“You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body
and knit me together in my mother’s womb.
Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.
You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion,
as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.
You saw me before I was born.
Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out
before a single day had passed.”
-Psalm 139:13-16 NLT
The first person I contacted when we got Keller’s diagnosis of autism, after crying and blabbering with Casey for a while, was my sister. My sister lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I am in Cape Town, South Africa but living across an ocean has somehow made us closer and stronger. She is my favorite person in the world outside of the crazy three that live in my house.
I texted her. Blabbered. Sobbed. You know how ‘real’ it makes something when you tell other people? Was feeling that. And she responded with sadness and shock and love. And then later she sent me a piece of Psalm 139. She said her spirit was telling her to share that Keller was ‘perfectly and wonderfully made.’
In the New Living Translation (above), the passage says that each person is ‘wonderfully complex.’ The Prince family is hilariously and glaringly complex; that is obvious. But now my soul has to wrestle with Keller being wonderfully complex, including his autistic brain. He is perfectly made, including a brain that isn’t properly developed and keeps him from making social connections and communicating. He was brought into OUR family by the way. Our family’s life mission is to communicate and socially connect with people. And now our perfect little boy was somehow woven together BY GOD inside me… but he does not have the parts of his brain that teach him how to do… what we DO.
It’s a painful place to wrestle, and I know I am not the first. God, why would you allow Keller to be developed so wonderfully and yet his brain doesn’t process the same way we do? How could he not be able to hold eye contact, be hugged, be a friend? These are things that are very possible, but we will have to TEACH Keller how to be social. We have no idea what the future holds and what kind of kid Keller will be. He might be the most outgoing kid ever or grow up to have only one friend.
At least I will always be his friend.
There are no responses to my questions shot up to God. Just his promise that even though Keller doesn’t SEEM to be perfect and wonderful in this moment, he IS. God has made Keller and allowed autism to be a part of his story. I might never know why, but I can be sure God thinks Keller is wonderful.
So now we wrestle with Keller’s wonderfully complex brain and ask God to expand our version of perfection. I have a feeling I am going to like God’s version of wonderful more than the one I have always held…