This is an update sort of post.
It’s been many months since I covered this topic, and for a long time things stayed very much the same with my now 12 year old autistic son being a very firm atheist for over a year.
I was committed to see through Nathan’s spiritual journey without pressuring him to believe what I wanted him to. Because I personally have spent so much of my life dedicated to learning about and loving God, this took iron patience and a new kind of faith. Respecting Nathan’s feelings about God and giving him time to wrestle with the concepts lead to a surprising outcome.
For some needed background, I recommend these two previous posts that set the stage for where we are as I have covered this fascinating journey:
God: “The Unbelievable Story” (1st Interview with Nathan)
Juvenile Atheism, and Bunny Studies. (a profound update)
It all started with Social Studies. As Nathan studied world civilizations, he noticed that these were the same people groups spoken of in the Bible. The Egyptians, the Hebrews, the Babylonians, the Assyrians–each one of these groups is recorded in the narratives of the Bible. He learned how all the groups were poly-theistic, and the Hebrews were mono-theistic. In his autistic support class he watched the Dreamworks animated movie The Prince of Egypt (which is rather loose with it’s historicity, I realize). Suddenly the story clicked. What he heard only at church, he also heard at school. This vetted the story for him as actual, rather than “a made up fairy tale and untrue story” as he had previously thought.
Nathan loves the music at church, and hearing his sweet, pitchy little voice is a precious thing. It’s reminder that his story, and my story are not over. God with us is a work in progress.
Recently, when I thought he was ready to talk about it, I said, “Nathan, I noticed you are singing in church. How do you feel about God now?”
Softly, he said, “Well, I think it’s true. I believe in God now.”
“Did you learn about the Hebrews in school, like you did at church?” I asked.
“Yes. The Egyptians were real, and they had slaves,” he told me.
The story isn’t over. I don’t feel like Nathan has arrived somehow, but now his journey has new hope and new possibilities. He still needs to be nurtured spiritually. Don’t we all? He needs us to model God ways to him, the Fruit of the Spirit. He has never wanted to pray, and my hope is that he finds the comfort that comes with talking to God.
The invisible, but real, is a challenging concept for many of us, and Nathan’s very concrete ways of understanding the world–because of his autism–make it all the more important to be Jesus to him so that the reality of God is experience and learned in regular life. He’s not so different after all.
Who has best modeled God for you?
Oh, Lisa… such good news. I’m so grateful that your “iron patience” has been rewarded!!
I love how you’re letting your son find his own way to God but remaining engaged with him and asking good questions. Blessings to you!
Wow, that’s really hard to do. I admire your courage to let God work instead of taking matters into your own hands.
Ed, soon you may learn just how hard this can be. When that happens, it can rip out your heart in ways you never realized, and it’s so fraught with my mistakes and misgivings. So indeed! Blessings to you, my brother & soon-to-be-daddy.
Lisa, you want this in your household, you do not want it “later”. The incubator model of perfect temperature and carefully rotated hen eggs that much of evangelicalism seems enamored with for so long is a dramatic failure. Take on all the subjects in your household and lovingly and at a marathoners pace work them through. My son was home for Spring break and talked about how all the people he went to Christian school with are off the rails. I told him that all he that he desired of middle class evangelicalism over the years was a farce, being raised two standard deviations from normal with tractor, axe, firewood, discussions of Marx, Che, Chomsky, Tillich, going to American University, and Africa had prepared him to wrestle with the issues of the Age.
My dear brother, I couldn’t agree more.
I am so happy that finally the textbooks are saying that each colony had their own God. Actually if you didn’t worship as that particular colony did you were ‘banished’. This to me is not religious freedom. By saying the country was founded on religious freedom but failing to state further that each colony had their own ideas. Our country has it’s ups and downs on what religious freedom means to each individual. I learned from my Mother to be tolerant of other’s beliefs and it would be a better place to live. We can hope our children keep the same religion/beliefs but also respect those who don’t 100% agree with our way of thinking.