Precerpt from Raising God's Rainbow Makers - Introduction
Precerpt (excerpt from book prior to publication): Raising God's Rainbow Makers (Mahlou)
Introduction
I originally titled this
book God’s Broken Sprinklers. These
sprinklers I was talking about were not broken at all. If anything, they were
special sprinklers. Not shaped like the other, run-of-the-mill sprinklers, they
liberally splashed much more water over parched earth than did the new, shiny,
“perfect” sprinklers. Then along came the sun and refracted all that water into
something marvelous: immense rainbows. Thinking about what the sprinklers do, I decided that a better name for
this book was Raising God’s “Rainbow
Makers.”
How I ended up with so many rainbow
makers in my family is a complicated story and one that took me years to
understand. People would tell me that God never gives us more than we can bear,
but, really, should I have been expected to bear 18 years of intensive child
abuse? I survived my childhood, but not all abused children survive.
I was and had always been an
atheist. It was more than simply a reaction to my parents’ hypocrisy (beating,
stabbing, and humiliating their children at home while singing about love at
church) and the hypocrisy of the local church leaders who looked the other way.
It was a deep conviction that no god would allow my seven siblings and me to be
so severely abused, and, given that conviction, I assumed that there must
indeed be no god. The concept of free will was not mentioned in our church, at
least as far as I can recall, and it is certainly a concept that would have
been difficult for any child, let alone a child in my circumstances, to
understand. The thought that God might be crying right along with us never
entered my head.
When God created, He created
from love and to love because that is His nature. We tend to get in the way of
that because our nature is selfish. God created us for relationship, but I got
in the way of that. As Helene Rosevere so wonderfully observed, “Jesus came to
cross out the ‘I’.”
People would tell me that
God was testing me, but really, two out of four children with multiple birth
defects? Could not one have been sufficient for the testing? Or some other test
that did not involve my children, just me? I have come to realize that God was
not testing me; God was trusting me. God was trusting me with these very
special, broken sprinklers that would, with time, water more parched land than
many, if not most, of their “perfect” peers, and create a zillion rainbows in
doing so.
There is an African proverb:
The one who has bread does not appreciate
the experience of the famine. I
suppose that is some of what was at work here.
What
I do know is that the birth of my younger daughter Noelle
with multiple genetic defects (spina bifida, epilepsy, hydrocephalus) was the
worst thing that ever happened to me. It was also the best thing that ever
happened to me. I was blessed to repeat that experience with my younger son
Doah (CHARGE Syndrome); with Shura (spina bifida, amputee), a teenager I took
in from Siberia; with my grandson (lifelong kidney issues) and with my
granddaughter Nikolina (OEIS Complex). I know God loves me and my family. He
has trusted us with the care of so many of his sprinklers and filled our lives
with so many rainbows.
For more posts about Elizabeth and her books, click HERE.
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