Knowing My Son Belongs To God – Guest Post

When Angie sent me her guest post, I had not expected to cry. I know Angie as the fun-loving mama behind The Homeschool Classroom.  This post hit me where I live.  From the stanza of the song she mentions to the emotions she conveys in this post, I found myself remembering, and being thankful all over again to have been given the chance to mother a child with a congenital defect.  Truly, all these little ones belong to God, no matter how “imperfect” they may seem.

We all have a story.  Angie’s is about her son, Jack.

My middle son is the one child that has probably given me the most tension headaches from clenching my jaw so tightly. When he was preschool aged, I once described him to somebody and said,

Jack knows how to push your buttons. And if you don’t notice that he’s pushing your buttons, he’ll be sure that you don’t miss it.

Though I had some depression during and after each of my three pregnancies, it was during my pregnancy with Jack that I had the worst depression, and it was after his birth that I had my worst postpartum depression which climaxed one night when I considered thoughts so horrible that I wanted to be sick.

One of the things that helped bring me out of that postpartum depression was a check up when Jack was still a newborn. Our doctor had heard what he thought was a heart murmur in the hospital after birth, but later couldn’t hear it, so thought it was nothing. At another check up, he seemed to spend an eternity listening to Jack’s tiny chest. He declared that Jack did, indeed, have a heart murmur. He would need tests that day, as well as an echocardiogram later.

As I watched my then two year old yelling, “Give me back my brother!” as we heard Jack crying from inside the X-ray room, I realized that God had given me this child to protect. He was not a punishment (as my depression-raged brain was telling me), he was a bundle that needed protecting and I had a God that knew I was the person to do it.

We were thrilled as years went on (though other minor medical issues popped up from time to time) that Jack’s heart was strong and he continually got good marks from his cardiologist. They were confident to move appointments farther and farther apart. Even with this, they promised that his defect would need to be fixed one day, but this would likely be in his 40’s, 50’s, or even into his 60’s. I imagined Jack as a grandfather when I thought about his heart repair.

At one appointment, we were told that they were downgrading his defect, but also had found a leak. This leak, the cardiologist warned, would probably be what would be more apt to cause problems. Still, when asked about repairs, he assured us that we would likely be looking far into adulthood, as we had always expected.

Last year, we had an appointment that had been two years since the one before (definitely the longest we had ever gone between appointments). It was the very first appointment where I wasn’t afraid going in. This had become routine, and we were used to things always being better. It was one of the first appointments where I took Jack in without my husband (although as homeschoolers, I did bring along the other children). The appointment seemed to go just as normal. He had an echocardiogram, an EKG, some time with the doctor (who is always full of jokes), and then he said he wanted to review some video and he’d be right back with us.

The doctor came back into the office and said, “Hey, Jack – I want to see one thing myself. Let’s go back and look at your heart again.” We had never done this before, but I still felt pretty good. The doctor told us to go back to the room while he looked up some measurements. I had a nervous feeling in my stomach, but was still okay.

Back in the room, our always joking doctor walked in with a serious look and took a deep breath. Then came a long talk that was hard for me to remember. There was talk of the leak, of an enlarged root, of the possibility of an aneurysm. Jack, then eight years old, had his head dropped down. Only when he made the sign of the cross did we realize that he was praying. He didn’t even understand what was happening, but he was scared.

In an odd twist of fate, we had just a week earlier received our new insurance plan for the year and one of the specific notes was that it would only cover 90% of a repair to a congenital heart defect. I mentioned it to our cardiologist, and he was shocked. I told him that I understood that 10% of a repair wouldn’t be pretty. So, trying to lighten the mood, I asked with a laugh, “He’ll still get to wait to have this repair until he’s well off our insurance, right?’ He looked at me with a genuine look of empathy and quietly shook his head no. He assured me that it wouldn’t be done right now, and that they would watch how things developed. He promised they would fix it when it was “bad enough” to definitely need it. In the meantime, Jack (at eight years old) was given a prescription that he will likely take for the rest of his life.

I couldn’t come to terms with all of this. It was too much to take in. Coming just six weeks after the sudden and unexpected death of my Grandma, it seemed unbelievable. (Oddly enough, though we didn’t have a clue that this would happen, my other Grandma would pass away just five months later.) I would sometimes drive by myself and just cry. “How could this be happening? Why would you do this to him, God?” I would plead.

Finally, one day while driving, Casting Crowns came on with “In Christ Alone.” As I listened to the song, I sobbed. When I got to this part of the song, I came to a true epiphany:

“For I am His and He is mine –
Bought with the precious blood of Christ.

No guilt in life, no fear in death,
This is the power of Christ in me;
From life€™s first cry to final breath.
Jesus commands my destiny.
No power of hell, no scheme of man,
Can ever pluck me from His hand;
Till He returns or calls me home,
Here in the power of Christ I€™ll stand.”

I truly, in my heart, realized that Jack belongs to God more than he belongs to me. I may very well love Jack more than any other person on this planet, but the love I have for Jack can never compare to the love that God has for Jack. Even though I already knew this, it’s like at that moment, God used that song to really speak to my heart and remind me of that. It was then that I was able to let go of a lot of my worry about our new situation. No amount of worry would change it. All we can do now is pray and know that we need to understand that we may not know what the future holds, but God does and He will be with us.

Angie is a homeschooling Mom to three children. She is a former domestic flunkie who writes about all of the things that happen in life between loads of laundry at Many Little Blessings. She is also the founder of The Homeschool Classroom and Catholic Mothers Online.