour into your heart? 

(Sara) I actually think, Amy, when you were saying earlier that you know the outcome that you want. I think that that is so true with me in my prayer, whenever I pray,  God, I need help handling this disease. In my head that help is: I need you to cure him, and while you're at it if you could make the house accessible. Of course in my head, there's this whole dialogue of  if you cure him then I won't need an accessible house. In my head I have this whole really detailed plan of what this help should be. When He  sends me help it's in the form of this. When we traveled every 28 days for a couple years, we flew out to the east coast for a clinical trial. The help that He provided for me at that time was getting to know the director of the hotel. She made sure that the staff knew who we were. When we ordered room service, we actually had the chef at one point have somebody call us back and say, “We heard he likes fried chicken. we don't serve that, but I'd be more than happy I have it on hand for you next time.”  When we would let them know we were coming, we would have trays of stuff in the room just to make his stay a little bit more pleasant. That had nothing to do with what was in my head about the cure. If I stopped and sat back and realized God's providing all of this help for me. It's up to me to recognize what that help is and to appreciate it. You're so outcome-driven, at least I am, and I don't want to put words in everybody's mouth, but that's not what I asked for. Yes it is. That's exactly what I asked for, and He's providing that for me. That's how the blessings and prayers have been answered. It's just so beautiful they have been answered in a way that I could never have predicted. One of the blessings of all of this I think is being a special needs mom in my shoes is that I get to say a side of humanity that most people don't get to see. I get to see a side of humanity that they're willing to do the fundraisers, they're willing to do the food meal trains, and they're willing to do the chicken tetrazzini for the millionth time. Thank goodness for that. We might not want it, we might say that’s not what we need. It really is. 

(Carrie) One thing I felt like I learned early on with all that is, I'm very independent, and I don't want to depend on anyone or be needy. When I don't allow people to step in and help I'm taking away their blessing. I'm taking away their opportunity to be surrendered to the Holy Spirit to serve someone else. I can't remember if a friend said it to me, or if I heard it from the Holy Spirit, but he said, “Don't take away their blessing. Don't take that away.” I would love to encourage our listeners to allow people to serve you when you need it. Don't be afraid to let them also get their blessing because we definitely look most like Jesus when we're serving one another.

(Sara) I remember our first fundraiser. I remember I was crying because it was over 300 people that showed up for this 5K. I remember looking at my mom and I was in tears. I almost felt like a hypocrite, I don't even know if hypocrite is the right word, but it just didn't feel right to me. I told her, “there are so many other people that need this.” We weren't in a financial position where we needed that right at that moment. I was expecting my mom to have this, she was supposed to be my mom. She was supposed to be this caring, ‘I know sweetie,’ ‘Oh my gosh, how can I help you?’ She was just supposed to be the mom and to really boost me up. She looked at me and she said, “You have no right to take their God-given responsibility to help you, away from them. That is not your place. That’s between them and God, and don’t you dare step in. I was like, ‘oh, that's not how that was supposed to go.’ It stuck with me.

(Carrie) Good advice

(Sara) Yeah, it stuck with me. You're right it's not up to us to take that blessing away from them.

(Amy) I'm going to speak here to the moms who don't have kids with physical disabilities. Because we don't always have that experience. So to the moms out there who have kids with invisible disabilities and behavioral issues, people aren't always falling over to help us. They’re usually going the other way.

(Carrie) We’re sorry about that. 

(Amy) I think this is really important. The first thing I want to say to you out there is that God sees you. And you have to be able. Here’s something you need to surrender and not hold: is what other people think of you. Find your people that you can say: “I need help.” I remember one of my closest friends said to me, “I just, I had no idea.” I thought, how does she have no idea? It's because I didn't tell her. I know how isolating it can be to have kids with behavioral issues that people don't understand. In this situation, what you guys were talking about, there are people that want to step up and help, but you have to let them. You have to say, okay what if this child loses it and throws a temper tantrum with this person. Well they only have them for a little bit, they can handle it. You have to surrender that, and that used to be really hard for me. I would be so worried that they would just be horrible, and for the most part they weren't because they have attachment disorder so for other people, they act a little bit better. That’s one thing I want to say is that there are people that want to help you, you just have to be willing to tell them what's going on. I know that's hard, but there are people that went to help you. I also want to say as Carrie, you were asking about the hope and how we see the answers to prayer. I have to say, I wish this wasn't true about me, but so much of the time I focus on what is not, that I forget to see what is. I am learning everyday to do that better. One of the things that I practice a lot is silence. Sara, you were saying you start your prayer to God - help this child and then you go on your laundry list.

