Posted on by Jennifer Johnson · 1 Comment

Questions

When you parent a child with a severe communication disorder, you ask yourself a lot of questions:

What caused this? Will she ever talk? Will it always be this way? Why is her behaviour so challenging today? Is she feeling okay? Did someone hurt her? How can I help her? When will she speak?

You buy PECS cards and visual schedule boards, attend SALT workshops, consider buying tech devices to help with communication, and maybe even learn Makaton or another sign language.

You spend hours researching online, worrying out loud with your spouse, and perhaps you pray. You pray for a word. A single word. And when you hear her say it, you rejoice, because maybe she’s already six years old and only just speaking her first word!

Then you pray for a short phrase. You long for it. Verbal communication. And one day she jumps on daddy in bed, shouting, “wake up wake up!” Maybe you cuddle at night and tell her you love her, then hear “I wuv you,” in reply. Your heart bursts with joy.

You pray for yes and no, for please and thank you, and eventually the words come. “No” was much easier for Beth. No was her favourite word for a long time, as she tried everything to avoid the things we needed her to do. But just lately, when she’s in a happy and well-regulated state, I’ve noticed her saying “yes, mama” quite often; tear-jerking for this mama.

Encouraged by the progress, you start to wonder if she will ever ask a question. Then one day she says, “daddy, are you okay? What’s wrong?”

This girl continues to surprise and delight us. One day, she will come home and tell me how her day at school went. One day, she will be able to tell me what activities she did and who she played with.

Until then, I rely on her teachers to communicate through the app. I rely on others to keep her safe throughout the school day. And I pray. She has come so far. What will she surprise us with next?

Original writing by Jennifer Johnson ~ Dedicated to Bethany

Posted on by Jennifer Johnson

Thoughts of Home

What is home exactly? This is a question I have been pondering recently. It is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary online as “the house, apartment, etc. where you live, especially with your family.” But is that all it is? The same dictionary goes on to say that home can also be used to describe “someone or something’s place of origin or where a person feels they belong.” This definition hits closer to the mark for me.

Home is so much more than a place. Home is a feeling. Home is “my people.” It is not just where one lives, where one lays one’s head, or where one stores all their stuff. Home is a place of safety. A place of emotional attachment. Someone can live in a house, with all their stuff, and even with their family, and still not feel safe. They are not “at home.” At home we are comfortable to be ourselves, to relax, to enjoy each other’s company, and to feel safe.

I have had several homes in my life. The first one I don’t remember because my parents moved when I was a baby. The next home, I consider my childhood home, where I was a toddler, infant, and younger junior. It was packed full of children and stuff. It wasn’t perfect. It was busy, and loud, and at times there were voices raised in anger. But it was home. I was with my family who loved me.

When I was about nine years old, we moved house again, to the house where my parents still live now. I don’t live there anymore but visiting them is like going home because I lived there for so much of my life, and because my parents are there. It is a place which is full of clutter, laughter, and occasional arguments. It is a place of love.

At the age of almost nineteen, I moved to the USA for four years of studying at university. I lived in the Halls of Residence for those four years, and although it sounds strange to say it, the place did start to feel like home. The halls lacked some of the comforts of home (privacy being one of them), but I built friendships there which became like family relationships. There were also friends living near to campus who opened their homes to me anytime I wanted to come over. They made me feel “at home,” allowing me to do laundry, share meals, and help myself to drinks etc.

There were also friend’s moms who “mothered” me, bringing me cakes and cookies to my room on campus, and taking me places, or generally just being a mother figure to talk to while living overseas. I really appreciated that. In fact, it got to the point after four years, that I felt so comfortable and “at home,” where I was, that I was apprehensive about returning “home” to my place of origin.

I lived back “at home” with my parents for seven more years before I was married and moved into a small maisonette with my husband. It was there that we got to know each other better and learned to feel “at home” with each other. It was to that home that we brought home our first daughter, Lucy. Having a baby in the maisonette made it feel even more like home. Maybe that is because to me, home is family.

During Lucy’s first nine months as a baby, we came to the realization that we couldn’t afford to grow our family living where we were. We needed to move away from my “home area” to a place where housing was more affordable. This meant leaving the area where my parents and two of my sisters lived with their husbands and children. It also meant leaving my “home church,” the church where I had been attending since I was a young teenager (apart from my time overseas). They were my friends and family, my support network. They were “home”.

We left my “home.” We moved to Wales which was “home” for my husband, although we were living in a completely different area of Wales. We had two houses there. Our first was a modern three-bedroom rental house on a main road. It was there that Lucy was weaned and took her first steps. It was there that we forged new friendships with a “new to us” church community. It was there that I discovered I was pregnant again.

We decided to buy a house before baby number two was born. We were in a hurry to move because of the pregnancy and bought a very spacious three-bedroom house in a good location, but which needed a fair amount of TLC. It was the kind of TLC that required money we didn’t have, so we spent five years making do and patching up things here and there. We did our best to make it home, and although we raised the girls through their infant years there, the area just didn’t feel like home to either of us. That house will always hold a special place in my heart though, because of all the memories we made there with our little girls. We like to visit those memories regularly on Facebook and Google Photos.

When we moved to our current house in Mid-Wales just over a year ago it was like coming home. We moved to a house on the same estate where my youngest sister lives with her husband and children. It is a town that feels like home because my grandparents lived here for most of my childhood. We were regular holiday-makers as children and teens visiting them here. Although they are deceased, the memories of my grandparents live on here. We have joined a church family where we feel at home and have made friends. Our house is cosy (small) but homey and we feel safe and comfortable here. We are home.

And yet, the older I get, the more I sense that these earthly homes are transitory. Even my current home will not feel the same as my children grow, change, and eventually move out.  As I read in Scripture, “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14 ESV). “But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Phillippians 3:20 ESV). As Christians we recognise that on earth, nothing is perfect anymore. Nothing is as it was when it was created. And “now (we) desire a better country, that is an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city” (Hebrews 11:16 KJV).

As well as looking for our future eternal home, Christians are told to be at home in God. In John 15:4 Jesus said, “Abide in me.” To abide in is to make one’s abode in or to remain in. We are to be at home in God’s presence. We are to be at home in God. We are also to be at home with God’s people, in God’s house. “Blessed are they that dwell in thy house: They will be still praising thee” Psalm 84:4. I suppose that really it makes sense, in the context of believing in a Creator God, that we should feel at home with Him. The homes we have on this earth in this transitory life are simply foretastes of eternal home, eternal refuge, eternal safety, with and through the LORD God who made heaven and earth. May those foretastes feed our yearning for him!