thank you for praying for me
Riley cries quietly, so quietly I don’t realize right away. I stand behind her, my fingers swiftly smoothing and plaiting her hair, thinking it’s exactly the color of the burnished morning light streaming through the windows. Sometimes it suddenly strikes me that she’s in her early twenties and some things haven’t changed at all. I’m still tidying her hair into neat braids to keep it out of her face for school. And then she sniffles, and my mama-ears tune to the timber of the sound, and I know. I bend over just slightly to look into Riley’s ocean eyes, and she jerks a little. Her hair slides through my fingers.
“You’re crying. Are you crying?” It’s a fact, but I switch to a question because she needs practice articulating her own feelings. “Are you sad?”
“I’m just tired,” she says simply, and I realize what it must mean to her still to carry on a routine most kids finish years before she will, while they’re still kids. At Riley’s age, I had married already. I lived and worked in a busy city. It doesn’t do to compare, but it does help me understand some of what hurts her. Autism makes Riley innocent about many things, but it’s a mistake to underestimate her depth. She’s also smart and deep and complicated, even though she struggles to articulate herself. Sometimes now I can see the ways maturity weighs her down.
“I understand,” I tell her, reestablishing my grip on her hair, looping an elastic around the finished end of the first braid. “I get sad when I’m tired too.” Somedays, it hurts to feel my vulnerability so completely.
I pick up the soft, tawny waves still loose on the other side of Riley’s head and begin a second braid, thinking that the strange, ever-shifting combination of child and adult I see in my daughter represents the human condition, not just an Autistic one. From a spiritual perspective, we live as both, discovering new innocence and immaturity and limitations, new disappointments, even, with every step toward growth and freedom and contentment and completeness. In our faith family, we use a fancy word–sanctification–to describe the transformative process by which we experience present salvation, the movement away from the old toward the new, from death to life. We feel real pain and longing as part of the process. Riley’s no different really, longing to realize every single detail of the life God wants for her.
Pray, the Holy Spirit says, and so immediately I do, speaking words right out loud over Riley’s head.
I once read a book about prayer that urged me to a childlike (but not childish) posture in prayer. I am God’s child, always a child before Him, and children just ask–with honesty, without feeling the compulsion to edit for eloquence, when they trust that their parents love them. So, standing with Riley’s hair soft in my fingers, I just ask God to give her all the things I need myself–energy, peace, rest, the assurance that where she goes today He goes with her, and ahead, and behind. I pray as I braid, and when I finish my prayer, I finish the braid, too. I lay my fingers flat against her head, tenderly, thinking how penned up and polished we can look on the outside–neat and smooth, like these braids, even though inside we feel unkempt and wild.
From time to time, skeptical adults, even people of faith, will ask me if Riley possesses real faith. The question doesn’t offend me; I know what textbooks say about Autism. I also know the limits of knowledge, and I love a God who explodes the outer limits of human understanding. He blows my mind repeatedly every day, and many times, he does it though my children. He’s taught me this: nothing, not even Autism, separates us from His love. And as for Riley, well, she’s no textbook case. No human being really ever is a textbook case. Like the rest of us, she’s imago dei, and time and again, she shows me that she knows no greater treasure than a God who listens and loves. Riley values prayer more than any other gift. It’s not a ritual for her.
“Thank you for praying for me, Mom,” she says now, and it’s her mature self, her redeemed and ageless soul, meaning it. And then she laughs, quiet joy building to a crescendo, suddenly free. I remember how Ann Voskamp calls laughter “oxygenated grace,” and I think, yes, just that, and I finish my prayer with the words of John, my fingers still resting tender on the back of Riley’s head.
Out of your fullness, we receive grace in place of grace already given. Thank you, and amen.
