Hope

I was reading a blog this afternoon and came across this...

Hope By Barbra Gill

Often others seem to feel a special responsibility to puncture our hopes. They say things like "You know she will never learn to read," or "you need to accept that he doesn't know what is going on around him, " or "He's doing well now, but he will reach a plateau."

They would say we are in denial, that our dreams are "false hopes," from which we must be protected. God forbid anyone should go around entertaining false hopes! But, in a certain sense, what other kind of hope is there?

Hope is the thing that is willing to take a chance on the future. And who is audacious enough to say what the futurewill bring? Hope is the capacity to see something on the horizon that we are willing to move toward. If our hope gets us from today to tomorrow, and in that new day we are ready or able to deal with something we thought we couldn't' face, then hope has done it's job.

There is a worse thing than false hope. It is no hope at all.

I know I have felt discouraged because someone close to us has questioned our decision to adopt Malachi and even worse have questioned his possibilities. I remember back to when we told those closest to us that we were thinking about adopting a baby with Down syndrome we were actually told "he will be a mistake and a burden." That hurt more than you will even know, but Josh and I knew that person was wrong. We knew Malachi would be a blessing in our lives and in others close to us. We didn't know what to expect, we didn't know what kind of struggles he would have but we chose to have hope. Hope that no matter what happens he would be loved. Hope that he would crawl, walk and talk one day. Hope that people in our family would accept him for him and not based on his diagnosis of Down syndrome. We have hope that he will play sports and compete in the special Olympics, hope that he will be accepted in school, hope that he will learn to drive, hope that he will attend college and graduate, we have hope he will melt the coldest hearts and that along the way he will teach us all to have a little more hope. I recently heard someone giving a speech to a bunch of high school students about Down syndrome. She said "children with Down syndrome have one extra chromosome and that one extra chromosome is the only difference between those without DS and those with." She then put it into a percentage. Malachi is the same as you and I, only 1% of him is different (the extra chromosome), 99% of him is the same. I have hope that one day people will see Malachi for the 99% rather than the 1%.