(Sara) This is how I would like for you to help me.

(Amy) It's the laundry list prayer.

(Sara) In case you were confused. This is exactly the way that I would like for it to happen.

(Amy) At our house we had what we called the “tattle prayer”, the really eager kid that wanted to pray just wanted to tattle. ‘Please help this sibling of mine that hit me.’ I just want to say that one of the things that’s helped me a lot. As special needs moms there's so much we need to be doing, and we need to tell God. “God here’s what we need. We need this, this, this, and this.” One of the practices which is so hard for me to do because I'm a doer is to sit in silence. I think the silence for me is me being held by God. I'm not Mom right then. It’s hard to do. I mean sometimes I can only do it for a minute, sometimes I can do it longer, but just thinking of myself being held by God or sitting next to God on the bench or whatever, helps me to let go of all my expectations. Then after that, I mean the next minute may be terrible, but it may not. You just don’t know. That practice has been something I’ve consistently done. I wish I was more of a glass half full, but I won't. I will always see the problem first. I'm just kind of a catastrophic thinker. I always have been. That helps me see the good. It helps me be quiet. It helps me think or not think actually. It helps me rest. 

(Sara) I would imagine that that’s true for all special needs parents is to take that moment, but especially those with the hidden disabilities and the behavioral issues is when you can take that moment to be held in silence, that it's probably even that much more important to learn that.

(Carrie) And to allow yourself to be cared for. 

(Amy) Right, which is hard as a mom. Back to looking at what isn't. There is not a close relationship with the kids with attachment disorder, but I am so grateful that I have other children that are attached to me normally and that we have close relationships. You have to look at the glass half-full, I guess, which is what I’m trying to say, which is not my norm, let me tell you. 

(Carrie) Right, you have to look for the things that God has answered, and that He is faithful and provides. As we close today, this is our last podcast episode for this year 2020, which is hard to believe. We will be taking a break next week, but we wanted to leave you with some encouragement and that is who we are placing our hope in. That is the person of Jesus. So these are some reminders about who Jesus is from some excerpts. These are spoken from Anne Graham Lotz’s Just Give Me Jesus. 

“Just Give Me Jesus”
He is enduringly strong, He is entirely sincere.
He is eternally steadfast, He is immortally gracious.
He is imperially powerful, He is impartially merciful. 
He is God’s Son. He is the sinner’s Savior.
He is the captive’s Ransom. He is the Breath of Life. 

No means of measure can define His limitless love…
No far-seeing telescope can bring into visibility the coastline of His shoreless supply....
No barrier can hinder Him from pouring out His blessings…

He forgives and He forgets. He creates and He cleanses.
He restores and He rebuilds. He heals and He helps.
He reconciles and He redeems. He comforts and He carries.
He lifts and He loves.

Just Give Me Jesus!

He supplies strength to the weary. He increases power to the faint. 
He offers escape to the tempted. He sympathizes with the hurting.
He saves the hopeless. He shields the helpless.
He sustains the homeless.  
He gives purpose to the aimless. He gives reason to the meaningless.
He gives fulfillment to our emptiness. He gives light in the darkness.
He gives comfort in our loneliness. He gives fruit in our barrenness.
He gives heaven to the hopeless. He gives life to the lifeless. 
That’s My King! Just give me Jesus!

His office is manifold, and His promise is sure.
His life is matchless, and His goodness is limitless. 
His mercy is enough, and His grace is sufficient.
Just give me Jesus!

(Carrie) Thank you so much 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. You can also find us on our new website: www.takeheartspecialmoms.com. Be sure to visit our site, and subscribe to our newsletter. If you have any questions or comments, please follow the links in our show notes. We would love to hear from you. We are taking a break next week, but we will see you back on January 5th where we will begin a new year.