In Him we find our truest and most welcoming home.
Sally
Nathan barreled in the front door, plopped loudly onto the living room couch, and sighed as though the world was coming to an end. “It happened again, Mama. I got in trouble with my big mouth. And this time it was with that friend of yours who teaches my class!”
My stomach did a familiar flip-flop, and a sort of shadow passed over my heart at the thought of his feeling like an outcast again. From experience of all of his years growing up, I knew how he argued, but also how he was misunderstood. And I especially knew the heartbreak that comes to a mama who wants everyone to love and understand her different child but finds that few will take the time to invest gentleness, compassion, and affirmation into his heart.
It seemed that most of our personal world did not want to look past Nathan’s issues, to truly listen to him and understand his heart, or to take into consideration his real value. Most just wanted to judge his behavior and his outside-the-box way of looking at life, or they saw him as just an inconvenience.
This made me hurt for him—and worry about him a little too.
When I was a young woman just out of high school, someone very close to me killed herself. The suicide note said, “I just wanted someone to take enough time to notice me and tell me I was okay, but they didn’t. I just couldn’t take the rejection and loneliness anymore.”
Understandably, this incident affected me deeply. I often asked myself, Could I have made a difference if I had called her or reached out more often?
In our broken world, there is—and will be—much that we cannot understand or control. I have known loving, intentional parents whose children choose a prodigal path. An innocent girl from our church was killed by a stray bullet. Cancer and other illness—including mental illness—have struck down so many. And the tragic reality is that some of our beloved mentally ill or otherwise troubled children, overwhelmed by the pain of being different, choose to end their story by ending their own lives.
The belief that God is good and that He loves us is our foundation to stand on in times of deep heart and soul testing. But faith does not take away the pain and anguish; it does not diminish the unforgettable years of heartbreak and despair. Sometimes we need a lifetime to even begin moving beyond the tragedies that our lives bring.
But that doesn’t mean we are helpless in the face of tragedy or that there is nothing we can do to help. The suicide of that young woman and my experience with other hurting people over the years—including those in my family—taught me the value of stopping to listen to others, trying to understand them, helping them feel seen. Often the memory of this tragedy stops me in my tracks to give those in my life a moment of my time when otherwise I would just get on with my piles of responsibilities.
I grieve for those I meet who have had tragedies in their families and have experienced unmentionable loss. And I have learned from experience that sometimes when people in our lives seem to be doing fine, underneath they are crumbling.
God offers grace to all of us as we fumble and make mistakes along the way. He also brings grace to us when we have given our all and our loved ones or children have still made destructive choices or suffered from misfortune. He does not require us to control our children or friends, much less “fix” them. But he does call us to pay attention, to love others, to be the ones who reach out as consistently as possible.
Learning to look more deeply into the heart of others by asking what was behind their actions was a life lesson that took me many years to learn. By God’s grace I was forced to learn it through Nathan. And by God’s grace, I can keep on practicing it. I can speak the words of love, comfort, and understanding to those in my life who fight the same battles as I do but who may be unable to articulate their struggles.
Realization dawned on me slowly through the years that because God loved me so dearly and because I had said I would be His girl, committed to Him with my whole life, He gave me the privilege of being Nathan’s mother. Nathan was one of the instruments God used to get my attention, to show me I could not live this life without His help, and to teach me where the heart of my ministry would be.
I had a deep desire to become more spiritual, but I had always imagined it would be by accomplishing heroic acts or serving God in some public arena. Yet God wanted me to understand Jesus, our humble servant king. So He used Nathan to show me that my righteousness would be learned not in my public life, but in the hidden life of our home, where no one would see.
My most important ministry would unfold one obedient moment after another as I learned to love and understand and serve those who were closest to me. Nathan or one of my other family members would push my buttons. And I would have to overcome my feelings and practice giving patient answers, to give up my rights one more time.
Walking in the Spirit, not by my flesh, became a reality through years of yielding my feelings and frustration to God and asking Him to give me grace for each moment of my days. As I have told my kids many times, walking in the power of the Holy Spirit often means choosing to be patient and loving when you feel like being impatient and angry. It is the practicing of growing in these areas that grows our spiritual muscle. God was helping me to grow up by living into the specific puzzle of life called Nathan—His gift for me.
Different: The Story of an Outside-the-Box Kid and a Mom who Loved Him by Sally and Nathan Clarkson releases on Jan. 24, 2017, from Tyndale Momentum. Available everywhere books are sold.
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Sally Clarkson is the beloved author of numerous books, including Own Your Life, The Mission of Motherhood, Desperate (with Sarah Mae), and The Lifegiving Home (with Sarah Clarkson). As a mother of four, she has inspired thousands of mothers through Whole Heart Ministries, which she founded with her husband, Clay, in 1998.
Nathan Clarkson is a writer, actor, producer, speaker, poet and lover of stories. Nathan has appeared in national commercials, TV shows and feature films. He has appeared in with Kevin Sorbo in the faith-based film Confessions of a Prodigal Son, written and produced by Nathan and his production company, Lighting Dark.
