Special Needs Children

36, Day 68 (Written Saturday February 18) ~ As I write this I want to ask you to pray for a family that is going through the worst thing a parent can face right now. They are friends of ours and their daughter is in a coma following cardiac arrest. At present she is struggling to breathe and requires a breathing and feeding tube. She is a very sick little girl and her family, as you can only imagine in your worst nightmare, is in agony as doctors try to find out what caused this and how to heal her. Her name is Taylor, she is a teenager and she has Down's Syndrome.

Praying for her today I began to think of the many children like Taylor that I have known through the years. Children we refer to as "special needs." As a parent I have never faced the challenges that many parents do, but we have been blessed to have friends whose children are special need children. If you have ever had the opportunity to move beyond the initial shock, awkwardness of not knowing how to act, what to say, what not to say, and just gotten to know these children, then you have been blessed to learn why we call them "special needs."

I believe we call them special needs children because we "normal" people have special needs that only these children can provide, teach and meet. We need to be more patient in life and learn that the world doesn't revolve around us and that we need to learn to wait rather than expecting and demanding. We need to be more appreciative of the blessings that surround us every single day of our lives, rather than taking our health, our freedom, our prosperity, our family, our friends, our jobs for granted. We need to be more innocent and childlike in our lives, taking time to be bewildered, fascinated, amazed and entertained by the simple, yet beautiful and elegant things that are all around us, seeing the good instead of the bad. We need to be forgiving insted of holding grudged, staying mad, getting so easily offended and focusing on our hurts instead of healing. We need to be brave enough to face challenged, overcome obstacles, press through adversity and grow stronger with each difficulty, instead of shirking back in fear or intimidation when things don't come easy. We need to learn these things by watching them be these things (patient, appreciative, innocent, forgiving, brave). They are special because we need them to teach us by example how to be what God intended for his children to be.