re-new
Beside me, my phone vibrates like a bee trapped in a jar, zooming frantically from side to side, beating its wings against the glass. I lift it and flip it over so that the screen blinks on and I can see that the vibrating heyheyheyhey is not the emergency I had imagined it could be but only the zing of Riley’s hyperresponsiveness. Someone on our family thread has sent a thumbs up emoji, and Riley’s thumbs up in response has unleashed a whole slew of emojis from other members of the family. Every time someone sends one, Riley sends one back. In fact, responsiveness is now so much a part of Riley’s nature that she can’t not respond. She responds to everything.
It’s interesting that someone who once could not respond and thus hardly ever did, her attention confused, her connections lost, her words stolen away by the early years of Autism, should now be so utterly devoted to responding. Interesting, but not entirely surprising.
When I read the accounts of miracles in scripture, I often imagine how the healed person’s life must have continued after the miracle, and I think the blind but now seeing might have become hypervisual, that the ones paralyzed and suddenly moving might have become the sort of people who move—walking, dancing, running, hiking, whatever—as a form of entertainment. Maybe those people became the ones who never stopped moving. Surely, Lazarus walked out of his tomb with a whole new breath.
It makes sense that the experience of new life, either entirely or in part, should catalyze a kind of chronic celebration, a hyperlife that well outclasses habitual flexing. This maybe was what Christ meant when He said that He came that we might have life to the full. The deaf now hearing don’t just hear, they listen. The oppressed now free don’t just meander, they explore. It’s Biblical: those people re-membered by God re-tell and re-joice their grace, on repeat.
Even so, it took me a long time to understand this in the same way, to realize that Riley’s ability to respond, which came from God as a giant yes in answer to our prayers over our silent child, is a miraculous experience of new life that she loves to rehearse.
The day the experts definitively diagnosed Riley with Autism, they had watched her beside us, carefully curating a long, snaking line of toys across the play area. She sat on her baby knees, her sunny curls shaking as she crawled back and forth from the toy chest in the corner, oblivious to the exchange of words above her head. The diagnosticians, two women, held clipboards in their laps and jotted down my answers to a series of questions. After the initial interview, they explained that they would need to take Riley out of the room for some additional testing and that I should wait in the waiting area where we sat. They stood and walked over to Riley, and one of the women—she had on a chunky necklace that swayed away from her chest when she bent down—took Riley by the hand and led her away. In the review following, the women would point to this specific moment, to how Riley, then just two years old, never turned back to look for my face, to how she never even acknowledged me or checked in with joint attention before she walked away with two strangers, as one of the strongest indicators of her condition. I remember now how I ached over this detail, how I suddenly felt dismembered, because I knew something essential between my daughter and me was irreparably broken.
That day, I began to pray for Riley’s attention, asking God to heal whatever kept her locked inside of herself.
I smile now, re-viewing things, and it makes me feel whole.
My phone keeps buzzing, jumping on the arm of the chair, and I think, “They don’t know she’ll never get tired of replying.”
Suddenly I gasp, wondering why today God should choose to dump His treasures in my lap, realizing that just this morning, when Kevin and I shuffled toward the door and our morning run, Riley had run staccato down the stairs, moving faster than she ever does, intent on seeing us out the door. She had waited, barefoot and rumpled from sleep, despite our reminders about her own schedule and the need for haste, until we ran beyond her field of vision, all the while, waving and watching, calling out her goodbyes. We had been a little frustrated, had shaken our heads over the delay she couldn’t afford, commenting that this is her way, not only with us, but with friends who visit our home. She will linger on the porch, waving one arm, watching our backs as we leave. When pressed, she will say, “I just like to see everyone off.”
I see it now though, that she who once could not attend, even to me, has become, in the newness of her life, hyperattentive. I had not, until this moment, even remembered how I once so fervently prayed for her attention.
I have been blind, I think, to so much of God’s redemptive work, but now that He’s healing my eyes and I have finally begun to see, I’ll be looking for it everywhere. In fact, I won’t be able to stop looking.
